Findings sat in the backlog with no status change for two weeks, these are the ones losing money silently.
At a glance
Of all the open Vortex IQ findings sitting in your LiveAgent helpdesk, this card counts only the ones that have had no agent action (reply, status change, tag edit, assignee change, priority change) in 14 days. LiveAgent’s helpdesk shape gives findings a longer healthy ageing tail than a chat tool, but past 14 days the resolution probability collapses; these are findings quietly costing the merchant money while everyone assumes they are “in the queue”.
| What it counts | Tickets tagged vortexiq-finding, status in (New, Open, Answered, Postponed), where date_changed is more than 14 days before now. date_changed is LiveAgent’s roll-up of every ticket-level event: reply, status, assignee, priority, tag, custom-field. |
| Why activity, not creation date | A ticket created two weeks ago that the team has been replying to is being worked on. A ticket created two weeks ago that nobody has touched in 14 days is abandoned. The card uses last activity, not creation, to make this distinction. |
| The 14-day rule | Calibrated against typical helpdesk merchant data: 95% of findings that get resolved are touched at least once within 14 days. Past that point, resolution probability drops below 30%. The rule is identical across chat / helpdesk connectors so cross-tool comparisons stay honest. |
| Postponed treatment | A ticket explicitly Postponed by an agent gets a date_changed bump on the postpone action, so it does not immediately appear here. But once the postpone passes 14 days without further action, it qualifies as abandoned. This catches the “Postpone-and-forget” anti-pattern. |
| Resolved findings | Excluded. If the team eventually resolves an aged finding, it leaves this count immediately. The card only ever holds open work. |
| SLA-distinct | This is not the SLA-breach card. SLA breaches feed Blocked Tickets. A ticket can be SLA-breached without being abandoned (active work but slow), or abandoned without being SLA-breached (relaxed SLA but no work). The two cards intentionally answer different questions. |
| Departments scope | All connected departments. Multi-brand merchants who isolate by department will see findings aggregated unless filtered. |
| Time window | RT, refreshed every 60 seconds. |
| Alert trigger | >5 (warn) and >15 (critical). 5 abandoned findings is a process-leak signal; 15 is a process-collapse signal that requires owner-level intervention. |
| Sentiment | Threshold gauge with warn=5, critical=15. |
| Roles | owner, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your LiveAgent data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A 35-person UK B2B parts distributor on Adobe Commerce uses LiveAgent (Large plan, 8 agents) for combined helpdesk plus VoIP support. Snapshot taken on 28 Apr 26 at 11:30 GMT. Today minus 14 days = 14 Apr 26. Anything withdate_changed before that is abandoned.
The team has 22 open vortexiq-finding tickets. Filtering for date_changed < 14 Apr 26:
| Ticket | Created | Last activity | Status | Days since activity | Abandoned? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #LV-14987 | 12 Mar 26 | 22 Apr 26 (agent replied) | Answered | 6 | No |
| #LV-14988 | 18 Mar 26 | 19 Mar 26 (assigned, then silent) | Open | 40 | Yes |
| #LV-14989 | 02 Apr 26 | 02 Apr 26 (created, then silent) | New | 26 | Yes |
| #LV-14990 | 05 Apr 26 | 12 Apr 26 (Postponed, no activity since) | Postponed | 16 | Yes |
| #LV-14991 | 08 Apr 26 | 24 Apr 26 (priority bumped) | Open | 4 | No |
| #LV-14992 | 09 Apr 26 | 13 Apr 26 (tag added, then silent) | Open | 15 | Yes |
| #LV-14993 | 11 Apr 26 | 27 Apr 26 (replied) | Answered | 1 | No |
| #LV-14994 to #LV-15008 | various Apr | 17 Apr - 28 Apr (active) | mixed | < 14 | No |
- #LV-14988 is critical-priority Stripe-Radar finding routed to the Engineering department. Engineering has been on a platform-replatform sprint and has not opened the helpdesk in 6 weeks. Routing problem.
- #LV-14990 is a TikTok Pixel finding postponed 16 days ago for “next-quarter triage”. Postpone-and-forget: classic.
- #LV-14992 is a tag-only edit (someone added
low-prioritytag) without further work. Process leakage.
tag = vortexiq-finding and date_changed > 7 days”, action: escalate to owner. Catches the next abandonment before crossing 14 days. Pair with Unassigned Tickets and Overloaded Assignees for the structural read.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Abandoned Findings | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| VortexIQ Findings Open | The pool that abandoned findings come from. | Abandoned / Open ratio. Above 25% = process collapse; under 10% = healthy backlog with normal aging tail. |
| Blocked Tickets | The SLA-breach overlay. | Abandoned + Blocked = silently breached. The most expensive subset; resolve these first. |
| Unassigned Tickets | Most abandoned findings were never assigned. | Unassigned > Abandoned = routing rules missing. Findings without an owner age fastest. |
| Overloaded Assignees (>10 open) | Other abandoned findings were assigned to people drowning in work. | High abandoned + 1-2 overloaded agents = redistribution problem, not capacity problem. |
| Avg Time-to-Fix (days) | Cycle-time peer. | Avg time-to-fix < 5d AND abandoned > 5 = team fixes fast when they engage, but engagement is patchy. Routing rules missing. |
| Backlog by Priority | Severity distribution of abandoned findings. | If most abandoned are Low priority = acceptable triage; if Critical = urgent intervention. |
| Throughput Trend | Outflow rate. | Throughput steady + abandoned rising = team is choosing easier findings and ducking the hard ones. |
| Adobe Commerce / Shopify / BigCommerce Total Revenue | Dollarised peer. | Sustained high abandoned has shown 1-3% trailing revenue dip. The cost of inaction. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in LiveAgent’s own dashboard:LiveAgent Agent Panel → Tickets → Filter: Tags =For programmatic verification:vortexiq-finding, Status excludesResolved, Sort by: Last changed (oldest first) Tickets at the top of the sorted list are your abandoned candidates. Eyeballdate_changed; anything older than 14 days from today matches our count.
GET /api/v3/tickets?_filters[tags]=vortexiq-finding&_filters[status]=N,O,A,P&_sortDir=ASC&_sortField=date_changed. Compare the returned date_changed field to your local NOW - 14 days.
Why our number may legitimately differ from a manual LiveAgent count:
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Activity definition | Either | LiveAgent’s date_changed updates on many event types; if a merchant counts “no agent reply” instead, they will get a higher number than we do (a status-change with no reply still resets our timer). |
| Time Rules side-effects | Ours lower | LiveAgent’s Time Rules can fire automated actions (auto-tag, auto-priority-bump). Each fire updates date_changed, even though no human touched the ticket. If your account has aggressive Time Rules, our count understates true abandonment. Recommended: exclude Time Rule events from date_changed (Settings → Automation → “exclude from activity tracking”). |
| Sync lag | Ours lower | We poll every 60 seconds. A finding that just crossed the 14-day boundary takes up to a minute to appear. |
| Free-tier API rate limits | Brief gaps | LiveAgent’s API rate limit is 180 req/min; on burst minutes a list may be cached. The card lags by 1-2 minutes during peak. |
| Time zone | Negligible | Boundary differences between UTC and workspace timezone average <1 hour over a 14-day window. |
| Soft-deleted tickets | Either | Tickets in Trash are excluded. Restoring brings them back into both the open and abandoned counts. |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes the divergence |
|---|---|---|
crisp.cri_vortexiq_findings_abandoned / livechat.liv_vortexiq_findings_abandoned / tidio.tid_vortexiq_findings_abandoned | Definitional twins. | A merchant on multiple chat tools concentrates findings in the primary tool; non-primary cards sit at zero. |
zendesk.zen_vortexiq_findings_abandoned / freshdesk.fd_vortexiq_findings_abandoned | Helpdesk peers. | LiveAgent’s abandoned count tracks closely to other helpdesk tools because the SLA shapes are similar; very different counts indicate Time Rules differences. |
shopify.total_revenue / bigcommerce.total_revenue / adobe_commerce.total_revenue | Statistical inverse. | Sustained abandoned >5 has shown 1-3% trailing revenue dips. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
My Time Rules update tickets automatically. Are they hiding abandoned findings? Possibly. LiveAgent’s Time Rules can fire on a schedule (e.g., “every 24h, if no reply, escalate priority”). Each fire bumpsdate_changed, which resets our 14-day timer. If you have a Time Rule firing every 7 days on vortexiq-finding, no ticket will ever cross 14 days from our perspective, the metric becomes silent. Two fixes: (1) configure the rule to NOT update date_changed (Settings → Automation → “exclude from activity tracking”), or (2) accept that LiveAgent’s automation is genuinely keeping the ticket warm and let the metric show 0.
Why is “Postponed” counted toward abandonment?
Postpone is a deferral, not a resolution. The merchant has consciously parked the work. If the work stays parked for 14+ days without any further action, it has effectively been forgotten. We catch it. If the deferral is legitimate (“waiting for next-quarter platform work”), resolve the ticket with a “won’t-fix” note instead, that drops it from the count and feeds Finding Resolution Rate.
A ticket is “abandoned” but my engineer has been working on it offline.
This is the most common reason a finding shows abandoned when work is happening. LiveAgent only knows about activity that touches the ticket. If your team works in GitHub or Linear, paste a status comment into the LiveAgent ticket once a week, two clicks, the ticket stops aging. We recommend a weekly Friday “ping all open findings” routine for engineering-heavy merchants. Or use LiveAgent’s GitHub integration to mirror commit messages back to the ticket automatically.
One of my abandoned findings is from 90 days ago. Will it ever leave this count?
Only when it changes status to Resolved, gets touched (any agent action), or is deleted. There is no upper age cap; a finding silent for 365 days is still counted. This is intentional, the whole point is to surface forgotten work.
My team uses LiveAgent SLAs. Why isn’t this card just “SLA breached”?
Two reasons. (1) SLA breach is binary at the SLA boundary; abandonment is a sustained-silence signal. A ticket can be SLA-breached and actively being worked (slow but moving), or abandoned and still SLA-compliant (relaxed SLA but no work). (2) Many SMB merchants on LiveAgent free or low tiers do not configure SLAs at all, in which case the SLA card shows zero and the abandonment card is the only signal of stuck work. The two cards complement, they don’t substitute.
Can I exclude tickets a specific agent owns from this count?
Not directly. The card aggregates the workspace. If an agent’s tickets are routinely abandoned, the underlying issue is that agent’s load or context, the metric is doing its job by surfacing the pattern. Use Tickets by Assignee to see whose load is the source.
The count went from 8 to 0 overnight. What happened?
Three usual causes. (1) An automation rule auto-resolved a batch (check Settings → Audit log → recent automation actions). (2) Someone bulk-edited tags, removing vortexiq-finding, dropping them from scope without resolving. (3) An admin imported or replayed activity events on the abandoned tickets, e.g., a bulk priority bump, which resets date_changed for all of them at once. Pair with Finding Resolution Rate, if rate did not jump correspondingly, the drop is artificial.
My LiveAgent free plan only allows one agent. Will the card still work?
Yes, but a one-agent helpdesk is unlikely to need this card; abandoned will sit at 0 or 1 because one agent inevitably touches every ticket weekly. The card adds value above ~3 agents where work can route through cracks. Free-tier merchants typically use Crisp or Tidio for chat-style work and LiveAgent only for telephony.
Can the abandonment timer be different per priority?
Not on this card. The 14-day rule is uniform. A separate “Critical-priority abandoned >3d” card is on the roadmap for merchants with high-volume audit pipelines. For now, set up an Automation Rule to escalate Critical findings after 3 days; that escalation bumps date_changed, which has the side-effect of removing them from this count, but it does the right thing operationally.
Is “abandoned” the same as LiveAgent’s built-in “Stale tickets” report?
No. LiveAgent’s Stale Tickets feature flags by absolute age (default 30 days), not by activity gap. A 30-day-old ticket with daily activity counts as Stale in LiveAgent’s report but is NOT abandoned in our metric. We are stricter and more useful.
Does the card distinguish between abandoned-by-agent vs abandoned-by-customer-waiting-on-info?
No, and intentionally. From the merchant’s perspective, a finding waiting on customer information for 30 days is just as costly as one waiting on engineering for 30 days, the underlying issue is unfixed either way. If you want to separately track “waiting on customer”, use a custom status (LiveAgent supports custom statuses on enterprise tier) and exclude that status from this card via the dashboard filter.