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Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Project Management
Tickets we created from audit findings that haven’t been resolved yet.

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At a glance

Live count of Zendesk tickets that Vortex IQ filed on your behalf from audit findings (broken checkout flows, refund spikes, performance regressions, ad-on-OOS, missing SEO fields) and which still sit in an unresolved state in your support queue. The merchant question this answers is: “how many revenue-protecting fixes have I asked Zendesk to triage that haven’t been picked up yet?” Treat this card as your unactioned-revenue-leak counter, not as a generic ticket count.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Zendesk data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A US mid-market home-and-kitchen brand on Adobe Commerce running Zendesk Suite Professional with three brands (US, Canada, Wholesale). Snapshot taken on 02 May 26 at 09:40 PT. The card reads 23, above the 20-ticket alert threshold. Three observations the merchant team should walk into the standup with:
  1. The number itself is the leak count, not a workload metric. 23 unactioned findings means 23 places where Vortex IQ has already evidenced a revenue or customer-experience problem and the team has not yet decided what to do. Anchor the standup on these tickets first, before triaging anything else in the queue.
  2. The Canada CAD rounding finding (4 days old) is the highest-impact one even though it is the newest. Cross-reference adobe_commerce.refund_rate for Canada. If refund rate has crept up by more than a percentage point since the bug landed, the cost is roughly (refund delta) × (CAD GMV in window). That number usually justifies same-day resolution.
  3. The Wholesale finding is the oldest at 12 days but lowest urgency. B2B pricing tier missing on 22 SKUs only matters when those SKUs are quoted; if the wholesale rep has been quoting manually, the impact is zero. Confirm with the rep before bumping priority. Old does not mean urgent in the support queue.
  4. 23 open is a leading indicator of customer-service capacity strain. Pair this card with zen_open_tickets. If the whole Zendesk backlog is also elevated and the team are drowning, Vortex IQ findings get buried under live customer queries, which is how silent revenue leaks form. Throwing a temp agent at the queue for two days clears the air.
  5. The 9-day-old size-chart finding is the most likely to read as “stale” to a non-engineering CXO. Make sure it has a status update from engineering attached as an internal note in Zendesk, even if the fix is not done. Visible movement is the cheapest way to keep findings from being abandoned (and tipping into the Abandoned Findings card).

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Zendesk’s own dashboard:
Agent Workspace → Views → Unsolved tickets in your groups with a tag filter on tags:vortex_iq. Admin Centre → Reporting → Explore → Tickets dataset for a queryable view of all Vortex IQ tickets and their state. Search bar with the literal query tags:vortex_iq status<solved returns the same population this card counts.
For multi-brand accounts, run the search inside each brand’s subdomain or filter by brand_id in Explore. Why our number may legitimately differ from Zendesk’s view: Cross-connector reconciliation:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why does Vortex IQ’s number disagree with Zendesk Explore? Three usual culprits, in order of likelihood:
  1. Time zone. Explore reports honour the dataset’s configured timezone (often UTC); Agent Workspace honours the agent’s personal timezone. Our card uses the account-level timezone. A 30-minute disagreement at midnight is normal.
  2. Pending tickets. Most default agent views hide Pending. We count it because for a Vortex IQ finding, “pending” usually means waiting on a developer, not a customer.
  3. Search index lag. The Zendesk Search API lags real-time creation by 30-90 seconds. If you just filed a finding, give it a minute before counting.
A ticket sat in “On-hold” for two months. Does it still count? Yes. On-hold means “intentionally parked”, which is a recoverable state in Zendesk. The card still counts it because from the merchant’s perspective the finding is unresolved. If you do not want long-on-hold tickets in this number, set up a Zendesk trigger to auto-close on-hold tickets after N days. Our Answer Bot replied to a Vortex IQ ticket. Is that ticket counted? Yes, until status is set to Solved. Bot replies do not change status by default in Zendesk; they leave the ticket Open. Configure a workflow that solves the ticket once the bot’s confidence threshold is met if you want bot-handled findings to drop out of this count. We run three brands on the same Zendesk subdomain. Do they all roll up? By default, yes. Vortex IQ aggregates across every brand the connector token has access to. To scope to a single brand, set vortex_iq.brand_filter: <brand_id> in the connector config. Multi-brand merchants typically prefer per-brand cards on separate dashboards. Open count just jumped, what should I check first? A 5-step playbook:
  1. Check your commerce platform first. Open the relevant Refund Rate, Cancellation Rate, and Order Volume cards for Shopify / BigCommerce / Adobe Commerce. A spike in refunds is the most common driver of audit findings.
  2. Then check site reliability. Open Datadog Operational Health Score and Sentry error rate. A bad deploy generates a tail of customer-facing errors that turn into support tickets.
  3. Then check the product catalogue. Catalogue Drift, Ads on OOS, and Top Products cards on the commerce platform. A pricing or stock change that shipped without QA can flood Zendesk with refund and “where is my order” tickets.
  4. Finally, check Vortex IQ findings categories. Filter by Vortex IQ tag (vortex_iq:checkout, vortex_iq:catalogue, vortex_iq:performance) to see which audit area is firing. The category is the strongest signal of which engineering team to assign.
  5. If none of the above explain it, suspect a viral negative review or social mention. Check Brand Mentions or social listening; one bad TikTok can drive 30+ tickets in an hour.
Why does the count look so volatile today? Today’s count includes everything filed in the last 24 hours plus everything still open from previous days. If you filed 10 findings this morning during an audit run, expect a step-up. The card is unsmoothed by design, you want to see the spike, not have it averaged out. Response time vs resolution time, which one matters for findings? Resolution time matters more for Vortex IQ findings than for live customer tickets. A finding does not need a 30-minute first response; it needs to be moved to a developer, prioritised, and closed within 7-14 days before it tips into the Abandoned Findings bucket. Configure your Zendesk SLAs accordingly: Vortex IQ-tagged tickets should have a “next-update” SLA of 3 working days and a resolution target of 14 days, not the consumer-grade FRT/NRT. We get findings via email AND via API. Are they double-counted? No. Vortex IQ files findings only through the API (POST /api/v2/tickets). If a merchant or agency forwards a finding into Zendesk by email, that creates a separate ticket which will not carry the vortex_iq tag and so is excluded from this count. Add the tag manually if you want it counted.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

VortexIQ Findings Open is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Zendesk and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.