A step-by-step guide to Freshdesk automation to send reminders on pending tickets

Let's be real for a second: your "Pending" queue is probably a source of low-key anxiety. It's that growing list of tickets waiting for a customer to reply, and each one is a little task you have to remember to follow up on. Your agents end up cluttering their calendars and to-do lists with manual reminders that are incredibly easy to miss when things get busy.

Automating these follow-ups just makes sense. It saves time, helps your resolution rates, and gives every customer a consistent experience. Freshdesk has tools for this, but as anyone who's tried to use them knows, they come with some… quirks.

This guide will walk you through how to set up a Freshdesk automation to send reminders on pending tickets. We'll cover the standard method and then look at a more modern, AI-powered approach that gets the job done without the headache.

How do automated reminders for pending tickets work in Freshdesk?

Setting up a time-based reminder in Freshdesk isn't as straightforward as you might hope. It’s not a single button; instead, it depends on two different automation features working together. Getting a handle on both is key.

First, you have Automation rules that run on ticket updates. These are your instant-reaction rules. They jump into action when something specific happens, like a ticket’s status changing. For our reminder setup, their role is secondary. They can’t delay an action, but they're useful for things like automatically changing a ticket's status from "Pending" back to "Open" the moment a customer replies.

The real workhorse for our task is the Automation rules that run on hourly triggers. You might know them by their old name, Time Triggers or Supervisor Rules. This feature scans all your tickets once an hour, checking them against time-based conditions you set up, like "hours since pending" is more than 24. This is the tool we'll use to send a follow-up after a certain amount of time has passed.

How to create a basic automated reminder in Freshdesk

To get a simple follow-up sequence running, you'll need to build at least two separate "Hourly Trigger" rules. It’s less of a single workflow and more a collection of individual rules that you hope will play nicely together.

Let’s walk through a common scenario: you want to send a reminder after two days of silence, and then a final notice before closing the ticket after seven days.

Rule 1: The first reminder after 48 hours

The goal here is simple: send a gentle nudge to the customer after two days.

Here’s the basic setup:

• Condition: The ticket status must be "Pending" AND "Hours since agent responded" must be greater than 48 AND "Hours since agent responded" must be less than 49.

• Action: The rule will "Send email to requester" with a message like, "Just checking in to see if you still need our help with this."

You’re probably looking at that "less than 49" condition and thinking it looks weird. You're right. It's a clunky but necessary workaround. Without it, the hourly trigger would see the ticket is over 48 hours old and send the same email every single hour until the customer finally replies. This little trick forces the action into a one-hour window, saving you from spamming your customers.

Rule 2: The final reminder and resolution after 7 days

If the first nudge doesn’t work, this second rule serves as a final check-in before you close the loop.

Here’s how you’d build it:

• Condition: The ticket status is still "Pending" AND "Hours since agent responded" is greater than 168 (that's 7 days) AND "Hours since agent responded" is less than 169.

• Actions: This time, you’ll have two actions that run one after the other:

  1. "Send email to requester" with a final notice, something like, "We haven't heard back, so we're going to resolve this ticket for now. Just reply if you need more help!"

  2. "Set status as Resolved."

This two-rule system gets the job done, but it also reveals a core problem: for every extra reminder you want to send, you have to build another completely separate rule. Want to check in at 3, 7, and 14 days? That’s three different rules you have to create, test, and keep track of.

Limitations of Freshdesk's native automation

While the method above works, it’s not exactly smooth. It's a rigid system that can create more hidden work than it solves. If you've ever spent time on the Freshdesk community forums, you’ll know you're not the only one feeling this frustration.

Here are the biggest issues you'll run into.

Your automations get messy, fast

A simple two-step reminder needs two separate automations. If your support logic is even slightly more complex, your list of rules can quickly become a tangled web that’s a nightmare to debug or update.

The endless reminder loop

The fact that you need a "greater than X / less than Y" workaround to keep from spamming customers is a huge red flag. It's not intuitive at all and trips up almost everyone trying to set this up for the first time. Logically, a "greater than 48 hours" condition should run once, not every hour forever.

No real-world scheduling

The system is built on elapsed time, not on a calendar. There’s no simple way to "snooze this until Tuesday" or "remind the customer on the 15th." This is a pretty basic feature in lots of other tools, but its absence in Freshdesk forces teams into clumsy time-based math.

Agents are forced to create clutter

To get around these limitations, teams often invent their own systems. They might create custom tags like "reminder-sent-1" or add a checkbox field that agents have to tick manually. This just adds more work and clutters up the ticket interface with fields that only exist to patch holes in the automation logic.

A better way to send reminders: Using AI

Instead of wrestling with a bunch of brittle rules, what if you could just tell an AI what you wanted to happen? A modern AI that sits on top of your helpdesk can handle these workflows with simple instructions instead of confusing conditions.

This is where a tool like eesel AI really makes a difference. It connects to your existing tools and manages workflows with a flexibility that native rule-builders just can't offer.

Go live in minutes, not hours

Forget about building a dozen rules and crossing your fingers that they don't conflict. With eesel AI, you connect your Freshdesk account in a couple of clicks, and you're good to go. The platform is self-serve, so you can get it up and running without having to sit through a sales call or a long onboarding process.

From rigid rules to flexible instructions

The difference in setup is night and day. Instead of creating multiple "Hourly Trigger" rules in Freshdesk, you give the eesel AI Agent a single, simple prompt in plain English:

"If a ticket is pending for 3 days, send a friendly follow-up. If there's still no reply after 7 days, send a final notification and resolve the ticket."

That’s it. The AI handles the timing, the logic, and the execution without you needing to build a separate rule for each step. It understands the entire workflow from that one instruction.

A screenshot showing the eesel AI interface where users can define automation workflows with flexible, plain-English instructions, illustrating a simpler alternative to Freshdesk's rigid rules.

Test with confidence before you launch

This might be the best part. With Freshdesk's rules, you save them and hope for the best. eesel AI's simulation mode, however, lets you test your AI agent on thousands of your past pending tickets. You can see exactly how it would have handled every scenario, giving you a clear forecast of its performance and total confidence before you turn it on for live customers.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, which tests the AI agent on past tickets to forecast performance before activation.

Freshdesk pricing: What you need for automated reminders

It's worth remembering that Freshdesk's more powerful automation features aren't on every plan. To create hourly triggers, you'll need to be on one of their higher-tier plans.

Here’s a quick look at their pricing and what you get:

Plan	Price (Billed Annually)	Key Automation Features
Free	$0	Basic Ticketing, Knowledge Base
Growth	$15/agent/month	Includes some automation capabilities.
Pro	$49/agent/month	Advanced automation, custom objects, custom reporting.
Enterprise	$79/agent/month	Full automation suite, audit logs, skill-based assignment.

As you can see on the Freshdesk Pricing Page, the ability to build the kind of automations we've discussed is reserved for the Pro and Enterprise plans, which can be a pretty big jump in cost.

Stop chasing tickets and start automating intelligently

Setting up a Freshdesk automation to send reminders on pending tickets is doable, but it forces you into a corner with complex workarounds that are a pain to manage. The system is powerful but unforgiving, and its limitations often lead to frustrating results.

Modern AI tools offer a much more flexible and user-friendly way to solve the same problem. They swap out rigid, hard-coded rules for simple, natural language instructions that are easier to build and far more reliable.

Ready to move beyond brittle rules? See how an AI agent can intelligently manage your pending tickets and learn from your team's past conversations.

Try eesel AI for free and set up your first intelligent automation in minutes.