There are quite a few situations where you'll want a ticket to stick to its current status, even after a customer has responded again on the ticket

Consider the example of an email rebate offer. Customers purchase from you and later email you with rebate information. A customer service agent acknowledges the ticket and marks its status to 'Rebate'. A dedicated rebate manager then verifies the information and initiates the rebate/refund. 

You have a custom view built for this 'Rebate' status. You also have a workflow rule setup to alert the rebate manager when a ticket's status is marked as 'Rebate'. In fact, you go one step further and setup a time based action rule: if a ticket isn't closed within 5 days of being marked 'Rebate', you want it to be escalated. That's a clean process and a pathway to great customer service. 

But, sometimes due to sheer scale, it could take your rebate manager a few days to verify the information and proceed with the rebate. In the meantime, if the customer responds to the ticket again, its status will automatically go from 'Rebate' to 'Open'. Nuh-uh, that's NOT something you desire. It disturbs your custom view, your time-based action rule and, above all, your peace of mind. But don't worry, there's a simple solution to this now. 

We've built a toggle where you can simply switch off that 'fall-back to default status' rule for a given status. In this case, you can prevent tickets from automatically falling back to open status after you mark them 'Rebate'. You can still manually change the status of the ticket, though. 

You can find the toggle under Setup -> Customize -> Request Status . This is what the toggle looks like:

Note: The toggle option is available only for statuses that are 'considered as open'. If a status is 'considered as closed', the fall-back can't be turned off. Also, the option works on tickets received across all channels.