Currently, when replying to an existing ticket or when creating a new ticket, you have to set the state manually. This means usually:
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when creating an outgoing ticket (outbound call / send email)
- set state = “pending close”
- set pending till = your preferred time, e.g. today + 1 month
Not sure if there’s ever a reason to set it to any other state like “open”. Does anybody do that?
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when creating an incoming ticket (received call)
This defaults to “open” (like everything else currently), and IMO this is the only situation where it’s actually correct to default to “open”
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when replying to an existing ticket
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do you use SLAs with first reponse tracking, and is this the first response? If so, set state = “open”.
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in all other cases:
- set state = “pending close”
- set pending till = your preferred time, e.g. today + 1 month
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We don’t use SLAs with first response tracking, so for us it’s always setting state to “pending close”, and manually choosing the pending time. This means 5 clicks for every reply 
IMO it should be possible to configure Zammad so that it will automatically set the preferred ticket state and the associated pending time when either creating a new outgoing phone/email ticket, or when replying to an existing ticket. I imagine a configuration interface where you can set conditions:
- action = create|reply
- ticket type = received call|outbound call|send email
and then add a list of suggested changes to the ticket:
- set state = pending close
- set pending till = today + 1 month
When an agent then begins this action (ie. begins a ticket reply), Zammad should automatically change the respective fields, but of course also somehow indicate to the agent that the fields have been changed, and allow the agent to suppress the suggested changes.