Visibility of system status for long term status

The first heuristic of Nielsen speaks about "** Visibility of system status **" that suggests the designer keep every information the user about the state of some operations, the classic example is the upload percentage made visible with the upload bar.

This rule is valid also for not real-time operations? For example, if I send a mail to the customer service, the status of this request is to be considered a "Visibility of system status"?

e.g in my profile page I could have a box with this sentence:

Your request is waiting for a response.

Other examples that I'm not sure to consider in that heuristic rule are: the red dot in a Facebook notification or, call into question StackExchange, user badges, progress, etc are handled with this rule?

If not how?