Zendesk Triggers & Automations: Timesaver for Your Work

When you run a business, there are never enough hours in the day. Everything demands your attention. A significant portion of business resources (time and money) go to customer care.

Luckily, Zendesk CRM has many handy timesavers on hand in the form of triggers and automations. You can still provide a great customer experience without needing an extra eight hours in a day – at a very competitive price point.

In this article, we will go over some of the Zendesk automation features and give advice on how to employ them best to make time to focus on running and growing your company.

Zendesk triggers vs. Zendesk automation – What’s the difference?

First, let’s establish and define what triggers and automation mean, respectively. 

A Zendesk support workflow has two business rule types – time-based and event-based. Both are cause-effect rules. If a ticket meets a specific condition, then a particular action will happen. Zendesk Automations are time-based actions that will automatically occur after a specific period of time. For example: sending your customer a reminder email if they don’t respond after 72 hours.
As long as a ticket remains open, automations run every hour. Automations are also helpful to escalate tickets that have been open for an extended period of time and help avoid customer anger.

Zendesk Triggers, on the other hand, are action-based. Each time the ticket status changes, the triggers run through and check if the new status matches the pre-set parameters.
A classic example of a trigger is the “We will reply to you in 48 hours”  email when a customer opens a ticket, or a “Thank you, please rate your experience” email when the ticket is closed. Zendesk triggers can also automate agent triage by assigning the ticket to the right agent according to specific criteria. 

For both Zendesk automation and Zendesk triggers, you can set the rule to meet all predefined criteria. If you set it to “any,” one or more of the conditions need to be true for the automation or trigger to fire.

How to set up Zendesk automations – an example

Here is an example of how you can use automation business rules to send reminders to your customer using Zendesk. This workflow aims to send two reminders to the ticket requester after four calendar days and six calendar days and solve it after seven calendar days without any activity from the requester.

The first and second reminder (bump)

A bump is a reminder to the customer that their tickets have been pending for a specific number of days, four in this example.

1. In Support, select the Admin icon (), then select Business Rules > Automations > add automation
2. Enter the name and conditions of the first reminder: ‘Ticket status is pending’ and ‘hours since pending 96’. You can specify that the system should only count calendar days.
    
   
   
   
3. The don’t_bump tag acts as a fail-safe. If an agent wants  to prevent the system from sending the reminder to a particular customer, they can add this tag to the ticket.
4. Next, you can define the actions that should occur when the conditions are true. In this case, the requester will receive an email. You can adjust the subject and text body to your requirements.
5. Click “Create automation” to save it.
6. Follow the same steps to create the second reminder; only it will be 144 hours (six calendar days) instead of 96.

Closing the Zendesk ticket (solve)

If the customer remains unresponsive after both reminders, you can set the Zendesk ticket to close automatically. 

1. In Support, navigate to the Admin icon (), then click Business Rules > Automations > Add automation
2. Enter the name and conditions of the first reminder: “Ticket status is pending” and “hours since pending 168.” You can specify that the system should only count calendar days. Also, include a condition that the ticket should contain either the bump1 or bump2 tag.
   
   
   
   
3. Under actions, add the notification email subject and text body and set “Ticket status” to “solved.”
   
   
   
   
4. Save the automation. It will not send reminders and close tickets automatically when the customer is unresponsive.
   
   
    

How to set up Zendesk triggers – an example

Here is an example of how to set up a trigger in the workflow to escalate a problem ticket. In this example, the trigger will fire after ten updates to a single ticket.

1. In Support, navigate to the Admin icon (), then click Business Rules > Triggers > Add trigger.
2. Enter and name and category for the trigger.
3. Click ‘“Add condition” and choose either “Meet all” or “Meet any.” In this case, we will use “Meet all.” 
4. Enter the conditions: “Ticket is updated” and “Number if incidents is 10”.
   
   
   
   
5. Define the actions: Email group > (assigned group).

This business rule will send an escalation notification to the specified assignee. You can adjust the subject and text body to include any information needed.

Below the line

Zendesk triggers and automations require some time to set up; but once they are created, you will save much time and reduce the risk of unhappy or angry customers. 

Do you want to start using Zendesk Automation and Triggers for your business? Get in touch with us at Unwired Logic to get started. Keep your customer experience flawless and positive with a few clicks – info@unwliredlogic.com.

Learn more about our Zendesk solution to see how we can help you with Zendesk implementation today!