Tip: How to set a reminder on a ticket
It is great to be able to put a ticket on-hold, but I am sure you have suffered from tickets remaining in that status for too long.
Sure you could create an automation to change the state back to being open after x days, but life is never as simple as there being a constant value for x. And perhaps you don't want to actually change the status, you just want to be reminded that the ticket is there. You may want to be reminded no matter what state the ticket is in (except closed!!!).
Well, I'm going to tell you one way of doing it. using a special type of custom field--a custom date field.
The high level summary of this tip is create a new custom field, allow the agents to populate it, and then send a notification to the agent when that date is reached. Before we start though there is a couple of small caveats.
- This is a date. Not a date and time, just a date. The date in question therefore starts at midnight, not when your business hours start.
- Currently, in a trigger you cannot test for a date being equal to "today". Therefore we are going to use the logic of "remind me before" a certain date (although you could easily adapt this to "remind me after").
Right, let's get on with it.
Create a custom field
First we need a custom date field. Go ahead and create a Ticket Field and give it a suitable name. I called mine "Remind me before".
Note: If you are an Enterprise plan customer, remember that you will need to add this field to your Ticket Forms also where needed.
Create automation to notify agent of reminder
Next, we need to create an automation. We want to test whether the reminder date is within the next 1 day (we cannot set this to 0 days - I tried!) however, any automation requires a nullifying condition otherwise it will repeat every hour. The obvious solution is to set the reminder date to be blank but unfortunately this (at the time of writing) is not considered nullifying therefore we are going to have to use a tag. I have one called "reminder_set" and we will deal with this later.
For now though, create an automation similar to one the one in the screenshot. In this automation we test for the tag and when the reminder is due and then send an email, blank out the date and remove the tag.
Automation: Notify Agent of reminder
Please note that in my case I have chosen to send all reminders to me personally. You will probably want to email "(assignee)".
Create trigger to add tag on update
Now we just need to deal with the requirement to have the tag to nullify the conditions of the automation. This requires a trigger. This trigger will fire when a ticket is updated and if a date is present, then add the "reminder_set" tag.
Trigger: Reminder Set tag on update
Well that is it. Perhaps whilst you are there, create a ticket with a reminder to order your mother (spouse, partner, favorite member of Zendesk staff, etc) some flowers on their next birthday. :)
Any suggestions on improving this, then please let me know.
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Hey all!
Thanks for all the great tips. We did get something that works based on the same principle: an automation that adds the reminder tag if reminder date is present, and a trigger that executes the action based on the tag and date.
However, the trigger always executes 1 day BEFORE the chosen date. Which makes sense given the condition is "within the next 1 days".
Has anyone managed to make it work ON the specific date, nor before nor after?
Thank you!
Olivier
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@Oliver, sadly this is not possible.
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I have read this thread and other help articles trying to understand what I am doing wrong. I feel like have copied the examples and I still can't get it to work. Help! Super frustrated...
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Hi David!
You can't have an automation run multiple times on the same ticket, so you need to add a nullifying condition, such as being more specific about the ticket status required to fire the automation and then having an action to change the status when the automation fires, or adding a tag to the ticket when the automation fires and setting up a condition so that it won't fire if that tag is present.
Once you've done that you'll be back in business!
Please let me know if you have any other questions!
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Yes... I have read that over and over again. What does that really mean—"nullifying condition". I have followed one of the examples on the forum almost exactly and it's not working. I am missing something.. That said from what I can tell in the forum their are others that are having the same problem.
I my mind "Ticket type: Followup Date" "is within the next" "1 days" is a condition that can only happen once!
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Hey David,
A nullifying condition is any ticket property that changes to prevent the automation from running more than once on any given ticket.
Because your automations run hourly, "within in the next > 1 days" is a condition that can be met multiple times in the course of a single day. That's why it's throwing that error for you.
You'll see in Colin's first screen shot that he has a condition set in his automation that a specific tag cannot be present in order for the automation to run.
If you scroll down a little further, you'll see that he has an action that adds that tag to the ticket when the automation runs.
The lack of tag allows the automation to run. The fact that the tag is then added prevents the automation from running on that ticket again.
You can do the same thing with other ticket properties as well, if you don't want to use tags. You can change the status of the ticket, ticket type, ticket priority, etc.
In order for your automation to work properly, something on your ticket must be changed so that those exact conditions cannot be met again on that specific ticket.
I'm sorry that this has been frustrating for you. I hope that helps to clear things up!
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Ok, Thanks! I was setting a tag in one of my first attempts but I must not have set it correctly because I was getting the same error. So that is where I got confused. When I went back and set a tag this time it worked!
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Excellent! I'm glad we were able to get it sorted out. :)
Let us know if you need anything else!
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Hi all,
Has anyone been having problems recently with these date-based reminders?
I have set it up exactly in the way Claire described on the previous page, and it worked fine until a couple of weeks ago.
It seems to me something is broken with the date, the second trigger doesn't seem to recognize that the reminder date is within the next 1 days and doesn't fire (the first trigger works fine and sets the tag correctly).
Has anyone had this problem?
Thanks
Olivier
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Hi all,
Do you notice that your tickets a few hours earlier than 1 day before the reminder date?
My tickets usually open around 7pm, 2 days before the date we set, which is a few hours earlier than I think it should.
I know tickets always reopen 1 days before, but I assume it should be at midnight.
Has anyone had this problem?
Also, has no one found a solution or workaround to tickets reopening 1 day early, so that tickets reopen on the actual date we set (eg. "reopen if ticket date is in the next 0 days?").
Thanks,
Olivier
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We would also like to have tickets re-open on a particular day. Having to set this up so that they re-open the day before is fairly inconvenient - especially because the UTC used for the automation triggers means they actually open at 5 or 6 PM a full two days before the date we've set, right as we're closing the office.
The ability to set a date and time for them to re-open would be incredibly valuable for us.
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Hi.
Someone mention the same error i am having, but i could not find the solution in the blog.
Can anyone help me?
Its in spanish, but the configuration seems to be the same
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Our solution to this issue was to resort to the excellent Zendesk Appstore and purchased:-
Calendar: Attach calendar events to tickets. http://zdsk.co/1Ph9xeZ
Yes, its $2.50 per agent, but it's easy to manage and synchronizes with the agents Google Calendar.
PS. No association with the product other than being a happy customer!
Craig
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I have a solution to this that allows us to get the reminder at midnight on the date selected in the calendar, so the Agents come in to the reminders on the correct day, not the day before! Obviously lots of automation means more things can break it, but it seems to be functional enough. But I haven't done a huge amount of testing with this so be careful.
This will not work for time periods less than 24 hours. We had to create a separate automation for "remind me tomorrow".
We handle tickets in a specific way, so this is tailored to us. But the concept could be adapted once you understand it.
Trigger fires if - Ticket updated (not by automation), with a due date present in the date custom field. Action: ticket custom field "Reminder set" to YES.
Automation fires if - field "Reminder set" to YES, less than 1 day until due date. Action: adds tag c_reminder_24. Also changes ticket from Pending to On-Hold.
Automation fires if - field "Reminder set" to YES, tag c_reminder_24, ticket has been on hold for less than 2 hours. Action: Change to pending.
Automation fires if - ticket with tag c_reminder_24, "Reminder set" field YES, and time since pending is greater than 23 hours. Action: trigger email and change ticket to open. remove tag c_reminder_24 and set custom field to No. -
Hey Tom, this looks good. Thanks for sharing your solution!
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It would be nice if you could set "Ticket: Due date" til today so you would be able to create a today view, listing all tickets for today.
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Hey Fredrik,
Welcome to the Zendesk Community, and thanks for the feedback! I encourage you to post it in the Product Feedback area, where our Product Managers hang out.
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I didn't see one posted yet, so I created this feedback in the Product Feedback area:
If this interests you, please go vote! Thank you!
Lee
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Thanks for coming back to share that link, Lee.
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With Colin's settings, I'm getting:
Automation could not be created as:
- Invalid date 'specific_date' for 'Remind me before / Is'It doesn't seem to like a blank value there, and I don't see another way to blank out that date.
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Hey Derek,
Just so we're both on the same page, could you provide a screenshot of how you're setting up your automation so I can take a look?
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Hi all, we are stuck in the blank date issue:
Somebody who resolved the issue in the past?
Best,Gabriele
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Hello Gabriele,
So it seems like you are trying to set up your reminder to be continuous and not have an end date. I would recommend putting in an arbitrary date that is far into the future so you can satisfy the variable it is asking you for when setting up this reminder. This solution is depicted in this community post, but I've also included our guide on how to set reminders to in case you need further assistance.
Let us know if this proves true in resolving this error and please reach out if we can assist you further.
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Based on this post instruction and what I see on our control panel, this method does not work, I keep getting an error.
I am doing my testing with Support Team and I cannot complete this.
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Hey Christos,
Can you provide a screenshot of the automation you're attempting to set up? This should help us troubleshoot the error you're receiving.
Thanks!
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Hello Brett,
Can you confirm what plans this workaround can be used on? Are triggers in the Zendesk starter and team plans flexible enough to set this up?
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Thanks!
Lee
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Hey Lee,
As long as your not concerned about business hours on your account and only look at calendar hours, then the triggers on starter/team should be enough.
Let me know if you run into any issues :)
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Hello everyone still following this thread,
I *think* my team has found a viable workaround to the 'blank date' issue that has surfaced here.
We started by adding the custom field per the original post instructions. When we setup the automation, however, we replaced the offending line "Set to a specific date" with another action: Add tag: "Reminded." We also set a condition on the automation to nullify it "Tags does not include Reminded."
The limitation here is that you can only set one reminder per ticket. Hope this helps!
Brandon
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It should be possible to blank the date now. I just use ctrl-a (select all) or ctrl-shift-backspace to clear it. You then have to tab to the next field or click another field — that seems to make it stick. Update the ticket and the field should remain blank!
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Active Feature Request (please vote):
Feature Request: Ability to set a reminder on a ticket
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I just posted a Feature Request for this at the link below. If you would like to see this feature please head over there and show your support. Please make sure to add an upvote and comment even if it is simply a "+1"
Also, you may consider adding it to your post to get the feature request more visible.
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