Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends |
Jan 21, 2021 | Jan 21, 2021 | Jan 28, 2021 |
We're thrilled to announce trigger categories, a new feature to help you organize your triggers. Trigger categories allow you to visually group triggers to make them easier to manage.
What’s new?
Until now, many of you were using dummy triggers (or visual placeholders) to organize your triggers. Categories allow you to formally designate these logical groupings and interact with them. For example, expanding or collapsing all triggers in a category for easier viewing, or taking action on all triggers within a category.
When will I have access to the feature?
Trigger categories will be available on all Zendesk accounts. If your Support account was created after January 20, 2021, you will have trigger categories enabled automatically. If your account was created before January 20th, you can enable the feature on the trigger edit page. At a later date, if you have not yet opted in, Zendesk will notify you and automatically migrate your triggers to include categories.
What’s changing with the API?
Once you are using trigger categories, you’ll be able to designate a category when creating a new trigger via the Zendesk API. If you don’t specify a category when creating a new trigger, we will select a category for you. You’ll also be able to make changes to trigger categories themselves through the API. For more information on the default behavior, please refer to our API documentation.
Ready to learn more?
See our documentation for details on enabling categories, creating categories, and managing categories.
10 Comments
This sounds dangerous. We have over 2000 triggers. Taking into account trigger categories also affect trigger order (managing categories), auto categorizing sounds like it'll affect the way our triggers run. How will the categories be determined for each trigger if the triggers aren't manually updated by the deadline?
We also have a few complexed flows within our triggers that need to run in sequence. How would we ensure they do not get separated or rearranged when this launches?
DJ Jimenez / DJ Jimenez - I'm guessing it doesn't try to determine categories, and would simply do what it does when you manually enable the feature. But would be great to have explicit confirmation of that.
Per https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360058107713
“Click the Enable button at the top of the page. …
After a few moments, all your triggers will be organized into a single default category, called Initial category.”
Is it (or will it be) possible to assign triggers to a category in bulk? I would prefer to avoid editing the macros one by one in order to get them into their appropriate cateogories.
Hege Farsund Solheim
Hi DJ Jimenez
What has been described above by Stephen Belleau is exactly right.
The automatic enablement of the Categories functionality after March 31, 2021, implies that all your existing trigger list will be assigned to one default category, called "Initial category.” They will not be split up into different groups, nor will there be any change to the way they are ordered.
It seems that on Chrome on windows I am unable to drag and drop the triggers in the categories
Hi Hege Farsund Solheim
I'm sorry you're having trouble! Did you click Edit order on the Trigger's page first? Are the drag handles showing? See Reordering triggers.

Hi Sudeshna Basu and Lisa Kelly,
It would be very helpful to have an option to expand all categories. There is an option to collapse all categories, but not expand. We would actually prefer if the categories were expanded by default.
Would also be nice if it remembered the column settings. The description column has been added by default, and it makes our triggers span multiple lines. We would rather always just see the trigger name as before. So now we have to change the column settings every time.
Does this March 31st date still apply? It appears that the original article was revised to not specify a date--it now seems to say that Zendesk will reach out at some point if you have not migrated.
Hi Lila Kingsley
The March 31 deadline for migration to trigger categories has been extended to give customers more time to make the change. We will notify you when a new date is available. Nina Olding
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