The keys to outstanding customer support are simple to understand, but as anyone who's handled customer issues can tell you, they can be difficult to execute.
Answering one customer email in a timely and thorough manner might be easy; but replying to five, 10, 20 emails in an hour? For that, it helps to have tools and a strategy.
For instance, let's say you've made the commitment to reply to each support ticket within one day. Wouldn't it be great if you could be notified when one of your tickets had gone unassigned for 24 hours? Yes!
Enter Zendesk Support Automations. Automations are actions that you set up to take place within your help desk when specific time intervals have passed. So, in our case, we want to be notified when a new ticket hasn't been assigned to anybody within 24 hours of its creation.
To set this up, go into Automations under your Manage tab. There you'll see existing automations (investigate them by clicking edit ); to add a new one, click Add Automation . This is where you define the condition that will prompt the automation. In our case, it's when a new ticket goes without reply for over 24 hours. The configuration looks like this:
Note that you can preview the results of your automation and see if any of your current tickets meet its rules.
Next, we'll define what we want to happen when a ticket meets the conditions. In this case, send an email notifying us that a ticket needs to be addressed. The condition might look something like this:
Note that in order for your automation to work, one of the actions must nullify one of the conditions (above, we changed the status of the ticket from New to Open ). This is so your automation doesn't keep firing in a constant loop. Also, you can string multiple actions together, such as send out a notification and escalate the ticket to a different support group or send a notification back to the customer letting them know that you haven't forgotten them.
If time is a factor in your support strategy, you'll definitely want to explore Automations.
Update (4/19/10) : I updated the automation example to correct the setup as explained above: in an automation one of your actions must nullify one of the conditions that causes the automation to fire.
16 Comments
We have some cases where an agent inadvertently sets a ticket to "Open" without making an initial user-facing reply. The example given here only works for tickets that are "New." How can we detect tickets of any status that don't have an initial reply?
Hi Chris, I believe you should be able to accomplish what you’re looking for with a trigger. I’ve created an example in my test account and you can tweak as needed and edit the email body to your liking, but basically this trigger would look for whenever Agent replies are zero and the ticket Status is Open. Then you can perform the action of emailing a specific user or a whole group notifying that there is an open ticket with zero agent replies. It seemed to do the trick with my testing, so I hope it helps with your workflow!
Is there anyway of notifying all agents within Zendesk instead of sending them an email? We are trying to notify all agents when a ticket comes through from a specific channel. Thanks.
Hi Thomas! Welcome to the Community!
There isn't any functionality that allows that built into the product, and I'm not able to find any apps that do this either. The closest thing I found was the Notification App, but it's not automated.
Another option would be to use our API to create an app of your own that does this. You can find our API resources here.
@Thomas,
We use Slack as a way to alert agents that prefer a non-emailed alert. There is a desktop and phone app and they work great!
Good day ZenDesk community!
I need to set an alert when ticket has been created and there was no agent reply for more than 10 minutes - how can I achieve that? All the metrics I have available in the automation condition dropdown are "Hours since..." and measuring first reply time in hours is unacceptable for our business.
Can I get reply time measured in minutes somehow?
I tried setting the value of 0.2 hours for example, but this is not accepted by ZD.
Thanks in advance!
Evgeny.
Hi @Evgeny,
Good point. I believe hours is the only Automation option. I wonder if you could play around with Zapier? I believe there would be a way to copy Zapier on created ticket emails and have it send back somethingnin minutes if other conditions are not met, add a tag and have a trigger fire off the alert you're looking for.
I haven't done this myself so I'm not sure how to walk you through it but I do know Zapier will allow so many "Zaps" per month for free. I mention this because depending on your volume, it may not be free.
I hope others have better recommendations for you!
Hi, i set almost the same conditions as you
status: open
Hours since requester update: greater than 24
and get an error:
Automation could not be updated as:
Hi Ivan!
You can't created an automation that would run multiple times on the same ticket; it's necessary to add a nullifying condition to make sure it only runs once. We go into detail about how this works in this article.
I haven't thought of a way of timing alerts on the basis of fractions of an hour, as Evgeny was looking for, but I have devised a supplementary automation to handle the situation that Chris Hardie described last year - i.e. to flag up where a ticket has been assigned, yet replying to the requester has got overlooked.
You create an optional dropdown ticket field like "FirstReplyNeeded" and give it an optional value such as "Outstanding". Assuming that you use the basic triggers "Notify requester of received request" and "Notify requester of comment update", then you add an action to the former trigger that sets FirstReplyNeeded = Outstanding and an action to the latter trigger that resets it to null.
The automated alert is fired off when Hours since assigned is [your choice] and FirstReplyNeeded = Outstanding. Other conditions could be the Ticket Group and Ticket Status less than closed, or individual assignees. This alert provides a safeguard where tickets could get assigned inadvertently to agents who are actually absent as well as those who are just absent-minded sometimes.
Thanks for sharing your solution, Simon!
Hello Zendesk Support!
I would like to set the automation like when we get a ticket with open or pending status to only get reminder e-mails, if the following ticket has no update greater than 48 business hours. Could you please suggest me the proper way to set this up?
We already set the way when we have a ticket more than 48 business hours Zendesk generated a reminder e-mail to take care about the topical ticket.
Thank you!
Hi Krisztina,
Are you wanting this automation to fire if no update has been made from requester of the ticket or the assignee? You have a couple options when creating this automation and I've attached an example below:
You can use any of the following conditions depending on who you're waiting for an update form:
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Hi Brett!
I wasn't clear entierly, but you just suggested me that I wanted to make.
I have set automation to fire if no update has been made from the assignee group and it works well.
Thank you for your help, I really appriciate it!
Have a great day!
Kind regards,
Krisztina Péterfi
Is there a way to not trigger the automation if the ticket is updated by any agent, rather than just the assignee?
Hi Dan -
It depends a little bit on your workflow and how you have your agents set up.
If your agents always set a ticket to "Pending" whenever they respond to a user, then you could set up a trigger to send a notification to the assignee group any time the ticket has been in "open" status longer than X hours, assuming that, if an agent responded, it would have been set to another status.
There's also a condition for Ticket: Hours since update which would fire any time there's been no update (from either the requester, any agent, or any other trigger/automation) in a given period of time.
If neither of those works for your circumstances, a slightly more cumbersome way to set it up would be to have a tag applied when any agent responds (either manually or via a macro) and then set it up so that, if that tag is present, the automation does not fire. But that would only work the first time as the tag would then be on the ticket going forward unless removed by an agent.
Let me know if any of those fit your use case, or if there are more details I should know to help you out.
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