Send out different notification messages using liquid

Problem

Very often, customers get annoyed by receiving canned emails from agents. This is particularly applicable for follow-up notifications or ticket resolution messages. One solution is to manually personalize every message.

What if you are using Zendesk Support with heavily automated with triggers and automations and there is no simple way to get rid of canned messages? Then you can let your business rules send out varying communication using the approach described in this article.

Solution

This solution uses Liquid to enable your triggers, automations, and macros to randomly select a pre-built message from a set of messages and send it to the customer. This gives you more variety in your canned messages, so all customers don't get the same message for a specific notification.

Liquid doesn't have the ability to generate random numbers, so this requires that you build some logic. Current Liquid code takes the ticket id number, which is almost random per user --> divides it by 3 --> and based on the remainder, displays different text. modulo: 3 (the remainder after division by 3) can return 3 possible results: 0, 1, 2. Each result is associated with text that will be displayed.

Liquid code

The code below represents the logic needed. You can copy and paste it in your business rules.

{% assign randomizer = ticket.id | modulo:3 %}

{% case randomizer %} {% when 0 %}

Your request ({{ticket.id}}) has been solved. To reopen this request, reply to this email.<br /><br>

{% when 1 %}

We glad to inform that this matter is resolved. However, if you have any outstanding questions feel free to reply to this notification.

{% else %}

#{{ticket.id}} is now considered to be resolved. You are welcome to reply to this email to reopen it and continue the conversation.

{% endcase %}

{{ticket.comments_formatted}}

Using the Liquid code in business rules

Trigger

You can create a trigger that sends notification when a ticket is marked as solved. Paste the Liquid code in the email body of the notification. Then modify the possible messages as you like.

To test the trigger, let's solve three consecutive tickets and check the outcome of the notifications. Below are three screenshots taken from notifications. Each notification has different text.

Automation

The same approach can be used for an automation. Let's assume you need an automation that will follow-up with a customer with different communication text after three days of no response.

Macro

If your agents prefer sending follow-ups manually, they can create a macro that uses Liquid code and returns different messages based on the ticket ID.

Enhancement

The idea of using Liquid for notifications is not new. There is great article about liquid as well as github page that explains Liquid in a simple way.

The code in this article is using modulo: 3 to calculate the remainder after division. The argument be easily be increased to 5 or 10. Division by 5 means 5 possible remainders after division can exist. Each outcome can be associated with a message. This creates very straight forward logic for increasing the number of outcomes and, as a result, creating the impression of truly random responses.

Of course any solution can be done better. For example, Liquid supports dates, which can be used to generate random outcome and then addressed via the case function.

There are many ways that the code above can be improved and adapted to certain workflows. You are more than welcome on suggest any of them in the comments.