- Sending an SMS text message when an urgent ticket has been unattended for more than 48 hours
- Sending a notification to a Twitter stream when a new urgent ticket is created
- Creating a Salesforce case from a ticket
Setting up a target
Target | Description |
---|---|
Basecamp |
Using the Basecamp target, you can push ticket updates to a project as:
You need to enable API access in your Basecamp account to use this target. For information about setting up Basecamp, see Setting up and using the Basecamp target. |
Campfire | Send notifications to a Campfire chat room. |
Clickatell | Use this target to send SMS messages using your Clickatell account. Follow the steps in Clickatell HTTP API Guide to setup the account, add a HTTP connection and obtain an API ID. |
Send emails to specific addresses. You can define the action in a trigger or automation.
Note: If
the target email address is an external Support
address on another Support account with whom you
have ticket sharing agreements, the email
notification is rejected by the target email
address. A ticket will not be created. This
happens in order to avoid an email loop. If you
need to share support requests with another
Support account, use the ticket sharing
feature instead.
|
|
Get Satisfaction | Post public comments to Get Satisfaction topics for tickets created using the Zendesk
moderator tool in Get Satisfaction. By creating this target, the necessary triggers and views and also add a useful widget in the home and ticket pages (you can remove those widgets if you don't need them) will automatically be created. |
HTTP | Pass information in the request body of HTTP requests to third-party services and REST APIs that accept JSON, XML, or form-encoded content. See Creating webhooks using the HTTP target. |
Pivotal Tracker | Create stories in Pivotal Tracker from a Zendesk Support ticket to easily prioritize support
issues in your project backlog. The Pivotal Tracker target sends the Zendesk Support ticket ID to Pivotal Tracker when creating a new story. If you have enabled Pivotal Tracker's native Zendesk integration in the target Tracker project, a link back to the Zendesk Support ticket is created in the new story. |
Salesforce | Create a Salesforce case from a Zendesk Support ticket. When you set up this target, an example trigger is automatically created for you. |
SugarCRM | Push ticket data to a SugarCRM case. |
Twilio | Use this target to send SMS messages to a mobile phone using your Twilio account. |
Send notifications to a Twitter stream.
Note: Make sure that you protect your twitter
stream if you don't want notifications to be
readable by the general public.
|
|
URL | Pass URL parameters to any URL. You can use placeholders as values. Example:
www.some-address.com?customer_name={{ticket.requester.name}}. Set up a script on
your server to receive the request, and then you can do just about anything from
there. See also the HTTP target above. To troubleshoot problems with the target, see Get information about HTTP and URL targets that aren't working.
Note: We don't recommend using URL/HTTP targets to update tickets in Zendesk
Support, which can result in multiple issues. Use for external targets
only.
|
Yammer | Send notifications to a Yammer stream. Follow the steps in this Yammer Target Guide to create a client application in Yammer and authorize this target to use the Yammer API. For more information, see Notifying your Yammer feed. |
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Extensions.
- Click the Targets tab.
- Select Add target.
- All of the target options are listed. Select the type of target and enter the required target information (which varies from target to target).
- Select Create Target from the drop-down list at the bottom of the page. If you want to test the target before adding it, select Test Target.
- Click the Submit button.
Once you've set up targets, you can edit, delete, and deactivate and reactivate them. See Managing external targets.
Using targets in automations and triggers
Once you've set up targets, you can use them in automations and triggers. Here's an example of a trigger that notifies a Twitter account when an urgent ticket is created:
Since you're interacting with external targets, there may be a delay between when a trigger or automation runs and when you'll see the results in the external target (in the example above, that would be your Twitter home page or stream).
You can enter up to 8192 characters in the Message field of a Notify target action.
Avoiding timeout errors
If a timeout error is received within 10 seconds of a request being made, Zendesk retries the request. After 21 consecutive failed attempts to retry the request, Zendesk deactivates the target. You'll need to reactivate the target before you can use it again.
Zendesk admins receive a notification when a target is automatically deactivated. They don't receive a notification when a target is manually deleted or deactivated.
- The message body in the trigger or target page is blank.
- There's a problem with the receiving server.
49 Comments
Hi Sergio,
I know that Liquid markup has been used in other types of triggered notifications as described in this article. Perhaps a similar method could be employed when notifying a target?
Superb Dwight, it works!!! Thank you!!!
Is there a plan to provide this support for Community posts?
I would like to hook the events.
A user posted a same request here before.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203662136/comments/206311267
I need to call an external API (using HTTP request) which requires header parameters. I don't find how to inform those parameters in the request, because all the parameters that I can inform are being sent in the URL.
Could I use email/token:{{token_here}} notation for the targets created in the UI???
Afaik, there's only option to put user&pwd.
thank you
Hi @Sergio -
It should definitely be possible to use the notation you mentioned in our targets. It'll look like this, with the token itself going into the password field:

That having been said, we don't generally recommend having your targets pointed at Zendesk endpoints. The biggest issues we've seen involve race conditions when a trigger/target attempts to update the same ticket on which the trigger is currently firing. Updating other objects (users/organizations) should be more reliable.
@Renato - unfortunately we don't allow you to send other header parameters to targets at this time.
For those who are concerned about targets being deactivated due to failure and not being able to re-submit failed requests, my suggestion would be to decouple your webhook from Zendesk by using a message queue, such as Azure Event Grid or other type of cloud-based message queue. These services are designed to be highly available, so the likelihood of failure would be much lower. You would set up the target in Zendesk so that it posts to your message queue, and then that queue in turn pushes the message out to your webhook (or your application can pull from the queue) and you'll have much more flexibility over retry logic and time-to-live.
This way, your external application can be taken offline or recover from failures without Zendesk knowing or caring that the message was ever processed.
Appreciate you taking the time to share this with everyone Josh!
Is there a way I can set to notify an email target with a plain text email?
Hey Gasper,
If you're using targets along with triggers to send out this email notification then you'd most likely need to alter your email template to get the notification to look how you want.
Let me know if I'm misunderstanding your question.
Is there any way set an agent's Zendesk Support Mobile app as a Target? I would like to be able to ping an agent's app with an automation to let them know that X ticket hasn't been updated in a set amount of time. We want agents to be reminded when a customer has failed to get back to us.
Hi Patrick,
There is not a way in Zendesk to specifically notify someone's mobile app. An automation could email them, and if they had notifications set up on their phone to let them know about that, this might be the best solution.
I would recommend posting in our Product Feedback forum as well: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/200132066-Feedback-on-Support
This lets other users upvote your request and add onto it as well. I will flag this as product feedback as well on my own side so that it is reviewed by our team internally, but I think you have a really interesting idea here.
Please let us know if we can assist further.
Hi Merel,
I actually created a tip that walks you through threading target responses into an existing ticket if that's what you're looking for. More information here: How to allow email target responses to thread into existing ticket
Keep in mind that this is an unsupported workflow so if you run into any issues you'll want to troubleshoot on your end.
I hope this helps!
i have whatsapp account embeded in Zendesk, and every single inquiry comes from Whatsapp will create a ticket. i would like to trigger the message to our custom app to automate the responses to our consumer, as you may aware, the conversation will be updated and our custom app only need the latest message received from whatsapp and its ticket on Zendesk, do you know how to make it possible?
Thank you before..
Support - Can we notify / update content from an external target - https://www.example.com/abc to help center page triggered by zendesk - https://help.joybird.com/hc/en-us ? (Without any ticket related in Zendesk)
@Vinay, that should be possible if you use a custom script along with our Help Center API which I've linked for you.
@Johanes, if I'm understanding you correctly, then creating an HTTP or URL target would be your best option here. You'd need to create a trigger that would send this information to the external target you've set up and include the ticket.latest_comment placeholder in the body of the email.
Hope this helps!
Hello can you (zendesk) that payloads sent via the HTTP target is encrypted (HTTPS) or not encrypted (docs do not mention https so assumed plan text).
Dave Kaminsky
As long as your target url is specified using https:// the HTTP target will use https:// & encrypt. While http:// will work we don't recommend using it except for maybe testing placeholder content (lorem ipsum, etc) to make sure your payload looks okay. In any production scenerio https:// should be used. I hope that helps, I'll file a ticket with the docs team to add some more context to the documentation.
Cheers!
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