The Proactive Tickets app helps your team go beyond the support ticket, focus on your customers, and build better relationships by enabling you to use customer lists to proactively reach out to segments of your customer base. Instead of waiting for your customers to reach out for help, you can kickstart customer service by creating proactive tickets on their behalf.
The Proactive Tickets app is available in the current version of Zendesk for Team, Professional, and Enterprise plans.
Here are some ways you might want to use proactive tickets:
- Manage business renewals: Create proactive tickets when your customers are coming up to their subscription renewals. With subscription type or renewal date stored in custom user or organization field in your Zendesk, you can target specific customer types.
- Online retailers: Proactively reach out to customers according to their service changes, purchase history, or order fulfillment status. With knowledge of your buyers' history, getting ahead of potential issues in your buyers' experience drives up revenue and reduces abandonment.
- Internal help desks: Notify users within your organization of service disruptions or changes in policy. Keeping your employees up and running reduces downtime and maintains their productivity.
To help you get started, this guide will walk through:
- Building a customer list for proactive ticket campaigns
- Installing the Proactive Tickets app
- Creating proactive tickets campaigns
- Best practices for your proactive ticket campaigns
Building a customer list for proactive ticket campaigns
The Proactive Tickets app is built on another Zendesk feature called customer lists. Customer lists define a segment of your users in Zendesk based on a set of criteria. The Proactive Tickets app will send campaigns to a targeted customer list you select.
We recommend that you create no more than 1,000 proactive tickets per campaign, so make sure your customer list has fewer than 1,000 customers.
Create a customer list for a group you want to target with proactive tickets. See Adding custom fields to users or Creating customer lists for more information.
Installing the Proactive Tickets app
- Click the Admin (
) icon in the sidebar, then select Apps > Marketplace. - Find the Proactive Tickets app, then click the title.
- On the app details page, click the Install App button on the upper-right side of the page.
) icon appear in the left navigation bar. 
Creating proactive ticket campaigns
Here's a short demo video to walk you through the below steps. It's best practice to double check your customer list and make sure that you are sending to the correct group of customers.
To create a proactive ticket campaign
- Click the Proactive Tickets () icon in the left navigation bar.
- Choose a customer list from the Select which customers to target drop-down menu.
- Enter a unique name in the Name your campaign field. The name will be added as a tag to all the tickets for this campaign. You can use this tag to create custom reports.
- Enter remaining details, like the subject, description, ticket status, and assignee, in the Create your proactive ticket section.
- Click Next to preview your proactive ticket.
- Review your proactive ticket details and click Send to send your campaign.
- Once your tickets are all created, a confirmation page appears. Additionally, Zendesk will automatically create a ticket view for your campaign. Click Go to ticket view and use that dedicated view to manage your proactive tickets.
Best practices for your proactive ticket campaigns
In addition to setting up the Proactive Tickets app, you can set up other aspects of your Zendesk to support your proactive ticket campaigns.
Before you create proactive tickets:
- Your proactive tickets will follow the existing workflows you have set up in your Zendesk. Review your triggers setup to make sure you want your proactive tickets to follow the same workflow. To create a dedicated workflow for your proactive tickets, you'll need to set up a trigger based on the unique tag for your proactive ticket campaign. See Streamlining workflows with triggers for setup help.
- Meet with your team to communicate the objectives and create an action plan for your proactive tickets campaign. Identify queue management, triage, and escalation strategies. With a prepared plan of attack, your team will be more efficient and productive in managing your proactive communication.
- Create other relevant tools, like macros to speed up repetitive responses, to support your proactive ticket campaign. See Using macros to update tickets for setup help.
As you create your proactive tickets:
- Make sure that you do not create more proactive tickets than your team can reasonably support. If you're planning on proactively communicating with your customers, you'll want to be prepared to be able to respond back quickly and efficiently. A great way to gauge how many tickets your agents can support is by simply looking at your agents' ticket resolution power, as measured by tickets solved per day.
- Be mindful of your customers when creating proactive tickets on their behalf. Just like any other outbound customer communication, you want to be careful on how often you "reach out" or "spam" them.
- Double-check your customer lists before sending out your proactive ticket campaign. We recommend that you create no more than 1,000 proactive tickets per campaign, so make sure your customer list has fewer than 1,000 customers. If you need to send to more customers, you'll need multiple campaigns.
After you create your proactive tickets:
- Check out the ticket view Zendesk automatically creates for you. You can use this view to organize and manage your proactive tickets. You can customize this ticket view to fit your needs. See Using views to manage workflows for setup help.
- To report on your proactive ticket campaign, you can use the unique tag that was created for your proactive ticket campaign. You'll need to use Insights to create custom reports based off of this tag. See Using Insights (Professional and Enterprise) for more information.
45 Comments
I am trying to send a test campaign to 2 email addresses that I have within my test customer list. I can enter all the details for the campaign but when I get to Send it does nothing. I get an error in the top right saying "There were Javascript errors in this app. Cannot read property 'replace' of undefined."
I have contact ZenDesk support but know this is a ZenDesk labs app so they were not able to help. Anyone got any ideas? I have uninstalled and reinstalled the app and no luck.
Hi Stephen!
I wasn't able to reproduce this problem with my own Proactive Campaign...everything worked just fine. My suggestions are as follows:
Give those things a try if you haven't already, and let me know how it goes!
I just found a major problem. I went through my list and set everything up. It said it was sending to 15 users (correct). However it generated 30+ tickets because it sent out multiple tickets to the same user if they had multiple email addresses associated with their user account.
Hey Alexis! This is definitely not expected behavior for the app, so I'm going to open up a ticket for you so a Support Advocate can take a closer look at this for you. We'll see you there shortly!
I absolutely love this app and use it often, but there's definitely an issue with it doubling the list. It usually happens for me when I try to go back a step and do something over - like wanting a different subject line. So my work-around (of sorts) is to test it out with a list that includes a few of my own email addresses. Then, once I know exactly how I want everything to look/work, I proceed very carefully and slowly so that the create and import list steps are done only once, and then the # of people on my list matches the number it tells me on the measure twice, cut once page.
When I create a customer list, I receive the following error:
One list only shows a list of 6 users out of 30. Another test that should have a single user profile shows 0.
I assumed the proactive app would include all users, but it's only showing the total from the truncated lists. I tried sending the campaign using the list that returned 0 profiles, but the app didn't do anything. I also tried adding more filters to the customer list, but the results stayed the same. Is there any way around this problem?
I am getting the 3 dot loading icon when clicking the start a campaign button. I'm on Professional (which this article says supports this app).
Hey everyone!
Sorry about the delayed response here. I'm currently in the process of gathering information on these issues, and I'll get back to you when I have some info to share. I appreciate your patience!
Thank you, Jessie.
Hi guys!
I did a little bit of research on this, and what I was able to find out is that the issues you're experiencing are most likely related to the way Customer Lists work in Zendesk, and in turn how that works with apps that use Customer Lists.
Technically speaking, the Proactive Ticket app is not a supported app; it's part of our Zendesk Labs selection of apps, which are experimental and provided as-is.
That said, we're looking into the issues with Customer Lists so there's a possibility that we will be able to get this resolved. Please bear in mind that I cannot make any promises because, as I mentioned, Proactive Tickets is not a supported app. But I will continue to monitor the situation and keep you posted as new information becomes available.
Thanks again for your patience!
Jessie, any idea why I'm not able to access the app at all? I still get the three dots loading icon when I try to start a campaign. And I appear to be on a supported version. I realize there isn't support, but want to make sure my account should be able to use it.
Hey Leslie,
You've already mentioned you're on the Professional plan, and this app is available for use on the Team plan and higher. That means that you can use the app on your account.
As far as the root cause of the issue you're having, I'm afraid that's outside my purview. My first suggestion would be to uninstall and reinstall the app; it's possible that it's just a bad install. If that doesn't straighten it out, I'd suggest trying to use it on a different browser. For instance, if you're using Firefox, try using Chrome and see if you get a different result.
Hey Leslie, something just occurred to me.
In order for the Proactive Ticket App to work, you need to have access to customer lists. Customers lists are an add-on item for the Professional and Enterprise plans. If you don't have that add-on, that would be the most likely culprit in your case.
Thanks, Jessie, that must be the culprit. Thank you!
No problem!
+1 on Nikki's request:
"I'd like Brand to be incorporated into this somehow (or at the very least, a way to pick which email address it's sending from). I've realized that my Proactive Tickets are coming from one email address, which is my default email address for my first Brand. But I am wanting it to come from the default email address for my second Brand.
Anybody know a workaround?"
Hi Edwin,
Thanks for letting us know your feedback on this. I've checked with the labs team and at present there isn't any plans to add brand functionality to the Proactive ticket app. There isn't any way you can make the tickets from the proactive ticket app come from the default address of your second brand as this app has not been updated to work with the Multibrand feature.
This is however a great idea and we recommend for you to submit a feature request for this over in our community here so our product manager can be aware. I also recommend for you to follow the request you create so you can be kept up to date with news from there. :)
Too bad there is no brand function in the app. I hope it will be available soon
I have now created a feature request for a multibrand feature in the Pro-Active Tickets app.
Jessie,
Given that Edwin's worthy suggestion about Multibrand features was canned due Proactive being a Labs project
How on earth do those of us that would find it terribly useful get it moved from being only a Labs project and unsuppoerted and actively added to roadmap?
I for one would adore being able to attach a document to a Proactive ticket (it's why I've never been able to get them off the ground on any of my multiple desks)- but I know there's no point asking for the functionality whilst it's still in Labs
Is there a standard routing for the ingenuity being displayed in Labs making it to roadmap or is it arbitrary?
Is there a way to say within Labs that "this product won't go any further... except as a hobby... ever" because with no obvious way to drive them forward from the outside it's terminally frustrating for us to see something that has major possibilities if only there was a relatively minor tweak
Hi Richard!
You're touching on some things that are pain points for many people, myself included, and I promise you that your feedback is not falling on deaf ears.
I am in regular contact with several different individuals and teams about this and I can assure you that the conversations that need to happen are, or will be, happening. As is often the case with stuff like this, though, there are a lot of moving parts that need to synchronize and sometimes it can be really challenging to get to that point.
For the moment I don't have any concrete information to share with you, but I will continue to ask questions and let you know when I have answers.
Hello, we are on enterprise plan, but once I click on create campaign I only see the 3 dots loading, and nothing happens. Have tried reinstalling the app and clearing cookies and I a still in the same situation.
Hi Team,
We now need to use the pro-active ticket function.
But when we use , we find the group & assignee list is not the latest.
Our aim is actually to record solution and assistance that we provided to any particular request coming from destination and also some urgent cases into our Zendesk report.
Question:
1.why some groups are missing,
2.the assignee are not updated
Please help check and advise.
Thanks.
Hi,
It seems I cannot send tickets with status "Solved" with the Proactive Tickets app. Nothing happens when I choose this status. Had to switch to "Open" and then bulk solve them after I had sent them. Bug?
Thanks,
Jessica
Jessie, it has been a year, do you have an update on the issue with Customer Lists not correctly interacting with apps?
Jessica, we get around that by having a trigger that fires if a ticket is set to Pending and has a specific tag on it. Then we use that tag whenever we use the Proactive Tickets app and set the responses to Pending, so the trigger Solves them. Not great, but has worked fine for us.
Any plans to make it so we can do private tickets? The toggle for that can be useful. We may create proactive tickets for group issues, send an email trigger out but not have the ticket public unless they respond.
Example:
"We see that you have been having an issue with _________ we would love to help you with this issue, call into us at ###-###-#### or reply to this email so we can try to help.
If they never reply we would like the ticket to remain hidden.
Thoughts?
Hey Sean!
We actually launched the ability to create a ticket with a private comment at the beginning of March. You can find more information about it here.
We just did a new run proactive tickets and for some reason it is limiting us to 100 tickets per. We setup a customer list with 246 users and then setup the proactive and it only showed 100 to send to. We then had to go through Vlookup hell to figure our who was not getting the ticket, created a new customer list with 146 users and it once again only did 100 so then we had to do the last 46. Was there a limit added to this Add-on recently?We have done many of these over 100 in the past.
Sean, did you recently go over 100,000 users in your account? We began seeing this same problem after crossing that threshold, as that is when Customer Lists stop working correctly.
FWIW, we check a box on the user profile when we upload a list of users to mass message. Then we apply a specific tag using Proactive Tickets and we have a trigger that unchecks the box if a ticket is created using that tag. That way we can tell who on the list Proactive Tickets skipped. Yes, it's unpleasant.
Hi Elliot,
We have been over that count for a few years. It makes it hard to use for sure.
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