This recipe describes how to use the Zendesk Bump-Bump-Solve method to clean-up outdated, dormant tickets in your account. Using business rules, you can set time intervals to first notify the requester that you're waiting for a response and then eventually notify the requester that a dormant ticket has been marked as solved.
This process includes:
- An automation which will "bump" the ticket requester after the ticket has been Pending for four days
- An automation which will solve out and notify the customer three days later
- A trigger which will be used to reset this process if/when the customer responds after either of these notifications.
This article includes the following sections:
Workflow goal
This recipe shows you how to notify (Bump) the ticket requester after four calendar days, notify (Bump) the ticket requester again after six calendar days if you're still waiting for a response, then solve (Solve) the ticket after seven calendar days. To meet your own requirements, you can modify this workflow to use different time intervals or set business days instead of calendar days, whatever you prefer.
Automating the first reminder (Bump)
Because you want to remind the customer based on the time the ticket has been pending, rather than based on a particular ticket event that has occurred, use an automation rather than a trigger to send the reminder.
Create a bump automation to remind the ticket requester that the ticket has been in Pending status for four days. Set conditions and actions that ensure the automation runs only once per pending status and that it runs only after a designated period of time (four calendar days). As such, this automation will be adding a unique tag to the ticket (and checking that it's not there) as well as notifying the requester. The automation you set up should look something like this:
To automate the first reminder
- In Support, click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Automations.
- Click Add automation.
- Enter the following information for the automation.
For the automation Name and Conditions:
The Ticket: Tags condition checks that two tags are not present on the ticket. The first tag, bump1, is used to signify that the automation has already fired and the customer has been notified. Since we're planning to send a second notification (after 6 days) before solving the ticket, the bump1 tag is added after the first notification so you can distinguish between the first and second notifications.
The second tag, dont_bump, can be used as a fail-safe by agents if they do not want this automated process to occur for any particular ticket. In these cases, agents can manually add the dont_bump tag to the ticket to prevent any of the bump automations from running.
For the automation Actions:
- When you’ve finished adding the automation name, conditions, and actions, click Create automation.
With this automation, when these conditions are met:
- The ticket status has been Pending for more than 4 days (96 hours).
- The ticket does not have a bump1 or dont_bump tag.
the following actions are performed:
- An email notification is sent to the ticket requester. See example below.
- A bump1 tag is added to the ticket to track that the first bump reminder has been sent.
The following is an example of the email notification sent to a customer after one of their tickets is pending for more than 4 days.
Automating the second reminder (Bump)
For tickets that remain pending, even after the first reminder is sent, create a second bump automation that sends a second reminder if the ticket is still pending after 6 days.
To automate the second reminder
- In Support, click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Automations.
- Click Add automation.
- Enter the following information for the automation.
For the automation Name and Conditions:
For the automation Actions:
- When you’ve finished adding the automation name, conditions, and actions, click Create automation.
With this automation, when these conditions are met:
- The ticket status has been Pending for more than 6 days (144 hours).
- The ticket does not have a bump2 or dont_bump tag.
- The bump1 tag has already been added to the ticket, which means that the first notification was already sent and the ticket is ready for a second notification.
- A check that the ticket was updated longer than two days (48 hours) prior (when the first automation ran). This condition ensures that when you first implement this process, and you already have tickets pending for more than 6 days, your end users will not all be notified and then notified again an hour later or at the same time.
A customer's response to the notification will reopen the ticket and our clean-up trigger will need to remove all of the bump tags from the ticket to reset this process.
the following actions are performed:
- An email notification is sent to the ticket requester. See example below.
- A bump2 tag is added to the ticket to track that the second bump reminder has been sent.
The following is an example of the email notification sent to a customer after one of their tickets is pending for more than 6 days and they didn't reply to the first notification.
Automatically solving the ticket (Solve)
Now that you've notified your requester twice and given them adequate time to respond, create another automation to come in and close the ticket. This automation will need to do two things: solve the ticket and notify the requester.
To solve the ticket
- In Support, click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Automations.
- Click Add automation.
- Enter the following information for the automation.
For the automation Name and Conditions:
For the automation Actions:
- When you’ve finished adding the automation name, conditions, and actions, click Create automation.
With this automation, when these conditions are met:
- The ticket status has been Pending for more than 7 days (168 hours).
- The ticket has a bump2 tag to show that two notifictions have been sent.
- It's been more than 24 hours since the ticket was last updated.
the following actions are performed:
- An email notification is sent to the ticket requester. See example below.
- The ticket status is changed to Solved.
The following is an example of the email notification sent to a customer when a pending ticket is automatically marked solved.
If the requester responds to the notification before the ticket changes from solved to closed, the ticket will be reopened and a clean-up trigger should activate as well.
Automatically cleaning-up the ticket
As a final step, add a clean-up trigger. This trigger removes any of the bump-solve process tags if a ticket is reopened. This trigger is needed if the ticket is reopened and the agent responds and sets it back to pending. In this case, cleaning up the bump-bump-solve tags enables the process to run again, even though it has already run.
To clean up the process tags
- In Support, click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Triggers.
- Click Add Trigger.
- Enter the following information for the trigger.
Under Meet ALL of the following conditions, add:
Status | Changed to | Open
Current user | Is | (end-user)
Tags | Contains at least one of the following | bump 1 bump 2
For the trigger Actions, add:
Remove tags | bump1 bump2
- Click Create trigger.
And that's all there is to it! With these three or four business rules, you'll have an automated process that will automatically remind customers that you're waiting for their response and eventually solve it if they don't. You'll no longer have to worry about managing pending tickets.
34 Comments
I was trying to implement this set of automations (why aren't they available by default!?), but the last one cannot be implemented, because the "Changed from" option isn't available. What gives?
Hey Eric! Welcome to the Community!
Automations are time-based business rules that fire at intervals of time, rather than on a ticket update, so you wouldn't be able to use an action like "changed from" to make it fire. If you need a business rule to fire based on whether the status of a ticket has been changed at the time of update, you'd want to use a Trigger.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
Ahh...the final automation detailed above is not an automation--it's a trigger! That makes sense now, but was unclear above. Thanks!!
Glad I could help! Have a great weekend. :)
Hi,
Is there a way to building out these automation/trigger rules without having having them fire off immediately after submitting?
The idea is to have everything mapped out, reviewed and then "go-live".
Thx
Welcome to the Community, Adrien!
For clarification, do you mean that you want to be able to basically stage all your triggers and automations and then flip a switch so they all activate at the same time? Or am I misunderstanding your question?
Hi there-
Working on the second automation (to solve) and am receiving this error:
Any suggestions? Thanks!
Kinsley
Hi Kinsley!
This just means that you need some kind of condition in the automation that will prevent it from running over and over again on the same ticket. Most folks opt to use a tag for this.
In your conditions, you would specify something like Ticket: Tags > Contains none of of the following > bump_solve.
Then you'll include an action in the automation that adds the tag: Ticket: Add tags > bump_solve.
So, when your automations run, this one will test each ticket for the bump_solve tag. If it doesn't see the tag, it will run the automation and add the tag, along with whatever other actions you want it to take.
The next time your automations run, those tickets won't be included because they have the bump_solve tag, and the automation knows to skip them.
Let us know if that's not clear!
Can you all please use higher resolution screen shots for your help guide articles? These especially are really low resolution and very hard to read any of the text
Hi Sunee! Welcome to the Community!
Thanks for the feedback on this; I'll be sure to pass it along to our Documentation team to let them know!
I was creating a trigger for collecting surveys from customers. Is it possible that one customer receives a trigger just once, no matter how many ever tickets the customer creates.
Hi Shubham! Welcome to the Community!
The easiest way to ensure that a user doesn't receive a notification multiple times is to add a User Tag. Every ticket that user creates will inherit that tag. You can then set up the Trigger in question to only fire when that tag is NOT present.
I'm sorry. I have 2 questions.
1. Do we need create a trigger to add tag bump first?
2. Why is there a condition hours since update? What will happen if there is no such condition?
Hello,
Once an automation email notification is sent to the requester, is that notification attached to the original ticket?
Thanks.
@Wit - You don't need to add a "bump" tag to every ticket; rather, you should have a "no_bump" tag that you add to tickets that you DON'T want the bump automation to run on, and then add a condition to the automation so that it only runs when that tag is NOT present.
The "Hours since update" condition is necessary so that Zendesk will know when to run the automation. If you don't add such a condition, the automation won't ever run.
@Christine - Just like with Triggers, the email notification isn't added to the ticket. However, if you set the automation up the way Joe illustrates here, there will be a tag on the ticket that will show where in the bump process the ticket is.
Hi There,
I have implemented this solution in our Zendesk instance. Would like to get some suggestions with regards to the reporting aspect. What is the best way to filter through or distinguish the tickets solved by the automation against those tickets manually solved by the agent? I believe the bump_solve tag can be used as the identifier but are there other steps that I might be missing?
We created a drop down field with different outcomes. Tickets solved by automation both add a tag and change this value.
You don't even need to put the field on the ticket form to confuse agents. the automation can still set the value on the ticket anyways. The dropdown field makes reporting a lot easier.
Hi Dan,
Thanks for the tip. I added an additional tag in the bump solve automation to differentiate the tickets solved by the automation and added a remove tag condition in the clean-up trigger for these additional tag. You mentioned that you added a drop down field but not in the ticket form. Where did you add this drop down field? I'm thinking of trying this.
Thank you.
I just made a ticket field and have automations update the field. You don't have to put it on the form for the update to apply, it seems. A ticket is a ticket, the form is just a means to differentiate for the user in the UI what fields they should use.
Is there a way to send a daily/weekly reminder (digest) to ticket assignees to remind them of tickets they have unsolved? Other ticket systems use "subscriptions" based on a query to carry this out, but not sure I see this in Zendesk since it seems I'd have to set up a trigger every day with a different time interval each time. Please advise.
Hi Jimmy -
The best practice we typically suggest is for agents to have a view of all of their tickets that are less than solved, and to work out of that view on a daily basis. However if your agents aren't regularly working out of Support, there are a couple of other things you can do:
Set up an Automation
While there isn't a digest function that would batch all of the unsolved tickets for an agent into a summary, there are automations that you could set to fire on each unsolved ticket an agent has. There are conditions for automations that are time-based, for example, you could have it send the assignee a notification if a ticket has been sitting in, say, open status for X number of hours.
SLAs
If you're on a plan type that includes SLAs, there are some that you could apply that would help to remind your agents when they're running up against a window of time you'd like them to respond by.
Insights reports
If you use Insights, you could schedule a report to run and send on a daily basis that would let users know how many tickets they have unsolved. They wouldn't be able to click from the report into the tickets, but it would be a reminder system.
Let us know if any of those might work for you and if you need additional information.
HI good afternoon,
a question about the clean up trigger. Why do I need to fill the "ANY" conditions. it seems like they are not necessary. hope to hear from you!
kind regards Annelies
Hi Annelies Schueler,
Thanks for reaching out and great question!
The "ANY" conditions about if a ticket has changed from "pending" or "solved" are added to this trigger to make sure it does not fire on specific workflows.
For example, including these "ANY" conditions makes sure that tickets moving from "new" to "open" (followups from "closed" tickets which inherit ticket tags) are skipped. Also, if you have an internal workflow where you move tickets from "on-hold" to "open" these tickets would also be skipped by this trigger.
That being said, feel free to remove those conditions if they do not apply to your team's workflow!
Feel free to reach back out with any follow-up questions.
If I change the condition Ticket Hours Since Update to Ticket Hours Since Requester Update, will this allow me to add internal notes without messing up the timing? My issue is that I will call to follow up after the BBS has started. I will add an internal note and this messes up the timing of the BBS.
Hey Ryan, yes if you change to Hours Since Requester Update, that should fix the issue where the timer resets after you've updated the ticket with an internal note.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
When I try to implement the second bump, I get the following:
I don't understand why or how as I am adding this exactly as in the example.
Hi, I'm not sure if it's just me, but I seem to be missing the instructions for the final step, "Automatically cleaning-up the ticket" - is anyone able to confirm what this should be?
Hey Sophie,
The conditions should just look for the tags that you set up in your previous bump automations. As for the actions, you'll want to either use Remove Tag > (tag name) or the Set Tag > (tag name) which will remove all other tags from the ticket.
Let me know if that's not what you're looking for!
Shouldn't there also be a trigger to remove these bump tags from follow-up tickets and not just when these tickets are re-opened? I would think that you wouldn't want the follow-up tickets to start off with the tags and therefore prevent the bump-solve process from starting over.
Hey Megan,
Great call-out! You can definitely set up a trigger that fires on tickets created as a follow-up. The conditions below should help:
Conditions:
Ticket > Created
Channel > is > Closed Ticket
Actions:
Set tags > (follow_up)
or
Remove Tags > (bump_tags)
Cheers!
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