Workflow recipe: Sending automated ticket reminders to customers

This recipe describes how to use the Zendesk Bump-Bump-Solve method to clean-up outdated, dormant tickets in your account.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
• Automating the first reminder (Bump)
• Automating the second reminder (Bump)
• Automatically solving the ticket (Solve)
• Automatically cleaning-up the ticket

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

1. In Support, click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Automations.
2. Click Add automation.
3. 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:

   

4. 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

1. In Support, click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Automations.
2. Click Add automation.
3. Enter the following information for the automation.

   For the automation Name and Conditions:

   

   For the automation Actions:

   

4. 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

1. In Support, click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Automations.
2. Click Add automation.
3. Enter the following information for the automation.

   For the automation Name and Conditions:

   

   For the automation Actions:

   

4. 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

1. In Support, click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Business Rules > Triggers.
2. Click Add Trigger.
3. 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

   

4. 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.