Help Center: Notify Customers of Post/Comment converted into a ticket

Now that the New Community is out and available to everyone, you may have already migrated from Community v.1 to v.2 and tried all the new features available. One of the coolest features is the ability to create a ticket from a post or comment , and that's what we'll talk about in this tip!

Level : Easy

Time : 20 minutes

Scenarios

You have a Feedback/Ideas Community : One of your customers is having a Community discussion about new features that they would like to see in your product. In this case you want to pass their feature request on to another department because you found their idea interesting.

You have a Support Community : In this scenario your customers post in the Community to help each other out, but you see a specific post/comment that requires further assistance and you want to convert it into a ticket for your support team.

With the New Community you can easily convert any end-user comment or post into a ticket, but now you want to send a special notification to the post/comment author, just to tell them you are thinking about them or that you got their feedback.

Note: This functionality is also available on Knowledge Base comments, so you can use this same workflow if you don’t have Community activated.

Solution

In both of the scenarios described above, you need to create a new trigger to notify the requester (the customer who created a post or comment in your Help Center), then modify existing triggers that check through tickets created to avoid multiple triggers firing at the same time for the same purpose.

First, identify any existing triggers that notify your requesters when a ticket is created in Zendesk Support under Admin > Triggers .

To exclude Community posts from these triggers, use under all conditions: Ticket: Channel - Is not - Help Center post .

Next, create a new trigger by going to Admin> Triggers> Add Trigger . In my test I named it “Notify Requester of Ticket created from Community” because I only use this tool for Community ideas. Set the following conditions:

 

Create Different Workflows

You can even create multiple types of notifications by adding a specific string of text to the ticket title or body, when you are converting the end-user contribution into a ticket.

This is how you do it:

1. Make sure you exclude the string from other similar triggers first by adding: “Ticket comment text: does not contain the following string”;
2. Create a new trigger and use under all conditions: “Ticket comment text: contains the following string” and specify what you are going to add in the ticket title/body;
3. Create a ticket from an end-user post/comment. Once you get the pop-up (shown below in the screenshot) add this string of text by typing it in. This is a manual process, but it will allow you to set different workflows for different request types, like you can do with ticket fields.

Example: In my test account I have a trigger with a general message that is sent for tickets created from Help Center and a trigger for tickets created from feedback/idea contributions.

When I convert an idea/feedback, I add the following to the ticket title: “[IDEAS]”

The trigger, shown below, then runs and checks through all conditions, especially if the title or body contains exactly “[IDEAS]” when the ticket is created:

In the meantime you'll need to make sure that the trigger for general contribution tickets doesn’t run on those labelled as ideas :

If you are not sure about which triggers are fired once a ticket is created, check the ticket events so you can have an overview of what happens during ticket creation.

The End-user Experience

This is what the customer will see at the end, once they receive the email notification:

Pro Tip: Review and Manage Tickets Escalated From Help Center With Views

Do you want to create a View only for contributions from your Help Center that have been converted into tickets? Use the condition Ticket: Channel is Help Center post

You are all set and ready to notify your customers! If you are just getting started with triggers, feel free to check our resources for further information on business rules.