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 seek help, you can kickstart customer service by creating proactive tickets on their behalf.
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 a custom user field in your account, you can target specific customer types.
- Online retailers: Proactively reach out to customers based on their service changes, purchase history, or order fulfillment status. Knowing your buyers' history can help you anticipate potential issues with their experience, driving up revenue and reducing abandonment.
- Internal help desks: Notify users within your organization of service disruptions or policy changes. Keeping your employees up and running reduces downtime and maintains their productivity.
To help you get started, this guide will walk through:
- Important considerations
- Installing the Proactive Tickets app
- Creating proactive tickets campaigns
- Best practices for your proactive ticket campaigns
- Release Notes
Important considerations
- You must set a default time zone on your user profile to use the Proactive Tickets app. If a default time zone isn't set, you will encounter a blank page when running a search.
- The Proactive Tickets app does not work with custom ticket statuses. The app is only compatible with system ticket status fields.
- When searching for customers, only 20 display in search results at a time. To create more than 20 tickets at once, increase the number of users per page. See How can I send more than 20 tickets at a time through the Proactive Tickets app?
- When searching for information in custom user fields, use the key that names the custom field. If you are looking for a specific multi-word phrase (such as “renewal date”), enclose it in quotes. This ensures that you receive exact matches.
Example: To search for the custom field named "renewal date," you would enter it as follows: custom_field_name: "renewal date".
Installing the Proactive Tickets app
- In Admin Center, click the Apps and integrations icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Apps > Zendesk Support apps.
- Click Marketplace at the top of the page and then enter "Proactive Tickets" in the Marketplace search bar.
- Double-click the Proactive Tickets app icon and click Install.
Creating proactive ticket campaigns
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 campaign using the Proactive Tickets app, agents must have permissions to create and edit shared views.
To create a proactive ticket campaign
- Click the Proactive Tickets (
) icon in the left navigation bar.
- Enter search criteria to create a filtered list of customers, then click Search.
Use the text field at the top to search all user fields. For example, type an organization name, tag, or last name in the text field, and the app will search all user fields to find results.
You can also use individual fields to search for customers. For example, to create a list of customers at the Petipet organization with a VIP tag on their profile, type Petipet in the Organization field and VIP in the Tags field. - Select the customers in the list, then select Create ticket.
- 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.
Note: If you're creating proactive tickets with a Solved status, make sure to fill out any required fields on the ticket form before proceeding. - Select a macro to run on the proactive tickets as they are created
- 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 Insights tag reporting: Reporting on tickets with one or more tags for more information.
Release Notes
Version 2.3.1 - 2022-05-24
- Improvements
- Allow HTML content for ticket description
Version 2.2.2 - 2021-05-10
- Improvements
- Fixed several issues with translations and alignment issues
Version 2.2.1 - 2021-01-25
- Improvements
- Added a more specific error message when the agent doesn't have the correct permissions to run a campaign and create the tickets
Version 2.2.0
- Improvements
- Allows sending campaign to failed users
- Updated alert message when campaign fails
Version 2.1.0 - 2020-05-20
- Improvements
- Search Enhancements
- Ability to run a macro when Proactive tickets campaign runs (Basic Plan)
- Bug fixes
- Characters in non-English languages being truncated
- Fixed an issue where it was searching/including suspended users
- Fixed an issue where markdown language wasn't working in ticket description.
Version 2.2.0 - 2020-11-20
- Improvements
- Allow sending campaign to failed users
- Bug fixes
- Add corresponding error text for unauthorized access instead of generic vague message
- Localization and UI update
Version 2.3.0 - 2021-07-30
- Convert and incorporate paid features into the Free plan
30 comments
Jacek Czerniecki (admin)
@... while I create a proactive ticket I use a macro, macro sends a message to a requester, but the message comes broken, containing html tags:
while I apply this macro directly from a ticket all is good, do you know what could be an issue of this?
Maybe this plugin for proactive tickets (that allows macros while we create proactive ticket) is broken? I tried everything and I have no idea what is wrong, thanks in advance for any advice,
Best regards,
Jacek
0
Ariane Frances dela Cruz
Hi Jacek,
I'd like to dig deeper into this behaviour and I'll be creating a ticket for you, please expect an email shortly.
0
Gaël VIP
Hello,
I have the same issue this last year, any update about using Macro in Proactive tickets without to have the html code email received by our customers ?
Thanks and regards,
0
Giuseppe
Hi Gael,
It looks like the issue can still be replicated. I'll create a ticket for you so we can investigate further and ask for more details about the issue.
1
Gaël VIP
Thanks Giuseppe
0
Jacek Czerniecki (admin)
hi @... someone created a ticket in my name for the same thing 6 months ago and nothing from that time happened, ticket is still open #9683287 , are you sure that creating a new ticket will somehow help us ? Do we have a chance of having this ever fixed ?
1
Giuseppe
Hi Jacek,
At the moment, it looks like this issue is being investigated by our Product Team. I have sent a follow-up on the investigation and I've included your ticket in my request.
0
Gaël VIP
@... do we have any update ?
Thanks
0
Brett Bowser
It looks like a fix is still being worked on by our developer team so I'm going to create a ticket on your behalf so we can get it attached to our problem ticket we have related to this issue.
You'll receive an email shortly stating your ticket has been created.
Cheers!
0
Jeff 47
One of my Zendesk websites keeps going blank after the first step.
But the other one works fine.
Does anyone know what causes this?
Thanks
0
Dane
For this kind of behavior, it's better if you try to clear cache and history first and use another browser if the issue persisted. You can also try to reinstall the app to test if it will fix it. Just in case the issue persisted after performing these steps, please contact Zendesk Support directly and we'll be glad to help.
1
Landry Norman
Can you change the brand the proactive tickets are associated with?
1
Dainne Kiara Lucena-Laxamana
Hi Landry Norman
At the moment the Proactive App is set to create tickets under the default brand. You'd need to create a trigger specifically for reassigning the proactive tickets to another brand.
0
立松貴央 TakaoTatematsu
Hi![](/hc/user_images/-GG7pR97vJFDNBsPJz9kAg.png)
When using proactive tickets to send out simultaneous tickets, can I only create tickets for 100 items at a time?
When I want to send out more than 100 tickets, if I go to the second page with 100 tickets checked on the first page, the first page is unchecked.
0
Elaine
Hi 立松貴央 TakaoTatematsu,
It looks like this needs further investigation. I'd like to look into the behavior you're experiencing. I'll be creating a ticket for you. Kindly expect an email notification shortly. For now, stay safe!
1
Ronald
+1 for what Landry Norman asked above - Specify the Brand a proactive ticket is associated with.
Dainne Kiara Lucena-Laxamana I know we can use a macro and/or trigger to set the brand on the ticket but we have a different default support address for our second Brand. A different support address for each Brand I think is quite common and Zendesk Support doesn't seem to accommodate this very well. As far as I can tell an agent has to use the "Select an Address" app to change the email address before creating a proactive ticket from a Brand that uses a support address which is not the default brand's default support address. Unless I'm missing something, that appears to be a limitation of Zendesk Support itself.
It would be very helpful if the Proactive ticket app could help to overcome this limitation by allowing the user to set which support email address the ticket should be sent from. Am I missing something with how this works or should I submit this as a feature request feedback somewhere?
0
Dane
Definitely on point and a very good feedback indeed.
Would you mind posting your use case to our Apps and Integration feedback topic? We have a template you can copy and use in your post. This is to help get more visibility and votes on the idea. Then, others can share their use cases to further drive demand for that feature. Thanks!
0
Herbert, Rich
Hi there - getting this error when I attempt to use the app. Just installed and entered the system field for status per the instructions. Any guidance?
0
Gabriel Manlapig
Have you activated custom ticket statuses in your account? Since Proactive Tickets app isn’t designed to work if you're using custom statuses as of the moment.
0
Herbert, Rich
Hi Gabriel,
We don't have any custom statuses enabled that I know of.
Thanks!
0
Gabriel Manlapig
Is it possible if you can check if this is enabled in your Zendesk account? To check this, please go to Admin Center, click
We are able to reproduce the same error message that you experienced when the custom ticket statuses is activated.
0
Barbara Generoso
Hello everyone
I have just installed the app and have the same error as Herbert, Rich
I also checked the custom statuses and they are not enabled on Tickets > Ticket statuses. Is "On-hold" considered as custom status?
Another point is that when I enable roles restriction, the icon on the left bar disappears. I set only available for Admin (as my own user) and the app just disappears.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Thank you
0
Jakub Tabaka
Great app, but when I tried to send a test email now, I had this error - what does it mean![](/hc/user_images/01HMY29Y9749KJ85S5XD5MVD3S.png)
0
Jakub Tabaka
Out of 7 end users, only 1 received the email. I tried many times. I selected different users and always get this error. Only one email - my personal google account - is able to receive any emails and it works, no other ones work! Please help
0
Gab
I've created a ticket on your behalf where we can further discuss your use-case.
0
Jakub Tabaka
Hello Gab, many thanks.
However I did resolve it myself....
It was one of the custom fields - we called it "customer query". We ticked the option that says "required to solve the ticket". Seems the app was unable to override this and without customer query value it was unable to solve tickets, unlike triggers - they can do it. I added customer query into the macro and this has resolved the issue.
Maybe something to pass on to your developers?
Thanks
0
Gab
Thanks for sharing that workaround! I've taken note of this and will definitely be passed on to our Devs.
0
Max Eckmann
Hi,
Our team is still unable to use macros in proactive tickets, as the description field remains empty when applying a macro.
Is there any update or workaround available?
0
Jakub Tabaka
Hello Max
I have a solution for:
- You open a proactive tickets app
- then you select your customer base
- then you click the tickets, and click on “Create XXX tickets”
- then please scroll to the bottom 4. Select a macro. You select the desired macro and click on the “previous” button in the bottom right corner, followed by “Create XXX tickets” again
THE MACRO DESCRIPTION will fill in automatically.
You then have to fill in a few mandatory fields (marked in red) such as campaign name, group and assignee and ticket status.
- once you're done click on NEXT, double check everything on the next screen and then SEND
Let me know if this hasn't resolved the issue, but I believe it will !
0
Jakub Tabaka
@... please see my above post. This is how the app works, I believe it's a glitch that hopefully can be addressed by your devs?
0