This recipe describes how to use the Zendesk Bump-Bump-Solve method to clean-up outdated, dormant tickets in your account.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.
Video guide
Watch the video below for a visual guide on how to accomplish this workflow.
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 Admin Center, click the Objects and rules 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 Admin Center, click the Objects and rules 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 Admin Center, click the Objects and rules 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 Admin Center, click the Objects and rules 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.
Fore more information, see the articles below:
39 comments
Ankit Bhatnagar
Can these reminders/follow-ups be shown on the ticket thread as part of the ticket conversations/public comments?
My concerns are 1) To view if the reminders were sent, you have switched to Event view, which is painful, and only some users know about events view. 2) If the incident is closed by automation the closing note on the ticket doesn't show any history of follow-up and shows the last manual comment; in most cases, it will be a question.
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Sabra
Hey Ankit Bhatnagar! These reminders are not automatically added to the ticket, but this is great feedback! Many customers have developed custom solutions using our APIs to update tickets with internal comments when notifications like these are sent out so agents working tickets are aware.
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shelley
Could a webhook work in this scenario to add an internal note to the ticket thread?
https://help.successcx.com/hc/en-au/articles/900002080763-How-do-I-add-a-Zendesk-internal-note-to-a-ticket-via-a-business-rule-
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Rosie
Yes, that's possible. Instead of Ticket is Created condition, you could use Ticket is Updated instead in your Trigger. Then follow through how to create the webhook from that article.
I've tried it on my test account. You can give it a try and see how it goes!
Thank you.
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Stephen Whyte
Not sure if anyone is watching this thread, but I could use some assistance with this process. The initial setup was successful, but since then I haven't seen any updates to pending tickets via this automation.
No changes have been made, so I'm confused as to why I never see any matching tickets.
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Paolo
It would be great if we could review the tickets where this automation should apply. I will go ahead and create a ticket to investigate this further.
Best,
Paolo | Technical Support Engineer | Zendesk
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Stephen Whyte
Thanks Paolo , have a few tickets that are approaching first bump status. I'll keep an eye on those to see if the automation fires.
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Oscar Hernandez
I created the automation like in the article but I get this error:
Automation could not be updated as:
The wording in the menus is not quite like the one in the article seems there have been changes to the menu options.
There are two options - one towards the top and one below the section called: "Requestor Role"
The option I am dabbling with is: Ticket: Hours since status category pending - Calendar Greater than - 48 hours.
However the wording in the article it says “Ticket: hours since Pending” which is different from what the options are there now.
What am I doing wrong here. Here is my screenshot:
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Dainne Kiara Lucena-Laxamana
Hi Oscar,
Rest assured that you are not doing anything wrong on your end.
In terms of the ‘wording’ different from the article, that is to be expected when you activate custom ticket statuses. Existing automations that use an hours since [system ticket status name] condition are updated to the corresponding hours since status category [category name] condition.
As for the error you are getting, with how you've set up the automation, it's set to run multiple times on the same ticket due to automations running every hour. An automation must contain a condition that is true only once or an action that nullifies at least one of the conditions; otherwise, the automation will run in an endless loop.
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