Question
What is the difference between ticket triggers and automations?
Answer
The differences between automations and ticket triggers highlight two different aspects of a support workflow: Time and action.
Automations
Automations within Zendesk Support are specifically time-based. Use automations when you want an action to happen according to a timeframe set up in your workflow. Automations run every hour on all your tickets that are not closed.
To know when and how to set up an automation, write your support workflow and indicate any time requirements associated with any of the steps. For example, use automations to send a reminder email to your customer if you are waiting for information from them for over a day. The below automation conditions in the example below will target tickets that have spent 24 hours in a Pending ticket status:
Ticket triggers
Ticket triggers within Support run every time a ticket is created or updated and take action if the changes in the ticket match the conditions defined in the trigger.
Use ticket triggers when you want certain actions to take place only when some a ticket event occurs. For example, you can use ticket triggers to send a response to a commonly asked question using the ticket trigger condition Object > Ticket > Ticket | Subject text or Object > Ticket > Ticket | Comment text. See below for an example of ticket trigger conditions that targets the subject text from an end user:
Each time a ticket changes attributes or when a user adds a comment, the system checks the ticket trigger conditions match the change and fires the trigger if they are met. The condition Object > Ticket > Ticket | Is | Created in the example above ensures that the ticket trigger only fires once, at the start of its life cycle.
For more information about building automations and triggers, see the following articles: