Question
What is the difference between triggers and automations?
Answer
The differences between automations and 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.
One way to think about when and how to set up an automation is to write your support workflow and indicate if you have any time requirements associated with any of the steps. For example, use automations if you want to send a reminder email to your customer if you are waiting for information from them for over a day. The automation conditions in the example below will target tickets that have spent 24 hours in a Pending ticket status:
Triggers
Triggers within Support fire when other specific actions take place. Triggers run each time a ticket state is changed and take action if the changes in the ticket match the conditions defined in the trigger.
Use triggers when you want certain actions to take place only when some other actions took place. For example, you can use triggers to send a response to a commonly asked question using the trigger condition Ticket: Subject text or Ticket: Comment text. See below for an example of 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 trigger conditions match the change and fires the trigger if they are met. The condition Ticket | Is | Created in the example above ensures that the trigger will only fire once, at the start of its life cycle.
For more information about building automations and triggers, see the following articles:
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