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Using the "Hours since" condition in automations



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Jennifer Rowe

Zendesk Documentation Team

Edited Jun 21, 2024


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41 comments

Alejandro,

my apologies for my late response. Thank you for the guidance. we have actually set an automation to raise priority and trigger against SLA under the business schedule. Works a treat. So thanks again. 

Matthew

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@...

No problem.

Yes, I avoided suggesting an SLA as you mentioned it would not work for your situation.

Glad you were able to get something working for you.

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"Hours since created" conditions - what is the least value to enter?     

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Bonnie

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Anita! The smallest value you can enter for this type of automation (and for any type of automation) in Zendesk is 1 hour.

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Thanks Bonnie.

Looks like "0" also works.  it runs on the next automation run.

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Bonnie

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Anita! Apologies for the confusion. I confirmed that you are correct and 0 will also work. You can only use whole numbers, but both 0 and 1 will work.

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Is Hours Since Assigned referring to the First Assignment or the Last Assignment?

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Joyce

Zendesk Customer Care

Hey Spencer!
 
"Hours since assigned" means how long has it been since an agent has been assigned to a ticket - which refers to the first assignment.

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I have problems with a similar setup.

I've got an automation adding a reply and putting the ticket to open when Hours since pending > 168 hours.

But I want it to run, when hours since the last reply is > 168.
I know I can use Hours since assignee update or Hours since requester update.
But when anything is happening in a ticket, it is seen as an update (ie field change). In my situations it should only be a (public) reply.

Any clue how to get there?

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Dekbi

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Jorn,
 
Apparently, we don't have a condition that will only determine that there is a Public Reply on a ticket. The only available conditions that we currently have are the ones that are listed in our documentation Automation conditions and actions reference.
 
In addition, I encourage you to create a new post in the General Product Feedback topic in our community to engage with other users who have similar needs and discuss possible workarounds. Conversations with a high level of engagement ultimately get flagged for product managers to review when they go through roadmap planning.
 
Specific examples, details about impact, and how you currently handle things are helpful for our product teams to understand the full scope of the need when working on solutions. You may also want to review the Product feedback guidelines and how to write an effective feedback post [https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4413820079386-Giving-Product-Feedback-at-Zendesk-].
 
We truly value customer feedback and your voice and votes in the forums help influence future Zendesk functionality.

 

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For using the "Hours since pending" condition - does this condition entail that the status is still pending? I've been including a condition that the ticket must be in that status.

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Hi mfg, yes -- "Hours since pending" requires the ticket to still be in Pending status for the condition to match. Hope that helps!

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@... - to clarify - "still" as in it hasn't changed from pending? ie. if a status goes from pending to open to pending, am I correct to assume that the clock starts from the most recent (second) time it gets set to pending?

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HI Matthew, yes that's correct, you've got it!

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Hi,

How do I define the business hours in "(business) greater than"?

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Hi Shane, business hours are counted using the schedules you've set up: Setting your schedule with business hours and holidays

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Dekbi - maybe I should post in a different thread, but...

I have an automation that fires after a ticket is on hold for 96 calendar hours, if ticket contains specific tags/fields. It's fired over 100 times this week, correctly.

I've discovered a lot of tickets, containing the same specific tags/fields, and are status 'On hold', are not triggering the automation at 96 hours.

I just ran a Zendesk Explore report to lookup ticket ID's, w/ on-hold status, and business and calendar hours since on hold - I found that some tickets, despite being 'On-hold' for nearly 24 hours, show their On-hold time - Business hours and On-hold time - hours metrics as 0.0 hours.

Through Zendesk Advanced Search, I've found tickets that have been on-hold for over TWO weeks, matching the same ticket parameters to fire the automation (it's literally a system email with pre-programmed data fields that are identical every time; again, the automation works several hundred times per week, but seems to fails several hundred as well).

So why are some tickets appearing as having 0.0 on-hold hours? And for tickets with way higher than 96 hours, why isn't the automation firing?

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Justin,

If you think that there is an unexpected behavior for your automations, it will be better to contact our support directly due to the nature of your concern. 

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Hello

Is this possible in trigger or automation?

What we wanted to happen is this. 

Agent last reply> after 5 minutes (customer no feedback/reply)  sent a message for follow > after 10 minutes (customer no feedback/reply) > sent a message to close the ticket then the ticket is automatic solved


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vincent solitario - im not sure if you're using "after 5 minutes" as an example or if you're meaning to go with those events actually happening as measured by minutes specifically , but automations only run about once per hour, so this would not be possible using automations. since there are no updates to the ticket, triggers would not run/fire.

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Is it possible to define business hours in the automation conditions? If it is how is it done ?

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Beto

Zendesk Customer Care

Hello Ecbo, I hope you are well! Thank you for your question.

You are able to choose between calendar or business hours on any Automation time condition, but you cannot define what those hours are directly on the Automation. You must define them on your schedule first, by following the steps here: Setting your schedule with business hours and holidays.

Once you have defined your schedule, you will have the option of selecting between calendar or business hours on the second box that appears after you select any of your time conditions, like this: 

I hope this was helpful!

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Is it possible to add a column in a field that shows the Hours since the ticket was created?

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Christine Diego

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Ofek,

Ticket hours since created is available as a condition in creating a view. If this is not what you are looking for, I would suggest Contacting Zendesk Customer Support and provide more details about your use case. 

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Dave Dyson (gmail) you mentioned in a post previously that  "Hours since pending" requires the ticket to still be in Pending status for the condition to match.  I'm trying to get an automation to run where:

  • "Hours since Pending, is greater than, 24" and 
  • Status is On Hold

These aren't the actual states I'm using as we have enabled custom statuses, but is there a way of achieving this?  Will the hour count continue from when the ticket was last set to Pending despite having changed to On Hold?

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Dave Dyson (gmail)

Community Moderator

Rolf Hayes Seems like you could use "Hours since On-Hold" as your automation condition for this, instead of "Hours since Pending" ?

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Dave Dyson (gmail), Not really as I am trying have the automation fire from a specific status regardless if it has changed to a different status since then.

Let me explain my case a little further.  We use ZD Suite to log the booking of engineer site visits to attend to many of the incidents and problems in tickets.  I've added some custom ticket statuses to help with this, namely "Visit Booked" and "Visit Elapsed".  The visit booked status is in the On Hold category and the visit elapsed status is in the open category.

So far I have tried an automation that runs when a custom date field "is within the previous" 2 days.  However this becomes true at 00:00 of the date in the custom date field according to the ZD logic, despite the visit not actually having happened.  I really want this automation to run with two conditions:

  1. Custom date field is within the previous 2 days (AND)
  2. Custom date field is NOT within the previous 1 day.

However the IS NOT function is sadly missing from custom date fields in automations and indeed from much of the ZD trigger and automation conditions.

As a work around I've created a further custom status called Dont Use and is simply for the system to change the status from Visit Booked to Dont Use and then back again with tags.  Then a further automation to change the ticket to Visit Elapsed when specific tags and hours since Visit Elapsed Status is more than 48 hours.

I've ended up with 3 automations just to fire one ultimate action which seems absurd.  Any advice or recommendations would help as all these automations start mounting up towards the limit of autmoations and maximum number of tickets that run in an hour.

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Mike DR

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Rolf!
 
The step you did is the workaround for now, I understand this is a neat feature to have what I would love to do with your partnership is attack this from both fronts; on my side, I'll flag a couple of articles for revisions as there are places we can call this out that could expressly mention it so others don't experience the frustrations you've experienced, and on your end if you could submit product feedback as outlined here to communicate use case, headaches caused, etc. so our product team can take it into future roadmap + release consideration I would be greatly appreciative.

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Hello! Is there a way to identify the “Hours Since Tag Added”? Basically a similar behaviour as the rest of the “Hours Since” function, but instead of the ticket status, it should get the hours since a particular tag was added.

 

For context: Our goal is to automate the process for following up and closing unresponsive tickets. Based on the advise that we found from the community, we already created 3 automations to:

- Automation 1: Follow-up since Pending (3 days)

- Automation 2: Follow-up since Pending (15 days) AND followup_1 exists

- Automation 3: Follow-up since Pending (20 days) AND followup_2 exists

This is fine and things are working as expected for new tickets (tickets that were created after this new automation process).

 

The problem: We already have tickets that have been pending for 30 days and more before we created these automations. This means, as soon as we activate the 3 automations above, those tickets that have been pending for >30 days will get notified one at a time for the span of about 3 hours, more or less (since the automations will fire hourly and Automation 2 and 3 are dependent on Automation 1 and so on). So instead of getting “Automation 2” 12 days after “Automation 1”, and “Automation 3” 5 days after “Automation 2”, the ticket will just be closed in almost 3 hours.

 

This is why we would like the filter to be dependent on when the tag (followup_1, etc.) was added rather than the pending status. We cannot use “Hours since update” as a workaround either, since there are times when we send internal comments on already-pending tickets.

 

Hope there's a way to do this or a neat workaround.

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Zsa Trias

Zendesk Customer Care

Hello Naomi,

 

We currently do not have a time-based condition to base on when a specific tag is added to the ticket. 
Only those that are listed when you create an automation are the ones available at the moment. 

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