Just as with tickets from other Zendesk channels, you can set up ticket triggers to manage your Text tickets. In addition to the actions and conditions available for all tickets, there are a few text-specific options you can use. For step-by-step instructions and ideas, see Sending outbound texts: Recipes and tips.
For general information about setting up triggers, see About Zendesk triggers and how they work and Triggers resources.
Considerations when using ticket triggers to send text messages
Keep in mind the following when using triggers to send text messages:
- Keep the body text short or it might be broken into multiple messages. Remember that placeholders will be expanded. A text message (including expanded placeholders) cannot exceed 1,600 characters. If your text message goes over this limit, you'll receive a delivery failure.
- You'll be limited to approximately 250 notifications a day before a carrier's spam detectors might block your number, so avoid using these for mass outbound notifications.
- The end-user's phone number should be set as their direct line (see Identifying the caller and handling new user accounts). If this isn't set, a new user will be created when the end-user replies.
- We will capture replies to these notifications as tickets for processing by agents.
- You don't need to set up a trigger to send updates to requesters when updates to a ticket are made. This is built into Text and happens automatically.
- If an end user has more than one phone number associated with their profile and you send them a text message, the message is sent to the first phone number that was added to their user profile. If you want text messages to be sent to another phone number, you’ll need to remove all phone numbers from the profile and re-add them, ensuring that the first phone number you add is the one you want text messages sent to.
- In the Zendesk Agent Workspace, if a ticket fires a trigger that sends text messages, neither the text messages nor the trigger that fired them show in the events log for the ticket.
Text conditions and actions for ticket triggers
- Ticket > Channel | Is | Text
- Notify by > Group text: Specify a group of users to receive a text message notification.
- Notify by > User text: Select (current user), (requester), (assignee), or a specific user from the drop-down menu to receive a text message notification.
For both actions, you need to specify the SMS number to send the message from as well as the SMS message itself.
Understanding responses to notifications
Responses to notifications are placed into a Text ticket, like other inbound Text messages. If the end-user's number doesn't currently have an open ticket, a new ticket is created. If the end-user's number does already have an open ticket, the response is added to that existing ticket.
When the last message sent to a customer in a ticket is a Text notification, the notification appears in the ticket as a private comment. This way, agents addressing the ticket can get the appropriate context from the Text conversation.
9 comments
Lisa Colpoys
The article says "Responses to notifications are placed into a Text ticket, like other inbound Text messages. If the end-user's number doesn't currently have an open ticket, a new ticket is created. If the end-user's number does already have an open ticket, the response is added to that existing ticket."
The part in italics does not seem to be accurate. We are using a work around similar to the one described by Justin above, to text end users who call first (and open a Talk ticket). It is a tedious process, and a new text ticket is ALWAYS created, even if there is an open Talk ticket. How can we have the text response added to the existing Talk ticket?
And while I'm asking about this, it would be great if agents can send SMS messages from Talk tickets without the elaborate work around. Is this feature on the road map and if so, is there a time frame for it? Thanks!
3
Daniël Nieuwendijk
I would also like to know this. There should be a feature to switch between all channels, including sms text, especially in view of Zendesk's push toward a more unified interface and allowing channel switches.
2
Lindanne Mureu
You can switch channels if the user has both contact details in place. For us, we can switch from email to WhatsApp if both email and WhatsApp numbers are on the user profile. This is very manual.
My challenge is, we just subscribed to omnichannel and we have duplication of users because now we have their numbers on WhatsApp but with WhatsApp alias names so very hard to link the two. We thought of deleting and importing our users afresh with both details in place.(and we followed the instructions for bulk importing users).We uploaded a list of 10 as a test but it did not import the user with both number and email. We were back to the same problem.It would be very helpful if we could find a workaround for this.
0
Roberto Salazar
Hello,
My team is trying to set up triggers to give customers an opt-in option to respond via SMS.
0
Neil
There isn't any IVR for Text or anything similar but you can try using triggers for this workflow. The trigger sample in this article shows how you can automate a reply to any end-user that sends a Text message to your Zendesk number.
0
Danielle
Hi there! Is this bit “If the end-user's number doesn't currently have an open ticket, a new ticket is created” indicating that if the end-user's number doesn't have a ticket that is 'less than closed', it will open a new SMS ticket? Or it is truly that the end user needs to have a ticket with a status of Open, not New/Pending.
Based on my current understanding of this section, I've set up an auto-reply to SMS tickets that sets the ticket status to open. However, I'm wondering if I read this too literally and I should remove that action so the tickets receive the auto-reply upon creation and are also tickets with status New, not Open. May I kindly ask you to share recommendations on this?
Thank you for your time!
0
Zsa Trias
Hello Danielle,
There's no need to setup a trigger to set the ticket status to open, the line suggests that if there's an unclosed SMS ticket, replies from the customer should reflect on the same ticket.
However, if the customer responds and the ticket is already closed, the reply would create a new SMS ticket.
1
Leo Medalla
I don't see text notification as an option in Zendesk Automations. Are there any plans of adding this option in the future?
0
Shawna James
0