Triggers are business rules that run immediately after a ticket is created or updated and automatically perform actions if specified conditions are met. For example, a trigger can be used to notify the customer when a ticket has been opened.
Triggers are composed of conditions, which are the qualifications needed for the trigger to fire, and actions, which are performed when those qualifications are met (see Understanding trigger conditions and actions). In other words, if the conditions are true, then the trigger will perform the actions.
There is a set of standard triggers that you can use and you can also create your own triggers. Admins and agents in custom roles with permission to manage business rules can create triggers.
Creating triggers
Triggers are business rules that run immediately after a ticket is created or updated and automatically perform actions if specified conditions are met. There are standard triggers and you can create additional triggers.
You must be an admin or an agent in a custom role with permission to create triggers.
The following video gives you an overview of how to add triggers:
Automating notifications with triggers [2:02]
- In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules > Triggers.
- Click Add trigger.
Alternatively, you can copy an existing trigger and modify it.
- Enter a Name for your trigger.
Use a consistent naming convention to help you recognize similar types of triggers.
- (Optional) Enter a Description for your trigger.
You can provide details about what the trigger does. You'll be able to search for triggers based on description.
- Select an existing Category for your trigger or create a new one.
- Click Add condition to set up the trigger to meet All or Any conditions.
Conditions are the qualifications needed for the trigger to fire.
- Select a Condition, Field operator, and Value for each condition you add.
The field operator determines the relationship between the condition and the value. For example, if you select the field operator "Is", your condition will need to be equal to the value. Different conditions will contain different field operators.
See Building trigger condition statements.
Note: It is recommended to keep your trigger statements simple. The more complicated a trigger is, the harder it will be to troubleshoot and maintain. - Click the Add action to set the actions that occur when trigger conditions are met.
- Select Action and a Value for each action you add.
- Enter the action information.
Depending on the action you select, you will enter different information. For example, if you select the "Type" action, you will need to select a ticket type.
- Click Create.
Your new trigger is added to the end of the list of triggers.
Note: Each business rule must be less than 65kb.
You can reorder the list of triggers (see Reordering triggers) or edit any trigger (see Managing triggers).
43 Comments
Good morning!
I am attempting to use triggers to to add verbiage to tickets regarding processes or regulations around certain request types. I feel as though there was once a comment/description option for triggers but I can no longer find this option. Is there the ability to have a trigger that will allow me to input internal note verbiage on a ticket based on the request type?
Thanks!!
Hello,
How would I create a trigger that would automatically inform a client when a specific tag was updated or changed. This does not mean I want to inform them of every update this would just be to show them that their ticket priority would have changed.
Thank you for the help.
It's really confusing to call this article "Creating triggers for automatic ticket updates and notifications", but then not actually talk about "trigger notifications" or eve mention the whole notify system in triggers. It's extremely difficult to find the right articles when the words used as product names are also used casually for their original intent as well.
Hello,
You may set the trigger like this:
Ticket Is Updated
Tags Contains at least one of the following [your_tag] (looking for the tag in the ticket that is used to inform the requester)
Tags Contains none of the following [action_already_performed] (indicating that we have already performed this action)
=============
Email Requester
Set tag [action_already_performed]
This way when a ticket is updated and applied you will email the requester.
Hope that helps.
You can definitely add a non-agent as a requester as this will prompt you to add the user's name and email address and will be added as an end-user. In CC, a non-agent can also be added. However, if you are referring to adding a non-agent as a follower, I'm afraid this is not possible as followers can only be internal users (e.g. your agents and other support staff are your internal users, also called team members).
More information can be found here: About CCs and followers
I hope this helps.
Thank you for Heather! Follow-up question - I tried following the Text formatting recipe for the auto-email trigger and for some reason I can't seem to make the "bold" nor the "Headings" formatting to work. Help, please?
Thank you Dainne, I followed that post.
Hello,
I created the triggers to receive an email when a ticket is created or updated. but still our team does not receive any email before assign the tickets to someone. This is a huge problem for us, we need to get a notification at the moment a ticket submitted. Could you please help us? Trigger page is atttached.Thank you
Hi Jah Tan
I'm not sure what your business case is, but you'd be using a ticket to run the macro, send an auto email, and then you want all replies to that email to open a new ticket? I would love to understand this more.
On the surface, you might want to test out setting the ticket to solved when you run the macro and have an automation set those particular tickets (using a tag? or a category field or something) to Closed asap (Automations run every 1 hour).
Then if someone replies to the email, the ticket is in Closed status, so this will automatically open a new ticket, though it will be a Followup ticket via Closed Ticket channel.
This can get tricky and I'm not sure if this will work if you're looking to have this happen with multiple end users per original ticket so extensive testing might be needed but give it a shot!
I want to have a trigger that sends a notification to a webhook on certain conditions, but only when the ticket is created, not updated. But there's another trigger that has to run first that updates some fields on the ticket, and that field is part of the first trigger's conditions. I want to make sure the notification trigger runs only when the ticket is first created.
For more context, we have different tiers of customers, and we want to call PagerDuty when a sev1 ticket is opened by one of those tiers but not others. But the customer tiers are updated by a different trigger, which calls a webhook to a cloud service to get their tier information and updates a custom field with that. The trigger that updates the plan tier information runs before any others, but then the ticket shows as Open, not New. Will any tickets that depend on the ticket being Created, not Updated, still run in this case?
I created a ticket on your behalf and will send it to you via email so we can discuss your concern there.
Thank you!
Hello Dianne!
Thank you for your reply! Gotcha! makes sense. Found a workaround though - looks like HTML is being read well by triggers and is accepted to format the email.
Thank you for this answer @CJ: Ezgi Filazoğlu I think the part that's causing problems is that Ticket is Created, and Ticket is Updated cannot both be requirements, that's why it's not firing. If you remove "Ticket is Updated", it should be able to fire.The current user piece will make it so this only fires if a ticket is created by someone for themself, which is fine and should be okay. After a ticket is created, all future updates are "Ticket Updates", but the very first one, is not considered a ticket update, so it's a conflict with "Ticket is Created". I have one moe question. So what kind of trigger should I create to receive a notification if an end-user makes a comment for ticket. İsn't it "Ticket is Updated"?
Thank you for your help.
but i still have an issue with your trigger. When you Update a ticket with anything that isn't a priority change it will email the requester telling them their ticket priority has been updated when it hasn't. Would there be anyway to possibly avoid that?
Hi there,
I'm trying to add a trigger:
If "field" CONTAINS "text", but the only option I can do is If "field" is|is not "present".
Any idea why I can't check the content of a text field to determine whether or not to execute a trigger that adds a tag?
Can the trigers check the mandatory fields when a ticket is created or updated, not just sloved?
We're going crazy trying to figure this one out.
Aiming to run a trigger when a macro is applied. The macro adds an Internal Comment, two tags and assigns the ticket to a group. This should then send a templated email to the customer (currently cut off, but it's just an 'email user' action).
For some reason, this just doesn't work. All of the criteria are matched and Zendesk 'counts' the trigger as having run, but the email just doesn't send.
What are we doing wrong?
Hi D.Fitz,
This would require deeper investigation. I've created a ticket on your behalf so we investigate this issue together. Kindly check your email for more information. Thanks!
Text formatting only works for emails from the agent interface or macros so they won't work for business rules such as automations or triggers.
Markdown is a simple markup language you can use to easily add formatting, links, and images to plain text. If Markdown is available in your account, you can use it in the following places:
Hi, is there a way to add a non Agent as Requester or in CC?
We would like to add additional requesters to Tickets.
Kind regards Wolf
Hi Ezgi,
For my organization, I would make a separate trigger, set up like below to get emails flowing for ticket updates. If we assume your agents set to tickets to pending, and tickets only switch to open when the user replies (which is what happens automatically by default), this would work. It says that if a ticket is updated, and that update changes the status to open, and the update has a comment being added as part of it, email the assignee this template that includes a ticket link and the latest comment formatted in HTML.
Hi PAUL STRAUSS,
I created a ticket on your behalf, and I’ll continue to assist you from there. Kindly check your email for updates. Thank you!
It is possible to update a ticket field with information returned in the webhook response after execute the Notify active Webhook action? How to refer this content?
Hi Dave, Thank you.
I have installed Ticket Field Manager app, it is great tool. Also is it possible to highlight the missed (not filled in after submitting the ticket) mandatory fields' in red color?
If you're asking whether ticket fields can be made mandatory on update (not sure on Solved), then that can be done vie the free Ticket Field Manager app: see Installing and using the Ticket Field Manager app
I'm attempting to create a trigger that will set a custom checkbox field on the requester based on the existence of a ticket tag. However, when I test this with existing tickets, it is not triggering. Any suggestions as to what might be wrong with my logic? See below:
Hello!
I have set up a trigger to automatically send an email to the customer when a macro is fired and I would like for a new ticket to be created when the customer first replies to the automatic email but I am not sure how to do that - help please?
Hi I had a question on triggers. In my trigger, I have a condition so that when a ticket is updated and the brand is set to a specific value, then the action is to set a form to a specific value as well. However, I'm noticing that the trigger is only working after I have updated the status of the ticket. My question is, is just updating the Brand on the details of the ticket not considered "Updating" the ticket?
Sorry if that doesn't make any sense. Happy to clarify more
Please sign in to leave a comment.