Streamlining your support workflow

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Managing your customers’ support issues and your ticket workflow requires tools to help create as many efficient processes as possible. The best way to understand how Zendesk Support helps you manage your support workflow is to look at how a typical ticket workflow can be streamlined with the tools that Zendesk Support provides.

Tip: Fine Tuning: Learn more about how you can optimize your Zendesk to best support your workflow in Don Newton's Brick-by-brick: How to piece together your ideal Zendesk, Part 1 and Part 2.

This article discusses the following tools:

• Ticket handling shortcuts
• `Triggering actions when tickets are created or updated
• Using time-based events to activate actions
• Notifying external targets about ticket events
• Using tags to manage workflow

Ticket handling shortcuts

It's common to get support requests for issues that affect more than one person and can be answered with a single, standard response. To do this, you use macros to create the standard responses, that agents can apply to tickets. Macros can also be used to update tickets without also notifying the requester. For example, you can use macros to change the agent or group assignment. See Using macros to update tickets and Creating macros for tickets for more information.

Below is an example of a macro that sends an email notification to the requester in response to an issue that affects many people in an organization:

This macro adds a public comment to the ticket, sets the status to solved, and adds a relevant tag. You will see included in the comment the text "{{ticket.requester.first_name}}". This is called a placeholder and is used for automatically inserting data into an email notification. For this example, the placeholder would automatically insert the first name of the ticket requester in the email notification. For more information about placeholders and how they are used, see Using placeholders.

Macros can also be used as shortcuts to streamline repetitive ticket handling tasks. See Building macro action statements for information on the different macro actions available.

Triggering actions when tickets are created or updated

When a ticket is created or updated, you can automatically respond by modifying ticket properties and sending email notifications to the requester using triggers.

Triggers are built off of conditions and actions. Conditions define the criteria, and if the criteria is true, trigger the actions. In other words, if a ticket condition is true then perform actions, such as make changes or notify a customer or agent. For example, you can use triggers to automatically assign tickets based on a requester's email domain or keywords in the ticket description. See About triggers and how they work.

Zendesk Support provides a set of standard triggers as best practices in a typical ticket workflow. You can view the default triggers and create or edit new triggers in Admin Center by clicking the Objects and rules icon () in the sidebar, then selecting Business rules > Triggers One available default trigger is "Notify requester of received request". On the Triggers admin page, you can click Notify requester of received request to view all the conditions and actions it uses.

As you can see the conditions require the ticket to be created and the status to not be Solved. If those two conditions are true, the action sends an email notification to the requester informing them the request has been received and is now a ticket. You can use this trigger as is or clone it to make copies that you can modify and repurpose. If you need to, you can deactivate these default triggers or you can create entirely new triggers. See Creating triggers for more information.

Note: Zendesk Support automatically runs through all of your triggers (from first to last) to see if each trigger's criteria is met. Whenever the ticket matches the conditions the trigger is fired. This means the actions of one trigger might affect the actions of other triggers. See Reordering triggers for information on selecting the order of triggers fired.

Using time-based events to activate actions

While triggers enable you to automatically act on tickets when they are created or updated, you can also modify tickets and send email notifications based on events in time. For example, you might want agents to be alerted if tickets remain unassigned after 24 hours. To do this in Zendesk Support, you can use automations. Zendesk Support provides a set of standard automations which administrators can edit or they can create new automations. You can access your automations in Admin Center by clicking the Objects and rules icon () in the sidebar, then selecting Business rules > Automations

Automations, like triggers, contain conditions and actions. The image below shows an example automation that will automatically close a ticket four days after the ticket is solved.

As you can see the conditions require the ticket to be solved and will activate after 96 hours, or four days, after the ticket has been solved. The action then changes the status from Solved to Closed. Four days is a best estimate for the minimum amount of time a ticket should remain in the Solved state before it is closed.

Unlike triggers, which are based on ticket events and run immediately after tickets are created or updated, automations only run once every hour and only on tickets that have been created or updated in the last 28 days.

For more information about using automations, see Streamlining workflow with time-based events and automations.

Notifying external targets about ticket events

There may be times when you want to notify an external target about a new ticket or an important state change to a ticket. For example, you might want to send a text message or post a notification to a company-wide stream. By setting up external targets you can communicate with many cloud-based applications and services (such as X, formerly Twitter, and Twilio) as well as HTTP and email.

After you've defined a target you can add it to automations and triggers. For instructions on adding and managing external targets, see Notifying external targets.

Using tags to manage workflow

To help you categorize, act on, or search for tickets, you can add tags. Tags can be added to tickets automatically based on the words in the request, manually by agents, or via triggers, automations, and macros. Once added, you can create views by tags, search for tags and the tickets in which they are included, and use tags in your triggers, automations, and macros. See Using tags for more information about tags.

Tags are helpful throughout the entire support workflow, but are especially for the following support tasks:

• Locating answers to support requests that have already been answered. Agents can search for tickets by tags. See Searching for tickets by tags.
• Creating ticket reports using tags. This provides you with a way to monitor hot issues and trends, for example. See Reporting on ticket tags (Explore).
• Creating custom workflows. Perhaps you want to add a custom field to your support request form and then act on that data. Custom fields contain tags that can then be added to triggers to, for example, route a request for a specific product to a specific support group or agent. See Understand tags and ticket fields for more information on custom fields and tags and Using tags in macros, triggers, and automations for more information on incorporating tags into your business rules.