Workflow recipe: Using the light agent role for a customer approval workflow

Sample scenario

Fashionocracy, an e-commerce clothing company, wants to let their resellers request samples from their Zendesk portal. These samples are billed back to the reseller, and an authorized supervisor must approve the cost before samples can be sent. The supervisor, however, generally doesn’t request the samples; he/she is only responsible for approving invoices. How can the Fashionocracy Provisioning Team incorporate their resellers’ supervisors into the sample request workflow without jeopardizing efficiency or automation?

Ingredients list

Light agent role
Ticket forms
Triggers
Custom ticket fields
Ticket field placeholder
Automations (optional)
Macros (optional)

Break it down: What do we want to achieve?

An organization makes a request that requires supervisor approval. We want to ping the supervisor to respond while automatically assigning and placing the ticket on “Pending” status until the supervisor has approved the request.

Solution: Make the approver a light agent

Converting a customer from an end-user into an agent role may seem counter-intuitive, but in this use case it will enable you to create workflows around an end-user approver that would prove difficult otherwise. Below are the steps that our demo company, Fashionocracy, would use in the sample scenario above. In this example the reseller Organization is DASH International, the supervisor is Mikkel, and requester is Kim. A pre-existing Form for Sample Requests will also be used.

Directions

Step one

Pull up Mikkel’s profile and change the user role from end-user to light agent.

A prompt will alert you that this change might affect workflows & permission.

Step two

Create a trigger with the following rules:

Meet all of the following conditions

Ticket Form is Sample Request
Ticket Organization is DASH International

Perform these actions

Ticket: Status = Pending
Ticket Group = Marketing
Notifications: Email User = Mikkel
- Email Subject
  “APPROVAL NEEDED: A sample has been requested by {{ticket.organization.name}}”
- Email Body
  
  Greetings!
  
  {{ticket.requester.name}} has requested a sample of {{custom ticket field placeholder}}. This request requires approval from you.
  
  Please click this link to approve or deny this request: {{ticket.link}}
  
  {{ticket.requester.first_name}} has told us that the sample is required by {{custom ticket field placeholder}}. so please reply as soon as possible.
  
  Thank you and have a great day, Fashionocracy Provisioning Team

Finished!

And you're done! You can add multiple “Light Agent Approvers” by duplicating the Trigger you’ve just created and changing the Organization on the Trigger conditions.

Additional biz rule workflows

Add a Trigger to notify the Requester that their request is currently awaiting approval from their manager (essentially the same as your current trigger, except that you’re notifying the Requester instead of the approver)
Create a Macro letting the Requester know that their request has been approved
Add an Automation to remind the “Light Agent Approver” that the request is still open if the ticket is still marked as Pending after a certain amount of time.
And so much more!!!

Things to keep in mind

Even though the light agent role is the agent with the least permissions, it’s still an agent role. That means it’s important for you to understand what your new “Light Agent Approvers” can see and what they can’t. It’s a good idea to create a dummy light agent profile, so that you can log in and see everything from their perspective.
Adjust light agent permissions accordingly. Go into the light agent role settings and make sure you’ve locked down everything you don’t want them to gain access to (Ex: switching their Report Viewing settings from “Read Only” to “Cannot View”
Make sure “Light Agent Approvers” and their constituents are in the same Organization. This will ensure that your business rules flow properly, but it will also help ensure that Approvers can only see the tickets within their own Organization.
You might consider creating an Agent Group for each “Light Agent Approver” to further ensure that the approvers won’t be able to access any other tickets in the portal. This should enable you to more easily create some business rules in the future as well.

Additional resources