About actions for auto assist and action flows

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Actions and action flows automate tasks to help agents handle customer requests. With the Copilot add-on, auto assist suggests actions or flows that agents can approve for automatic execution. You can use standard actions or configure custom external actions via APIs. Inputs for actions can come from conversations, ticket fields, or ticket IDs, enhancing task automation and efficiency.

There are two types of actions available for use by auto assist, which is part of agent copilot, and by action flows, which perform a pre-defined series of automated actions: standard actions and custom actions. This article describes what actions are and how they are used in Zendesk.

Understanding actions for automated tasks

You must have the Copilot add-on to use auto assist.

Auto assist suggests relevant actions and action flows to your agents to help them solve customer requests. When auto assist suggests an action, the agent can approve it and the system carries out the action automatically, saving the agent time. Similarly, when auto assist suggests an action flow, the agent can approve it and the system carries out all of the steps automatically.

Actions and action flows can be linked directly in procedures to ensure that auto assist performs the correct action for a user's request. Additionally, you can include custom actions as steps in action flows.

There are two types of actions: standard actions for auto assist that require no configuration from you, and custom external actions that you configure based on an API.

Standard actions for auto assist

Auto assist includes the following standard actions:

Update ticket status to any standard or custom status
Updated the priority, type, and tags ticket fields
Update checkbox, date, decimal, dropdown, number, or regex custom ticket fields
Leverage a Shopify integration to look up a Shopify order, cancel and refund an entire Shopify order, or refund selected items from a Shopify order. (See Workflow recipe: Canceling and refunding a Shopify order with auto assist.)

You can also update the ticket assignee and group, but these capabilities don't appear in the standard actions list. To update the ticket assignee or group in a procedure, enter an instruction such as, "Set the ticket assignee to [Agent name]" or "Change the ticket group to [Group Name]." Auto assist recognizes the instruction and applies its built-in logic automatically when the step is triggered.

When you insert a standard action in a procedure, you must specify the value you want auto assist to update the ticket or field to. The reference to value is entered directly after the standard action in the procedure.

You can reference the value by entering it in plain text or by using a value from the conversation, another field, or another action.

For example, say you insert the action Change field 'Language'. You could enter any of the following to specify a value:

Change field 'Language' to Spanish
Change field 'Language' to the value from "Product language" field
Change field 'Language' to the language used by the customer
Change field 'Language' to language returned by Action or Action flow

Standard actions don't appear on the Actions page in Admin Center and can't be modified.

Custom actions

Custom actions allow you to update data outside of Zendesk using an API you define. These actions allow you to query and modify your internal business systems or perform a third-party action. The more actions you configure, the more options are available to auto assist when it generates suggestions for agents.

Using Zendesk APIs with custom actions

Because you can create custom external actions using any API, it's possible to create an external action that points to a Zendesk API. If you do this, however, there are some considerations to keep in mind:

These API requests count against your overall Zendesk API rate limits. See Managing API usage in your Zendesk account.
As part of action setup, you’ll create a connection to authorize the request, which uses a Zendesk API token or OAuth token. This connection might have greater access privileges than your agents and end users, so you’ll need to be cautious that you don’t accidentally expose information they shouldn’t see.
In the future, you’ll need to migrate your Zendesk API actions to out-of-the-box Zendesk actions if and when equivalent actions become available.
Be mindful of how changes made by these API requests may interact with other parts of your Zendesk configuration, such as triggers, automations, and apps.

About inputs for custom actions

An input for a custom action is the information that the action uses in order to run.

You can create inputs for actions that reference the following types of information:

Generated information, based on the conversation between the end user and the agent
Auto assist uses generative AI to extract information from the conversation and passes it to an action or action flow as an input.

For example, say you have an input named "order_id" with the description “the customer’s order number, which is typically an integer of 9 or 10 digits”. If an agent asks, "Can I please have your order number?" and the end user replies, "Sure, it's 987654321", the action will pass this information to the "order_id" input.
Ticket fields
Custom ticket fields, and certain standard ticket fields listed below, can be used as inputs. When using a ticket field as an input, enter a name and description that's detailed enough that auto assist understands which ticket field you're specifying.

For example, entering "email" as an input isn't clear enough. Instead, you may want to name an input "requester_email" with a description such as "the email address of the end user who requested help."
Ticket ID
When using the ticket ID as an input, you must use the specific name zendesk_ticket_id and set the type as a number. Auto assist populates that input with the ID of the ticket.

When making use of the input in your API configuration, you can wrap the input placeholder in quotes to convert it to a string, or incorporate it into a larger string.

For example, you could have the following property in your API body:
```
"note":"Ticket number {{zendesk_ticket_id}} has been updated!"
```

Auto assist has access to read custom ticket fields and the standard ticket fields below:

Assignee email
Assignee name
Brand
Custom ticket fields
Priority
Requester email
Requester name
Status
Subject
Type