My consulting business has fairly involved sales funnel that usually requires quite a few followups because my lowest package is $1,000 so it's rare that people decide on the spot (or even have the authority to make that decision).

For the past 6 months I've been tracking my time on these followups. I was using Gmail with canned responses and Bommerang to let me know when the follow up was needed, but just to click click click click was taking over 16 hours a month!!

So I moved everything to Zendesk and set up some pretty killer Automations to do these followups automatically. The reason I couldn't just use an autoresponder system is because those systems don't know if the person on the other end has replied and you don't want to keep emailing them after they're replied.

With my Zendesk Automations, the emails continue to go out automatically unless they reply and then it stops and brings the ticket back into view. Otherwise, once I set it, I don't have to think about it again.

Here's how I did it:

1. Each followup in the sequence knows what the next one is supposed to be, so the actions include adding tags the next one should look for
2. Then when an Automation finds a tag that matches it's Conditions, it removes those tags and adds the ones for the next followup
3. Each Automation also has Conditions that look for "hours since update" so that I can space the followups at different intervals
4. Each Automation also includes an Email Subject and Body to go out as one of the actions, as well.
5. I also include a tag to signify that tickets with that tag (auto, in my case) should not be picked up by any other Automations and then included "does not contain tag auto" in all other Automations.
6. Finally, I created Macros matching each step of the sequence so I can drop people into it at any point and let the Automations follow up from there.

It's pretty sweet! And now I have 16 extra hours a month. Thanks, Zendesk! :)