• Hans Peter

  • August 22, 2016 08:22

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  Does anyone have an idea how to solve this problem?

• Megan Howell

  • August 23, 2016 20:57

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  Hey Hans, 

  Typically the best way to have an automation fire on a custom date field for the scenario you describe is to set the condition at "Date Field is within the previous 1 day", as you describe. I suspect the issue at play for you could be your account settings in terms of date and time zone, so I am going to pull you into a ticket to take a look at the specific ticket and date field in question!

• Joel Hellman

  • March 08, 2017 07:15
  • Edited

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  FYI for anyone visiting this post: the issue here is that the conditions for custom dates here doesn't account for your Zendesk times zones, but use GMT (UTC). So it might fire the day before, or the day after, depending in which time zone you are. E.g. with a timezone of CET (UTC+1), the automation would kick off the day after at 1 am.

• Peter Haller

  • June 18, 2018 16:42

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  Yes this is awful. Since there is no way to say 'not within the last 1 day' as a criteria and since the timezone assumes we all work according to GMT because... completely failed feature implementation... there is a ton of extra crap that needs to happen, including extra automation hits (do you all know that tickets only are allowed a very limited number of automation hits before they go dead?). This should be a very embarrassing thing to take years and years to implement, but apparently this is just a poorly implemented time zone feature that nobody cares to make work. 

• Jackie Ready

  • July 30, 2019 19:22

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  I noticed this was 3 years ago and it is still an issue.  Is there no fix for this in sight?

• Devan - Community Manager

  • July 30, 2019 20:30

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  Hello Jackie,

  I understand how this feature option is lacking the native to Zendesk Support something you want to see changed. I would recommend suggesting this change in our Product Feedback Forums so our devs can consider it for a future update. 

  Support Product Feedback

  Best Regards!

• Jimmy Ra

  • December 23, 2019 21:12
  • Edited

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  Hey there,

  Looks like there haven't been any updates regarding this issue, but I figured out a workaround solution for this if anyone is interested. Details below:

  ------------------------------------------------------------

  The Need

  • Set up automation to send out an email to the requester and solve the ticket if the status is still pending by the date that's set in the custom date field

  The Challenge

  • Business rule condition does not offer the same kind of control for custom date fields as it does for the native due date field (e.g., conditions for the native due date field can be set dependent on hours since/hours until, however, only 24 hour period days can be used with conditions for custom date fields)
  • Automation does not fire on the expected day since custom date fields can only reference GMT in business rule conditions (e.g., if the local timezone is Pacific Time then GMT is +8 hours -- as a result, using the "is within the previous 1 days" setting will fire the automation on the previous date after 4pm PT)

  The Solution

  • Create two separate automations

  ------------------------------------------------------------

  Automation #1

  • Condition: status is pending
  • Condition: custom date field is within the previous 1 days
  • Condition: tags contains none of the following "reachingcustomdate" "customdatereached"
  • Action: add tags "reachingcustomdate"

  Automation #2

  • Condition: status is pending
  • Condition: hours since update greater than 24
  • Condition: tags contains none of the following "customdatereached"
  • Condition: tags contains at least one of the following "reachingcustomdate"
  • Action: status solved
  • Action: remove tags "reachingcustomdate"
  • Action: add tags "customdatereached"
  • Action: email requester

  (Adjust the hours since update condition depending on your local timezone and also depending on around when you need automation #2 to fire. Also, include additional conditions and actions depending on your workflow and needs.)

  ------------------------------------------------------------

  Here's an example of how it'll work if your local timezone is Pacific Time:

  1. A ticket is set with pending status and the custom date field is set to 12/31/19
  2. On 12/30/19, automation #1 fires after 4:00pm PT
  3. On 12/31/19, automation #2 fires after 5:00pm PT

  Hope this helps!

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