How To Create a Slack Notification When a Ticket View Reaches a Specific Threshold

The Goal

Our Support team is structured so that you’re spending between 40-80% of your time in the Support queue, depending on your seniority level.

We wanted a way to be notified in Slack once our support queue reached a certain threshold so that individuals that weren’t scheduled to be in the queue could jump in and help out.

Prerequisites

For the specific solution I’ve outlined below, you’ll need the following:

A Slack account
A Zapier account on the Starter plan or above
Your Zendesk API Token

Instructions

Step 1

First, you’ll need a ticket view that shows the exact tickets you’d like to monitor. While you can definitely use a ticket view that already exists, you might want to create a new view entirely

For instance, in my specific case, I wanted to create this threshold notification based solely on tickets that would breach their SLA target within the next 6 business hours.

Once you have the ticket view you’d like to use, be sure to take note of the View ID (hint: it’s at the end of the URL in Zendesk) as you’ll need this ID for Step 4.

Step 2

Log into Zapier and click on the 'Make a Zap' button.

Step 3

For the first step of the Zap, select the Schedule by Zapier app and configure these settings as desired.

In my specific use case, I wanted this zap to fire every hour, but to exclude weekends since we don't offer weekend support at this time.

Step 4

Add a second step to this zap and select Code by Zapier > Run Python. For this step, we’ll be using Zendesk’s Get View Count API.

Simply copy the code I provided here and fill out your own Zendesk account information in Lines 4-7. Be sure to test this step to ensure that it's working as expected.

Step 5

Add another zap step. This time, select the Filter by Zapier app.

In the “Choose field…” dropdown, select Run Python > View Count, and then complete the logic as desired based on when you’d like this notification to be fired.

Step 6

For the final zap step, you’ll want to select the Slack app and configure a notification to the exact channel you’d like to be notified.

Step 7

Save & turn on your zap.

That's it!

Now that this solution has been implemented, our team can focus on their extra-queue-rricular work without feeling like they need to keep a constant eye on the support queue.

If you end up implementing this, definitely let me know. Would love to hear how it's been helping your team or if you found any ways to improve upon this solution.

saki

January 15, 2021 10:36

Thank you for the wonderful tips!

I'm stumbling in Step 4.

I copied zdviewcount.py as it is and entered the necessary information on the 4th to 7th lines, but the following error appears.

Is there anything else I need to fill out?

---

The run python could not be sent to Code by Zapier.

Your code had an error!

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "<string>", line 26, in the_function

KeyError:'view_count'

Chandra Robrock

January 15, 2021 14:14

Community Moderator

saki Of course! I double checked the code that I actually have deployed in Zapier and I can confirm that the code provided from my GitHub is correct.

That being said, I was able to intermittently reproduce this issue in Zapier when I tried testing this out in a new Zap which is very odd.

I appear to be able to get around this error by clicking back into the Run Python > Set Up Action step, clicking on the ‘Refresh fields’ button once more, and then click on 'Continue' to retest it. Mind giving that a shot?

I'm thinking Zapier might be falsely throwing an error after the code is initially copied & pasted into the zap, but appears to work successfully after that. Let me know how it goes!