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Notify Side conversation recipient through Automations



Posted Sep 09, 2020

Hi,

are there any plans to add this functionality to the system?

Our use case:

When contacting an external logistics partner through a side conversation and waiting for a reply from them, we set the ticket to 'on-hold'. 
If they haven't replied after 24 hours, we want to send them an automated notification like "respond to us please". 

This is similar to other automated notifications we send to the requester of a ticket after some time has passed like "we still haven't heard from you" or "we'll get back to you soon". 

Thanks!


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10 comments

Official

image avatar

Toby Sterrett

Zendesk Product Manager

Hey all. Unfortunately, automations in their current form only work directly on tickets and ticket information, so we can't use them to keep track of side conversations or create replies on them automatically.

However, we can try to at least keep the agent assigned to the main ticket that the side conversation(s) belong to that the ticket has gone quiet and they should probably check up on them.

One approach we’ve explored isn’t foolproof but might be a step in the right direction. Basically, the idea is:

  • Create a trigger (or macro) that fires on the creation of a side conversation that:

    • Tags the ticket with side_conversations and waiting_on_third_party

    • Sets the ticket status to on-hold

    • Sets the assignee to the current user (creator of the side convo)

  • Create an automation that marks a ticket as having a stale side convo

    • Conditions:

      • Ticket contains the waiting_on_third_party tag

      • Ticket has not been updated by assignee in ___ hours

      • Ticket status is less than solved

    • Actions

      • Add stale_side_conversation tag

  • Create a trigger that

    • Conditions:

      • Side conversation is replied to

      • Assignee is not requester

      • Assignee is not current user

      • Ticket status is less than closed

    • Actions:

      • Set status to Open

      • Remove the waiting_on_third_party and stale_side_conversation tags

  • Create a trigger that removes the stale distinction and gets things ready for the cycle to happen again when the assigned agent replies to a convo (maybe this one isn’t necessary?)

    • Conditions:

      • Side conversation is replied to

      • Assignee is the current user

      • Status is less than on-hold

    • Actions:

      • Set status to on-hold

      • Add the waiting_on_third_party tag

  • Create a view that lists an agent’s stale side convos with the following conditions:

    • Tags contain stale_side_conversation

    • Status is on-hold

    • Assignee is current user

This basic framework is a potential starting point for at least trying to surface some tickets that have side conversations that need a reply. Some caveats:

  • This is pretty coarse grained and brute force. It pretty much requires that an agent sends off the side conversation and moves onto something else and doesn’t do much while waiting for the side convo reply.

  • Multiple side conversations in one ticket add another dimension of complexity

It may be possible to further refine this approach... Perhaps the ticket could be made into a task type and the due date is used (if the stale calculation can be measured in days instead of hours). I'd love to hear if any of you experts have more ideas.

Hopefully this can help keep agents on top of the side conversations that need some nudging.

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We have a similar need to resend a Side Conversation if there has not been a response via an automation just as we do a pending ticket's public reply.

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Same need here. Any ideas for a workaround?

 

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Katie Sullivan

Zendesk Luminary

Please let me know if anyone has found a workaround for this, or if this is a planned Zendesk feature. We want to be able to automate followups on side conversations

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Looking for this as well, did anyone find a workaround for this?

 

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Would be helpful for us as well!

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That would be SO useful for us as well !

We didn't find any workaround except creating a child ticket instead of email.. (assigned to yourself then changing the requester). Not ideal.

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This would be a great feature! 

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+1 - we are looking for the same functionality to be able to send reminders in side conversations if the recipient has not responded to us

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Bumping this question. This would be immensely helpful, as we operate with many side conversation outside of our company. Automatic replies or bumps would lessen our team's workload immensely. Child tickets are not currently a reasonable alternative as there's no way to send directly to external emails.

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