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Tip: Keep Yourself SANE By Organizing Your Triggers
Posted Oct 28, 2021
Enabling Trigger Categories can help you keep your Triggers, and your workflows organized!
Zendesk level: Beginner
Knowledge: Zendesk
Time Required: 10 minutes
Triggers are event based business rules that, when conditions are right, run on tickets whenever they are created and/or updated. Triggers run in order from top to bottom, so order of operations is important. Thankfully, Zendesk has the ability to categorize your Triggers to help you keep relevant groupings together.
As a best practice, we like to remember that Trigger categories can keep you SANE, by organizing your Triggers into four categories: Setting, Assignments, Notifications and Exceptions. Let's look at each category:
Setting - These Triggers are first up as, based on the tickets origin, they have the mission critical task of setting ticket Priority & Business Schedule (if you have more than one) for things like Service Level Agreement tracking, Forms & Fields and Tags. Oftentimes these selections will dictate where a ticket is routed.
Assignments - These Triggers play traffic cop, routing and triaging tickets to their rightful place in your instance. Remember, order matters here too - so start broad and get more specific. You don't want the VIP client getting routed to Tier 1 support because your Triggers weren't in the right order! Note: These Triggers do not send any communication.
Notifications - These Triggers are arguably the most important of all, because they dictate who, how and when users get notified of communications. While some Triggers like "Notify All Agents Of New Request" might be over-zealous, others like "Notify Requester and CCs of Comment Update" are imperative if you want customers to be able to see your message. Don't forget about the Proactive Ticket Notification Trigger for conversations that are started by your agents on the web interface! Pro Tip: If you're ever curious if a Trigger sent a notification on a ticket, all you have to do is check out the event log.
Exceptions - Last, but certainly not least, are all of those other Triggers that don't fit into any of the other categories. These might be specific to an app/integration, an Admin-level error notification (ie: This ticket made it all the way through and missed all of our other Triggers, something is wrong), or just about any other type of event that would follow a user notification.
Ready to get started with Trigger Categories? It's available right now in your instance, and don't worry! Activating this feature for the first time will move all of your existing Triggers (and placeholder Triggers), in order, into an initial category aptly named: "Initial Category." From there, you can create and migrate your Triggers into these categories, or ones that make sense for your unique workflows.
Need more help with Triggers and other Zendesk configurations? 729 Solutions can help!
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13 comments
Kelsa Henry
Hi Brandon,
Thanks for this great tip however, can I get the same structure for views. My account has 4 pages of Views. (1.5K agents)
If 1 page has 100 views (no easy way to tell apart from manually counting)...that means we've got nearly 400 view. As an admin, it's definitely not contributing to my SANITY as the overall admin in keeping up, finding and managing them. Is that part of your product line to have views categorized as well so that I may retain the last bit of SANITY I have left?
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Brandon (729)
Kelsa Henry What a great suggestion! I'm not aware of anything up and coming in this regard, but I would definitely suggest cross-posting this on the new Admin Center Feedback Page. Cheers!
Brandon
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Ricky J.White
Hi Brandon,
Thanks for this great tip however, can I get the same structure for views. My account has 4 pages of Views. (1.5K agents)
If 1 page has 100 views (no easy way to tell apart from manually counting)...that means we've got nearly 400 view. As an admin, it's definitely not contributing to my SANITY as the overall admin in keeping up, finding and managing them. Is that part of your product line to have views categorized as well so that I may retain the last bit of SANITY I have left?
Thank you,
Alex
Blog Body:
Hi Alex,
Thanks for your feedback and questions.
We are planning to release the views dashboard feature in our upcoming version.
Once it is available, you will be able to see the number of views for each of your agent pages.
You can also check the total views for your entire account.
Thanks,
Brandon
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This comment has been edited by the Zendesk Community Team to remove extraneous information
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Dave Dyson
Hi Ricky,
I think the Brandon who's response you're quoting is not the Brandon who wrote this tip – and in any case, the best place for your Views feedback would be to add your use case to this product feedback thread: Add categories (subviews, dropdown view) function to Views
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Wesley E.Jacobs
These Triggers are arguably the most important of all, because they dictate who, how and when users get notified of communications. While some Triggers like "Notify All Agents Of New Request" might be over-zealous, others like "Notify Requester and CCs of Comment Update" are imperative if you want customers to be able to see your message. Don't forget about the Proactive Ticket Notification Trigger for conversations that are started by your agents on the web interface! Pro Tip: If you're ever curious if a Trigger sent a notification on a ticket, all you have to do is check out the event log.
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Brandon (729)
Thanks for the feedback Wesley E.Jacobs! Couldn't agree more!
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Sharjeel ahmad
Some Triggers, such as "Notify All Agents Of New Request," may be overly aggressive, but others, such as "Notify Requester and CCs of Comment Update," are essential if you want your target audience to see your message. For conversations that your agents start on the web interface, don't forget to use the Proactive Ticket Notification Trigger! Pro Tip: You only need to look at the event log if you're ever unsure whether a Trigger sent a notification on a ticket.
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Brandon (729)
Very Good point Sharjeel ahmad - Just make sure you're putting those in the the notification category. Also, something I noticed is that a category with inactive triggers can't be removed, so my best practice is to move those to a category at the bottom called 'Trigger Archive' and then make them inactive.
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Toini2
These Triggers, which determine who, how, and when users are alerted of messages, are possibly the most crucial of all. Some Triggers, such as "Notify All Agents Of New Request," may be overly aggressive, but others, such as "Notify Requester and CCs of Comment Update," are essential if you want your target audience to read your message.
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Jhonjelly
We have over 400 views if one page receives 100 views (there is no easy method to determine this other than manually counting). Keeping up with, finding, and managing them as an admin is absolutely not helping my sanity as the chief admin. Is it a feature of your product line to categorise views as well so that I may keep what little sanity I still have?
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Duckey
Others, like "Notify Requester and CCs of Comment Update," are crucial if you want your target audience to read your message. Some Triggers, like "Notify All Agents Of New Request," may be unnecessarily pushy. Use the Proactive Ticket Notification Trigger for any discussions your agents begin using the web interface! Pro Tip: If you're ever confused about whether a Trigger delivered a notification on a ticket, you merely need to glance at the event log.
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Konstantin
For my company, we labeled our Trigger categories as such:
This was due to what we considered a priority. For us, the priority was ensuring tickets were routed to their proper teams. From there, ticket updates (i.e. automatic actions) were next on our list, with ticket notifications being least (necessary and valid, but not as high a priority).
Basically, it comes down to what you need to be top priority, and creating a grouping structure that helps you best organize them. This functionality was definitely a huge "step up" from the previous behavior, of just a large list.
~Konstantin
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Brandon (729)
Thanks for sharing Konstantin! Glad to hear the functionality has helped you.
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