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Triggers and Automations - please share your feedback.



Posted Nov 05, 2021

Hi Zendesk community! We’re undergoing some changes to Triggers and Automations and would love for you to share your thoughts about these features.

Our questions for you

We have a few questions and would like to hear from you:

  • Do you lean on either Triggers or Automations more than the other? If so, why?
  • Who manages Triggers and Automations in your instance? Are there multiple team members working in these settings?
  • Do you do anything today with Automations that you wish you could do with Triggers, or vice versa?
  • How often do you make changes to these features? What safety checks do you have in place before pushing a rule into an active state?
  • Any other gaps, thoughts you'd like to share with us.

How to help:

Please let us know your thoughts in the comments below.  This post will remain open for one month, at which point we’ll close it and incorporate our findings here into the rest of our research. 

We are also interested in having a 1:1 conversation to dig deeper with a few customers. If you’re interested in participating in our research that way, please please indicate that in your comment as well and we’ll follow up via email.

Thank you!


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18 comments

Official

Thanks all for your feedback! It's always great seeing all of your suggestions and ideas. Over the coming weeks, we'll be reviewing and categorizing all of your comments, and may be reaching out with requests for more detail. We are really excited about all of the possibilities in this space. Stay tuned and thanks again for sharing with us.

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Just reposting my question from the breakout session.  Thank you!

When setting automations to run on a specific date the automation runs on the internal Zendesk timezone (UTC) rather than the timezone we have set in Zendesk (EST), so the automation always runs 5 hours before we want it to. How do we get it to actually open on the day we want it to?

Thanks!

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It was a great session, I do have a question, is there a place to view documentation for classic chat triggers?

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Angela Moore Is this what you're looking for? About the Chat default triggers

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I'd just like it if they worked.
Simple trigger to send a text when we get a ticket update ... between 10% and 25% of the time, nothing.

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Hi Bill, sorry to hear this! In case you haven't seen these, there are a few caveats in our Automating SMS support with Text triggers, and there are some general trigger troubleshooting tips in How can I troubleshoot my triggers?
 
If that doesn't help, I'd suggest contacting our support team directly; they may be able to troubleshoot more deeply.

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* It is not documented anywhere that triggers take up to 5 minutes to fire for the first time. This has been bitten me multiple times in the past (hopefully I've ingrained this by now!). I would love to see this lag gone, so that when I set up a trigger, I can expect it to immediately start working. 

* Automations and Triggers do not have parity in the fields and actions they can take.Giving them parity would greatly increase the power and scope for both. 

* Currently, we lean on triggers quite a bit more than automations, because the number of situations in which you can wait up to 2 hours for an action to occur, are much fewer than those we want to happen instantaneously. 

* Automations have an old interface that doesn't allow for searching in the dropdowns by typing. This can make finding the thing you need very difficult and tedious. When this was introduced for triggers I was super thrilled and love it. 

* Automations do not have the searching and filtering capabilities that Triggers have. I cannot easily find all automations that have an "Email Requester" action, but I *can* search and filter like that, on Triggers. For a use case example, I'm planning on updating all autoresponses next week, some of which are automations, some of which are triggers, so this was a glaring difference in finding and knowing how many automations and triggers I needed to update. 

* Triggers start to lag real hard adding conditions after about 20+. Yes, I know that's a ridiculous number, but it's the only way to do something like offboard 20 agents in one go. 

* I would love more flexibility around the number of options I can select for a condition. I often want to say "Form is <any one of five forms> " in the ALL section, so that I don't use up my one and only "OR" (the ANY section), on this alone. 

* I would love to have multiple ANY statements. 

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I wish messaging gave the option to trigger an automated response if a messaging customer hadn't received a response within a certain about of seconds/minutes whilst active on the messaging chat bubble on our website.

I keep getting told it's because messaging allows continuous conversation, but that shouldn't mean that the live chatting system shouldn't be able to have such a feature whilst it recognises a user is requesting a chat/messaging conversation

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We definitely use triggers more than automations. Automations don't give us any insight into when they'll run, so we can only use them for things that need to happen "at some point in the next hour or two".

I'm part of a dedicated team for managing Zendesk, our telephony system, and our internal platform for user data, and how those 3 services can interact with each other. We have a few thousand Care agents in the instance, and the Zendesk account is managed by a team of 5, including myself.

I wish there was perfect parity between the fields available for Automations and for Triggers. In a perfect world, I'd actually want to collapse these into a single admin feature. Automations and Triggers both make changes to tickets where their conditions are met, so I don't see any reason that one should work on time-based events and one should work on the current state when the core of both is a series of IF, THEN statements. To add to this:

  • I think Zendesk could be so powerful if we were able to use a query language or something similar to build triggers. I would love to have full control over the use of ALL and ANY, as well as the application of logical AND and logical OR. Overall, I would just like to see more control over the logic and the fields we can apply it to.
  • I'd also like to be able to establish multiple sets of conditions for a trigger that are more particular than just 'update' or 'create'. For example: WHEN a comment is added, IF Y and Z are true, THEN take action X. I may not want a trigger to run on any kind of update, but just on particular kinds of updates. Jira Service Desk offers something similar (source)
  • Adding additional operators would be great, too. We have contains/does not contain and is/is not, but changed to/changed from would be helpful. This would simplify triggers that prevent a specific action that we can't otherwise control in Zendesk (for example, I want Group A to have access to all tickets in the instance, but I do not want the assignee on a ticket changed from Group A to Group C).
  • Automations are a bit too opaque.  Why can't I see exactly what time the automation will run, or a log of the times it has run in the past? Why do they run based on UTC and not the local timezone that the instance is set to?

We're building new triggers all the time; our company is fast-paced so we have to adapt to new needs quickly. Editing a trigger or building a new one sometimes feels like trying to clip the right wire to deactivate a bomb 😅. It would be nice if we could, at any moment in time, copy and paste all of our business rules (but not the tickets themselves) from production to the sandbox without a fee. This would make it much easier for us to test our new logic and to see try out new features we might be interested in if we need to see how they comport with how we currently use Zendesk.

Lastly, it'd be nice to be able to click and drag triggers to a new position. 

I'd be happy to be part of a 1:1 conversation, and I'm sure my team would, too!

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Hey Team,

Here's my feedback from a ZD partners perspective:

1. The UI is not consistent between Automations and Triggers. Automations still display in the old UI. - Complete lack of consistency in UI here.

2. When you set a condition i.e Channel IS Chat and then go to change chat IS to IS NOT - it wipes out whatever selection, text or tag you've input in the next field. This is really frustrating and results in having to do the work twice. 

3. We also need the condition "received at IS NOT" - you only have IS - there are plenty of scenarios where we want to exclude emails being routed to certain areas. By not having IS NOT - you basically have to build a workflow that goes around the long way to achieve this. Instead of a simple condition of "Received at IS NOT"

4. Nowhere in Zendesk does it also tell you where a condition is no longer valid inside a trigger. So you never know until you go and check the settings if a condition is no longer valid. There should be some indication if something inside the trigger has changed because a condition is no longer valid which tells the admin they need to check the trigger and update it

I'd like to be involved in the 1:1 conversation for this if I could be please. :)

Best,

Amie

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Hey Oli

FYI - Everything in ZD runs on UTC time and that's probably never going to change. The logs would be really awesome for this type of thing though. 100% agree there. 

The only way you can look at the history of automation/triggers right now is if you have it add a tag to the ticket, then you can obviously run a report based on how many times that tag has been added etc. 

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Thanks, Amie Brennan! Having to add a unique tag for things just to get reporting on how frequently they're used is another beef that I have, but that applies to macros as well as automations. I think it results in unnecessary bloating. I raised this in a comment in a different community post already, though! 

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Hi I noticed this thread was still open so I was hoping to add to it with a request. Is it possible to add Agent or Assignee conditions to the Condition field in triggers? Currently the only options apply to Ticket, Requester, or Other. Our use case is setting up a User Field for Agents and being able to apply an Agent or Assignee tag to a ticket if the specific agent is assigned to the ticket, and then basing our triggers/automations based on the Agent/Assignee tag.

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Hey Binh Du

Check out this new EAP that ZD have released. It would help you with your agent routing for tickets. 

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409149119514

Hope this helps. :)

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Hi

We heavily use Triggers and have a few use cases in the automation mostly around highlighting tickets over a certain ages etc

A few points I would like to see

  • Consistent UI between the two options - Adding tags as part of the triggers is easier and as you can see the tags you can be sure you haven't mispelt the tag.  In the automations, its a free text box which makes it easy to put a hyphen instead of an underscore and not realise
  • Ability to properly group and categorise automations - This was a big improvement to triggers and makes them much easier to manage when you have a large number.  We tend to shy away from automations as its difficult to keep them all straight in your head when its just a growing block
  • Next runtime and logging would be great - Just to give us an idea when the automations run but also to be able to troubleshoot why they didn't run against certain tickets
  • The ability to force a run on the automations - Whilst I understand they are scheduled, this would help after first creating an automation so it can action what you are thinking about now.  If I create an automation to find and highlight all SLA breached tickets for some form of reporting on a consistent basis, being able to fire it manually the first time would be great as I can then move on to looking at this rather than waiting 2 hrs before the first run potentially.

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Recently encountered an issue with customers not receiving our responses, discovered the reason was because I deactivated the following default triggers: "Notify requester and CCs of comment update" and "Notify requester of new proactive ticket" 

I inherited our Zendesk from a previous Manager and was cleaning out the system so I was unaware that such a crucial function would be deactivated so easily and with no notification. I'm sure this has happened to others as well, and it's really a big set back when you have to go back to review previous tickets because external response weren't actually sent. 

I would suggest setting up some type of pop-up notification that informs users that if you delete this default trigger, responses will not be sent, unless you've set up another trigger with that function.

Also, the trigger doesn't even note that it is a system "default" trigger. 

Thanks. 

 

 

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I will follow up to Rakel's feedback and say that as a ZD Partner, I often see customers who have done this because they were not aware of the system triggers true functions. I agree that:

1. having the system triggers labelled as "SYSTEM", as you do with ticket fields would be very beneficial. 

2. Displaying a warning message if an admin attempts to delete a system trigger, especially the 2 which send out the ticket email notifications to customers as Rakel mentions. 

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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

Post has been closed for comments while feedback is being reviewed and categorized by our the Zendesk product management team. For any related feedback, feel free to create a post in our Feedback - Ticketing System (Support) topic. 

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