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How to ban people in Messaging



Posted Jul 21, 2023

This is my tutorial to create a ban system in Messaging.

A caveat here, this won't prevent a person from creating new accounts by entering a different email.  That being said, it does work.

The basic idea here is to change the entry on a Custom User Field that is assigned via a ticket tag.  When the banned user sends another entry, the User Field will cause another Trigger to action and put their ticket into a group with no one assigned and immediately close the ticket.  I have made it temporary by tracking the tag on the ticket via an automation, and changing the User Field again 7 days after the ticket closes. 

The screenshots and tutorial here are for a temporary ban system.  You can make this permanent by not applying the final automation, or use both by using a second tag.

First, we need to create a user field.  I created one with 2 entries in a drop-down box.  Ban is for a user that will be banned, Released is for a user that was released from the Ban that we will be using for tracking purposes.

Now that we have a User Field made, we create a macro.  The macro will apply a tag and solve the ticket.  In this case, I made the tag "chat_ban".  Remember to instruct agents to press "Enter" before submitting the change so that the message sends to the customer.

We will now need to create a Group with no one assigned to it.  I've called this "Ban Box".

So now we need a trigger that sends tickets with our tag to the Ban Box.  We do this through a trigger as the macro can't Solve the ticket without having an Assignee.   We also have this trigger change the User Field to "Ban".

 

Now that the User Field is showing the customer is banned, we can now check this User Field and move any new Messaging chat created by this User into Ban Box immediately and close the chat.


Or, we can time this to occur after an hour.  This has the added benefit of allowing the banned customer to complain into the wind without having the ability to create a new Chat.  They have some time to calm down and abandon before they can start attempting to break the system. 

So now we want to release our temporary ban.  Since the tag is applied to a specific ticket, we can measure the time since that ticket's closure and trigger off of that to change the User Field again.  We change it to "Released", and now the customer can create chats again.  Agents/Leads can then refer to this field to see if we have a repeat offender.


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3 comments

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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

This is an awesome tip. Thanks for sharing Victor :)  

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Great write up!

Will this still allow a harassing customer to continue to submit live messages? 

I believe if I read this correct, it's placing a tag on the user. So if they do send in another message, the support agent can see it and put them back in the ban loop?

The customer would have suspended access from tickets but not messaging?

Am I interpreting this correct?

Sidenote: Shocked that having the ability to suspend a person through live messaging isn't already a feature within the rollout originally.

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Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

Hi Jonathan, thank you for providing your feedback about suspension here. It has been logged. If, in the future, you would like to make a post about this in our feedback channels which our PM's review and respond more frequently, please make a post here using this template, we would love to hear more from you! 

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