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Enable Macro Visibility Based on Ticket Properties for Enhanced Process Control and Efficiency
Posted Sep 12, 2024
Please give a quick overview of your product feature request or feedback and note who in your org is affected by this issue
For our 140 agents and admins, we wish that we could make Macros visible (and recommended) based on ticket properties. Today Zendesk only supports a ticket group (i.e. team) based access, or to make macros available to all agents.
We have tickets for specific business processes that we use macros to manage, and those macros should only be applied to them and be available as the tickets move between different teams.
This is a feature request that would improve the employee experience for our agents, reduce administrative burden for our admins by minimizing the need for contextual workspaces (which are awkward to use and update for macros), and help our company’s business processes be more efficient, decreasing errors caused by agents.
What problem do you see this solving?
It would help our business processes run more smoothly as different teams in Zendesk collaborate on the same business processes but across different customer segments and reassignments.
It would ensure process-specific macros are not inadvertently applied to the wrong tickets, preventing issues in business processes and reporting.
It would improve the employee experience by ensuring macros are not shown to agents or in situations where they are not meant to be used, making it easier for agents to directly access the right macros for the business process.
It would also help admins and agents by providing a more intuitive configuration for recommended/available macros directly on the macro page, rather than relying on a disconnected Contextual Workspaces page that only admins can access.
When was the last time you were affected by this lack of functionality, or specific tool? What happened? How often does this problem occur, and how does this impact your business?
This is a persistent issue for us. Problems with accessing and suggesting relevant macros for specific processes occur every day. Since we use the workaround of showing all macros to all agents, the impact is limited to the frustration of irrelevant macros showing up, agent uncertainty about when macros should be applied, and complaints from agents and teams about seeing irrelevant macros in their daily work.
Example when it goes wrong
An agent is handling a digital power of attorney ticket request with specific data. We have designed a specific series of macros that streamline a business process and communication. Issues occur when the ticket moves across teams, and we haven't anticipated that another team would need access to that macro. The agent might incorrectly apply a visible macro to a ticket where it's not meant to be used, failing to notice that custom placeholder fields are blank or that their action has inadvertently altered custom fields meant for other processes.
Are you currently using a workaround to solve this problem?
For now, the only maintainable solution we've found is to stop using the “Available for” access condition on the Macro page and instead make macros available to “All Agents” for all macros connected to specific business processes. These macros are then applied to tickets that have certain data via tags, custom fields, etc. Additionally, we use the contextual workspace feature to suggest when macros should be recommended.
However, we have no solution to prevent macros from being applied to tickets where they should not be used.
We have in-house Zendesk app developers and considered writing our own Zendesk App to show/hide Macros based on ticket properties, but there is no (at least public-facing) support for this in the Zendesk Apps Framework, so it wasn’t possible.
What would be your ideal solution to this problem? How would it work or function?
The ideal solution for us would be to add an option on the Macro page for macros that we associate with specific business processes tracked in Zendesk via ticket properties. This option could offer something like a “Ticket condition,” similar to what is already present in the Contextual Workspaces for recommended macros.
In fact, we would prefer having macro filtering/recommendation based on ticket properties directly on the Macro page. Today, it's possible to recommend macros in Contextual Workspaces, but the issue is that only admins can configure Contextual Workspaces. We delegate macro management to many agents, and maintaining the mapping between Contextual Workspaces and macros is awkward, especially since the macros listed in Contextual Workspaces are disconnected from the Macro page itself.
Ideally, if we have used this new ticket condition on the Macro page, that Macro should always show up in the “Recommended list” since we have explicitly designed the macro for that situation, and it should not be visible otherwise.
We don't mind at all if the macro is “technically” invokable (i.e., via API etc.) even if the ticket conditions are not fulfilled. This request is focused on making it easier for our business to follow processes, not about security concerns.
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2 comments
Graham D Robson
Hi Joel - Your use case is familiar.
As a suggestion, perhaps consider Flowset to meet this need. Flowset can replace the use of Zendesk Macro's to support two levels of data-driven comment insertions:
Please feel free to contact us so we can discuss this and show you how it can be achieved and the efficiency benefits it can bring.
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Shawna James
Thank you for taking the time to provide us with your feedback. This has been logged for our PM team to review. For others who may be interested in this feature request, please add your support by upvoting this post and/or adding your use case to the comments below. Thank you again!
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