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!