Prevent "Thank you" replies from reopening tickets

Hi there! Do you have really kind customers who reply just to say "thanks"? This is great, but it creates more work / clicks for agents, and can impact reporting on agent handle times / time to resolution.

Here's a tip to address that. It's not a perfect solution (the ticket still reopens, then immediately re-solves), but hopefully it helps until the decade-old feature request is addressed natively. One day. I believe 🤞

Okay, here's the idea. If any of this sounds complicated because webhooks and API, don't worry! We'll break it down step by step, and please feel free to comment with any questions.

1. When a Solved ticket is replied to from the requester, and their comment includes "thank", "thanks", "merci" or any translations/variants you want, we are going to trigger an action to notify the "Update Many" bulk tickets endpoint. No, we aren't bulk updating multiple tickets. This endpoint can be used for a single ticket. It's useful for its "additional_tags" property that the regular update tickets endpoint does not have.
2. In our call to that endpoint, our JSON body includes some liquid markup. We are checking the last public comment on the ticket for its comment.value.size before adding a unique tag, and solving the reopened ticket.

Why do we care about comment size? This will ensure we only solve the brief "thank you" tickets. We will not solve paragraphs that happen to include "thanks in advance for your help". We will not solve any "thanks, but I still need help with xyz". No false positives.

Why are we adding a unique tag? This is to aid you in reporting. If you are counting # end-user public comments, for example, you can subtract 1 for tickets that have this unique tag. Or, you can subtract 1 from # reopens for tickets with this tag. It's also a good idea have a unique tag in case troubleshooting is required.

Shout out to for Ash for inspiration from a similar solution to tag tickets containing attachments. I am shamelessly copy-pasting from some of their steps.

Here we go!

1. Enable API access (see screenshot)

Password Access (item 3 on the screenshot above) - enable if you want to authenticate using your admin username and password for the webhook API calls.

Token Access (recommended) - To use an API token for the webhook, select item 4 on the screenshot, then "Add API token". Copy the token right away. It is only shown to you once. This will be used for basic auth in the next step.

2.Create webhook
Title : Update Many endpoint

URL: https://domain.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets/update_many.json?ids={{ticket.id}}
Method: PUT
Content Type: JSON

Authentication: Basic auth 

For basic auth with API token, your username will be email@address.com/token. Password is the API token created from step 1.

3. Create Trigger

Trigger Name: Close and Tag thank you replies

ALL Conditions:

1. Status is Solved
2. Comment is present
3. Requester is current user
4. Comment text contains the following words: thank, thanks, [insert translation or other variants]

Actions:

Notify active webhook: Update Many

JSON body:

{"ticket":
{% for comment in ticket.public_comments offset:0 limit:1 %}
{% if comment.value.size < 25 %}
{"status":"solved",
"additional_tags":["thankyou"]}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
}

There you have it! Make sure to test different scenarios (solved replies with short "thank you" and solved replies with longer "thanks, but I still need help with..."). You might want to play around with the exact character count if you find 25 is too short. "thanks for your help!" is 21 characters.

If you don't have a sandbox, a tip for testing is to add an extra trigger ALL condition to say something like "Subject text contains MYNAMETEST" so it only fires on your test tickets. You can remove this condition when testing is complete.

Thanks for reading!