Hi all! I'm sharing the automation I built to assign email domains to client organizations in Zendesk using Zapier, hopefully this is helpful to someone. Please feel free to ping me with any questions.

First some background - we have SLAs set up on organizations, some of which may be very short. We also have a number of automations and rules that depend on client-specific attributes. The problem we ran into is that most organizations (about 95%) didn't have an email domain attached, so when a new user emailed us, the organization wasn't attached until someone doing triage manually assigned it. This sometimes meant that an SLA had already passed before it was even attached to the ticket. It also created a lot of manual work, and sometimes errors if an agent attached the wrong organization, causing tickets to be stranded.

I built an automation in Zapier to fix this. Here are the steps. Of course I recommend testing in a sandbox if you use this! 

1. Trigger - New ticket in Zendesk view. I made a view that is all new tickets with an organization attached 

2. Filter - proceed only if Organization domain name is missing. Useful tip - in Zapier you don't use any tasks if your second step is a filter and it doesn't proceed. Using this filter means no extra tasks are used, which is handy if you're not on an enterprise Zapier plan 

3. Formatter - text pattern. I extracted the domain from the requester email using this RegEx pattern - (?<=@).*  

4. This is a critical step - I added a list of domains to ignore as a second filter based on the output of step 3. This is because even if an agent assigns a client user to an organization, sometimes we don't want that domain to be attached to the org. For example, Gmail is not our client so if someone with a gmail.com email address messages us about a client, we don't then want every gmail address to be attached to that account. Here's the list of generic domains I used, based on a 'does not contain' rule. 

gmail
yahoo
hotmail
aol.com
msn.com
wanadoo.fr
orange.fr
comcast.net
live.com
rediffmail.com
free.fr
gmx.de

5. Zendesk - Update Organization - using the ticket organization from step 1 We add the domain (output of step 3)

6. This step is optional but I recommend it at least to start with. I created an Excel file in Onedrive, and used an 'Add row in Excel' step to create a log file. The log file records the organization name, org id, domain to be added and the date. 

When I deployed this, I first used a limited filter on the view to restrict it to a small set of clients, and carefully reviewed the log to ensure no generic domains were making their way through. Once I was satisfied with this after about 5 days, I removed the filter on the view. We're about ten days in now, and I've seen no issues so far. 

The impact of this has been substantial - originally over 80% of tickets coming in didn't have an email domain associated (which meant they had to be manually associated with the client org). In ten days, this has dropped to just under 25%, meaning 75% of our tickets are now getting the correct org and SLA on creation, and saving our triage team a lot of time.