Tip: How to set a reminder on a ticket
It is great to be able to put a ticket on-hold, but I am sure you have suffered from tickets remaining in that status for too long.
Sure you could create an automation to change the state back to being open after x days, but life is never as simple as there being a constant value for x. And perhaps you don't want to actually change the status, you just want to be reminded that the ticket is there. You may want to be reminded no matter what state the ticket is in (except closed!!!).
Well, I'm going to tell you one way of doing it. using a special type of custom field--a custom date field.
The high level summary of this tip is create a new custom field, allow the agents to populate it, and then send a notification to the agent when that date is reached. Before we start though there is a couple of small caveats.
- This is a date. Not a date and time, just a date. The date in question therefore starts at midnight, not when your business hours start.
- Currently, in a trigger you cannot test for a date being equal to "today". Therefore we are going to use the logic of "remind me before" a certain date (although you could easily adapt this to "remind me after").
Right, let's get on with it.
Create a custom field
First we need a custom date field. Go ahead and create a Ticket Field and give it a suitable name. I called mine "Remind me before".
Note: If you are an Enterprise plan customer, remember that you will need to add this field to your Ticket Forms also where needed.
Create automation to notify agent of reminder
Next, we need to create an automation. We want to test whether the reminder date is within the next 1 day (we cannot set this to 0 days - I tried!) however, any automation requires a nullifying condition otherwise it will repeat every hour. The obvious solution is to set the reminder date to be blank but unfortunately this (at the time of writing) is not considered nullifying therefore we are going to have to use a tag. I have one called "reminder_set" and we will deal with this later.
For now though, create an automation similar to one the one in the screenshot. In this automation we test for the tag and when the reminder is due and then send an email, blank out the date and remove the tag.
Automation: Notify Agent of reminder
Please note that in my case I have chosen to send all reminders to me personally. You will probably want to email "(assignee)".
Create trigger to add tag on update
Now we just need to deal with the requirement to have the tag to nullify the conditions of the automation. This requires a trigger. This trigger will fire when a ticket is updated and if a date is present, then add the "reminder_set" tag.
Trigger: Reminder Set tag on update
Well that is it. Perhaps whilst you are there, create a ticket with a reminder to order your mother (spouse, partner, favorite member of Zendesk staff, etc) some flowers on their next birthday. :)
Any suggestions on improving this, then please let me know.
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Hi,
The solution found by us is an automation with condition: Hours until due Date (calendar is) 4.
If you look in the Events of a ticket, you will see that the date has a time too. Ours is 10UTC (and local is 12PM). I want the reminders at 8AM, hence the 4 hours before.
(first automation was 8 hour since, because I thought the day started at 12AM midnight and needed the +8 hours)
Tested and working.
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Hello,
I wish I read the more recent comment on this thread first before I read https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/231659207?page=1#comment_4404674864282.
But yes you have to make sure to use a tag that matches both the condition and action as shown in the screenshot above. I'm glad did not have to add the custom field as that sounds like a nightmare and in my case could impact both customers and my agents.
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How exactly do I blank out the date of the custom ticket field once the reminder date is reached if we can not add an action on the automation to "set to a specific date" to a blank field? So many people have said they get an error, but not seeing a solution.
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Ludmila Buza Were you able to do this on ticket types other than "Task"?
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Hi Melody,
I created a support ticket on your behalf, so we can investigate this further.
Best,
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Hello, thanks for this feature that should be in Zendesk as a standard option in my opinion.
I have an issue: even if I set up the date, some tickets get reopened 1 or 2 days before. Last example: we set up the reminder for 10/11/2022 and it got reopened today (08/11/2022), without reason (I checked the events but could not find anything outside this trigger):
Did someone have the same issue? If so, how did you solve it please?
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Hi Antoine Baudoin,
I would like to check this for you. Hence, I created a ticket (11112375) for us and sent it to your email so we can continue working together.
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Hi ZenDesk,
Have there been any updates on this as far as settings hours instead of just days? We need ticket reminders (same day) just hours later. Can this be done now, or do we need some kind of integration with another app if we want this capability?
Thank you in advance!
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Hi Dustin,
Currently, this workaround still works as the same to send a reminder being open after x days. I have found a 3rd party app that might be able to do it. You can check this 3rd party app here.
I hope this helps. Thank you!
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Related question: Is there a way to simply create a reminder based on (static) X days since last updated date, to notify assignee? I didn't see a way to create this and don't want it to be a manual action to select remind or not. Thanks!
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Hi Mike Kelsch,
At the moment, there's no native way of setting a reminder based on a static number of days. Aside from the option above, you may play with the time-based conditions (based on x number of hours) we have in automation (Ex. Hours since update).
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It seems like there are at least 5 people here reporting the same issue where the automation throws an error titled "Invalid date 'specific_date' for 'Remind me Before / Is' but it doesn't seem to have been addressed yet - how can we get an answer about how to fix this? I think if it's removed the automation won't work but I'd really like to employ this tip! Thank you!
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Hey Hailey Wisener -
Thanks for bubbling this up. You could achieve this through a webhook that updates the ticket field. The JSON would look something like this:
API:Update Ticket
PUT /api/v2/tickets/{{ticket.id}}.json
{
"ticket": {
"custom_fields": [
{
"id": 360048278251,
"value": ""
}
]
}
}PS - If you need a primer on Webhooks, this article is a great resource.
Hope this helps!
Brandon
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I don't understand why Zendesk always forces its customers to use workarounds like a webhook to delete an already set date!
I want to delete the field and not add ANOTHER webhook as a workaround.
Brandon, as a group leader, do you think this is a good way to keep paying customers happy?
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Hey Patrick Lanwehr,
I hear you. As part of a consulting firm that specializes in augmenting Zendesk native functionality, we are no strangers to seemingly 'simple' workflows that, for one reason or another, have been left on the cutting room floor of the Zendesk editing bay.
Although I don't work for Zendesk, I can speculate that since leaving the field populated with the expired date has no impact on the intended workflow, and might even serve as a historical marker (ie - when was this reminder sent), it was most likely not considered as part of the original use case and as such wasn't included in the version you see today.
That said, I know that Zendesk is constantly evaluating and evolving the product, and your feedback here is being noted by the teams that are working on enhancements across the product. The best thing I can suggest is to reply here with a specific use case for needing the field cleared post-notification, thus giving the product folks more context as to the need.
Brandon
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