Zendesk features to increase efficiency and customer satisfaction

As you might already know, automations and triggers can be set in your Zendesk account to make sure your incoming requests  are well taken care of and, in return, your customers are happy.

Triggers are business rules you define that run immediately after tickets are created or updated. For example, a trigger can be used to notify the customer when a ticket has been opened. Another can be created to then notify the customer when the ticket is solved.

Essential facts for triggers

• Triggers are created from conditions and actions. Conditions set the conditions needed for the trigger to fire and actions represent what will be performed when those conditions are met.

• Triggers will run, or check the conditions, immediately after tickets are created or updated.

• Triggers will only fire, or apply their actions, if the ticket meets the trigger's set conditions.

• Actions applied by one trigger can affect other triggers.

• Actions in one trigger can affect the actions in another.

• Triggers do not run or fire on tickets after they are closed. However, triggers can fire when a ticket is being set to closed.

• Triggers, like all business rules, must be smaller than 65k.

• To help you manage large numbers of triggers, triggers can be organized into categories.

Check out this article if you want to find out more about Zendesk Triggers.

Automations are similar to triggers because both define conditions and actions that modify ticket properties and optionally send email notifications to customers and agents. Where they differ is that automations execute when a time event occurs after a ticket property was set or updated, rather than immediately after a ticket is created or updated.

• Automations are time-based; they take action when a time-event occurs, not immediately after a ticket is created or updated

• Automations run every hour, but not necessarily top-of-the-hour; they will start at some point during the hour.

• Your automations will always start running at the same time every hour.

• Automations do not run or fire on closed tickets.

• An automation must contain a condition that is true only once or an action that nullifies at least one of the conditions; otherwise, the automation will run in an endless loop.

• Automations, like all business rules, must be smaller than 65kb.

Check out this article if you want to find out more about Zendesk Automations.

How can you use these features to your advantage?

Configure Automation based on Pending status

Typically, you don’t want to keep tickets open cluttering in your support queue. For this, it’s best to configure an automation which reminds the user about their request with you.

This can be achieved by configuring automations to send an email as a reminder to the user like  "Hey, we're still waiting to hear back from you. Is this problem resolved? If so, ignore this message and this ticket will close in 24 hours. If not, please respond and let us know and we'll gladly help you out”.

This way you are making sure no ticket is marked as solved without the user’s awareness.

Configure reminders for On Hold tickets

It’s quite common to come across a customer who says 'call back tomorrow morning' or 'I am out of the office this week', or 'please leave the request open for a week or so'... we also have the position where we ask outside users for info and want to get back to our customer once the info has been received.

This scenario is perfect for moving the case to  'On Hold' Status. However, without a reminder function, it is only a technical change which might be forgotten if a reminder is not in place to ensure the conversation is picked up later.

Let’s have a look at the configuration steps:

1. Create a macro “On Hold”

• Add tags according to the timeframe (hold6, hold24, hold 48, etc)

• Comment mode should be marked as private as macro will serve more as a note to the agent

• Also, the note should be descriptive in case anyone else needs to pick up the case

1. Add an automation with these conditions:

• Status is On Hold

• Tag is hold48 (for example)

• Status since last update greater than x number of hours

• Action to change status to Open

1. Agents will apply the macro and the ticket will be removed from their queue for the configured number of hours then, when conditions are met, it will come back to their attention.

Scheduled replies using automations

Using a combination of triggers, tags, automations, and ticket types, it actually is possible to send with an approximate delay.  Because automations run only once each hour (at the same time every hour for your own account), this won't be exact; it's accurate to within about an hour.

Configuration steps:

1. Decide which tags will manage this automation
   For example, you can use “delay1”, “delay2”, etc, but adjust the time and naming of the tag based on your needs, like when you are writing the replies and when the email should go off.

2. Edit any existing notification triggers to NOT send if they include one of those tags
   Make sure to add this to all triggers that send a reply to your clients, as you may have several. Use the Condition “tags - contains none of the following" and enter all of your new tags.

3. Create a new automation for each tag/delay which will send the email after enough time has elapsed.

4. Optional, but highly recommended, set up a custom Ticket Field to provide a drop-down with the delay options. This will make it easier and less error-prone, as you won't have to manually type in a tag.

5. Before submitting a new ticket or reply in Zendesk, simply select the delay from the drop-down. Zendesk will automatically add the tag when you submit.
   If you skipped Step 4, then you'll need to manually enter the tag, such as "delay24". This also requires you to remember which tags actually exist, and which don't (entering "delay23" might not work!), hence my suggestion of the drop-down.

Organising and Troubleshooting Triggers and Automations

If you’ve been using Zendesk for a while now most probably you have a lot of triggers and automations created already. Sometimes, even though they were named uniquely, they were difficult to find and troubleshoot in that long list.

What you could do in this case is to come up with a standard naming convention like adding a prefix to triggers and another to automations, for example T00N and A00N. It is also advisable that respective code to follow the order which triggers the event.

I’m going to make a post about most used business rules that I come across, maybe they will inspire you.

I’d be very curious to find out some flows that you are struggling with. Being a troubleshooter and solution finder, a dad basically 😂 I’d love to find that solution for you. Comment below and I will happily look into it. Come on, guys, let’s get one comment!

Also, as per usual, smash that big reg button below to book a call with me to discuss your concerns.