Both triggers and automations can be an invaluable contribution to your workflow in Zendesk. You can edit, activate, deactivate, or delete them by accessing the business rules portion of the admin dashboard. In many ways triggers and automations are very similar, they both define a set of actions that will occur when a ticket matches specific conditions and can modify ticket data.
However, they run based on different kinds of events.
Triggers react to a ticket when they are created or updated.
Automations react based on time events.
Since automations are based on events in time, there are additional conditions that allow you to make updates to tickets a certain number of hours after specific events occur. Ultimately automated business rules allow you to cut out repetitive tasks your agents would otherwise be doing manually.
Conditions
Conditions refer to tickets, user fields, and the data contained in those fields. When setting conditions within triggers and automations you can specify them to be All or Any conditions. All conditions means just that, all the conditions must be met on a ticket for the automation or trigger to run. Any conditions means that only some need to be met to run the automation or trigger. If no conditions are met at all then a trigger or automation won’t run.
Actions
Actions are what will happen if the specified conditions are met. An action can do many things including send an automatic email response, update the ticket status, set an assignee or group, and add tags.
Triggers
There are a handful of default triggers and automations already built and they can be a great place to start when learning how to set them up. They can also be modified or clones to better suit your team’s needs.
Default Triggers
- Notify requester of received request
- Notify requester of comment update
- Notify assignee of comment update
- Notify assignee of assignment
- Notify assignee of reopened ticket
- Notify group of assignment
- Notify all agents of received request
- Auto-assign to first email responding agent (inactive at sign up)
Default Automations
- Close ticket 4 days after status is set to solved
- Pending notification 24 hours (inactive at signup)
- Pending notification 5 days (inactive at signup)
- Request customer satisfaction rating (system automation)