Automation - Issue with replies

Hey @thomas37 -

By the sounds of it, you have the automation setup correctly.  A ticket reopening on a new comment from an end-user is expected behavior, so long as the ticket is still ‘solved’ and not ‘closed.’  If a follow-up ticket is being created, you may need to extend the time between solved > closed (also an automation).  If the update is in fact applying to the original ticket, but the status is not reverting back to open, I would check your event log for a Trigger that is overtaking that action and moving the ticket back to solved (perhaps on the presence of a tag).  

If you can't find it based on this, Zendesk Support (through “Get Help” in your instance) is really good at figuring out things like this from inside of your instance.  Hope this helps!

Brandon

Hi, 

as Brandon already mentioned the gap should be the closing of tickets. Nevertheless the request should result in a new ticket responding to the closed one, right? 

Regards,

Stephan

A ticket status changing to Open is a default behavior of Zendesk that I'm not aware of being able to modify. Even if a trigger/automation was subsequently changing it back to Solved that should show in the logs. Is the reply from the user coming through as a public reply? If there's nothing sensitive perhaps you can share a screenshot of the events following the user's reply to help debug further. 

Hi Thomas,  

You should have a trigger that looks like this. It opens the ticket upon customer response and sets the next action date to today.

Hi Steve,

if the automated reply is adding a comment in the ticket the status should be set to “open” by default. No additional trigger needed. From my experience the automated reply is ignored by Zendesk and I do not expect that the above mentioned trigger will show a new effect.  Is is also solving the problem with automated reply? Thank you for your feedback.

Regards, Stephan

Hi both, 

Thank you so much for your feedback. I'm just testing out the Trigger as it looks as though the automation when the requester replies is embedded in the ticket but not as a regular comment if that makes sense. I'm hoping the trigger you shared Steve will re-open the ticket but if it doesn't is there a way I can ensure the automation email is adding a comment in the ticket? 

It seems the trigger that Steve kindly provided did not work. I've attached a screen shot below. The System is showing the email notification and the tag added to prevent the automation from firing more than once but nothing about the ticket staying as solved or re-opening. 

For context the screen shot below is the reply from the requester to the automated email. It's showing up as usual on Zendesk “Thank you for your email” but this reply isn't actioning the ticket to re-open. Any ideas as to why? 

Hey Thomas - This is a long shot but you could try changing the action of the automation from Status Category to Ticket Status > Open.  If that doesn't work, I would suggest reaching out to Zendesk Support.  Don't forget to keep us posted!

Thanks Brandon, It now works! I think the issue was 2 things, the condition set was causing the ticket to remain solved and the requester email was the same as the agent when testing so most likely wasn't actioning the ticket to open. Zendesk Support helped me resolve this along with your comments above! Thank you all. Really excited to implement this now 

Hi Thomas,
It sounds like you're really close! In similar cases, people use a trigger instead of an automation to reopen the ticket when a requester replies. You could try setting up a trigger that changes the status to “open” when a comment is added by the requester. Hope this helps!