Admin User Group April 2023 Meetup Recap - This is ZIS

Thanks for having me, Michael! I loved everything about the meeting; and I am grateful for your efforts, as I walked away learning a few things I didn't know coming in. :) 

Thanks for the great meeting!

Being able to post a public or private note using a Trigger seemed to be something a lot of folks in the Admin User Group want to know how to do. I was struggling with how to do this for some time and finally figured it out, so I thought I'd share my steps to help out others who are facing the same struggles.

As a first step, you're going to need to generate an API token and create a webhook that's capable of updating a ticket. This is a generic and simple little webhook that's really powerful. I'm sure you can think of many different uses for it (I definitely have!)

To get that webhook set up, I followed this excellent guide by Sweethawk (a 3rd-party Zendesk app developer who I am not affiliated with): https://support.sweethawk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403979546637

Word to the wise: Set this webhook up using the admin account you want your public or private notes to be posted "from." 

I made the mistake of initially setting the webhook up from my own account instead of our "generic" admin account. This meant every note my automations posted appeared to be written by me. This led to agents messaging me with questions and even assigning tickets to me which I, as a lowly admin and not a CS team member, didn't have a clue about or any involvement with. 🙃 

If you're going to be creating a lot of these types of automations and you don't already have an admin account that's clearly marked as a bot, generic account, or "Virtual Assistant," I strongly recommend adding one—even if you have to pay for an extra seat.

Creating the Trigger

It's very important to include a nullifying condition for these types of triggers and automations. "Ticket Creation" is a strong nullifier. Otherwise, consider using tags, etc. 

For example, to use a tag as a nullifying Condition, you can use "Tags DO NOT CONTAIN", and then make adding that same tag a part of the Trigger's Actions.

Limit your trigger parameters as much as possible, to prevent it from firing unnecessarily.

Whenever possible, test your trigger or automation first in a Sandbox or "free trial" account before making it live in Production.

To post a private note, use the following trigger Actions: 

To make the comment public, just change "public": false in this JSON body to "public": true.

I've used this same webhook to post the Assignee and Group ID to a hidden field whenever a ticket gets solved. If a customer creates a Follow-Up, a trigger pulls the existing Group and Assignee ID out of our custom text fields created for this purpose, and uses those to reassign back to the original handling agent. The sky's the limit!

Hope this helps. :) 

FYI, you can use html_body instead of body to use HTML in your comment's formatting.