Advice from our experts on Ticketing, Triggers & User Management

When working with triggers don't forget to use the "Ticket is" condition for your triggers. I find it easier to classify which trigger is which specifically. This article explains how it affects your triggers when you have it as a condition and when you don't.

When working with triggers, its important to remember that triggers fire in the order that they are listed, and that each time a trigger fires Zendesk will go back and evaluate all of the triggers again in order.  The best practice is order your triggers from highest to lower priority.  More information is available here and here. 

I'm a visual learner, so I've often referenced this image from our About triggers and how they work article, as it's important to understand when triggers will (and won't) fire.

As you add more triggers (more cool workflow enhancements over the evolution of your account) I suggest adopting and sticking to a trigger naming convention.

- Use the name of a condition or action that you might search for in the trigger list

- Add a number to make sure your ordering system can be followed and agents can use the number to tell you what happened on their ticket

Also, any good admin has a visio or workflow diagram that explains what a common ticket flow looks like; from ticket created, notifications received, automatic prioritization/categorization, manual or macro'd handoffs or reassignments, and final resolution into reporting. Having an image that reflects your design helps explain what Zendesk does to your stakeholders.

Here are some templates I've used over the years;

When working with triggers, to make sure your trigger is working, always view all events of a ticket. This is possible one of the most powerful troubleshooting tools you can find in Support. For more information, see How can I troubleshoot my triggers?.

It's important to remember that while you can't report on how many times a trigger fired, you can report on ticket tags. So while building a trigger feel free to have the actions of the trigger add a tag as well if you think that you will ever want to track its usage over a period of time. These links below will help you report on ticket tags in both of our reporting platforms:

Explore: Reporting with tags
Insights tag reporting: Reporting on tickets with one or more tags

I would also echo that order of operations is important to consider and remember when working with triggers and how the order affects the results. The other two conditions that I find very helpful are:

• Ticket is created
• Ticket is updated

These two conditions can help narrow in the focus of triggers very easily. 

Another helpful tip is to use tags when testing your triggers. You can temporarily require a tag to be present in the trigger conditions which will allow you to specify exactly which tickets will be affected before releasing the trigger into the wild!

Everyone has shared a LOT of incredible advice already on triggers, which is excellent because triggers could be seen as the foundation of the ticketing platform in some respects! 

I would like to second Ricardo's suggestion about viewing ticket events to understand how your triggers are acting on your tickets. This is the best possible way to troubleshoot when a trigger is not running, when a trigger is firing on the wrong ticket, when a trigger is firing too many times, or whatever else is going wrong. The events view allows you to do a side by side comparison of the conditions of your trigger, and whether those conditions match, or fail to match, the state of the tickets.

Another thing I want to call out about triggers is how fundamentally they are tied to all of the email communications your Zendesk system sends out. Every email sent to a customer, is sent by a trigger (with few exceptions). You can see how that works by reviewing this article About the Support default triggers. Of course this means you want to be careful with these triggers and make sure they are working to make sure your emails are sending. But, it also means you have a lot of opportunity to get creative and customize your email sending triggers to make customizations to your email messaging.

For example, you could clone the "notify requester of comment update" trigger and adjust the conditions so one fires on all tickets except those with the "VIP_customer" tag, and the second fires only on the tickets with the "VIP_customer" tag. That second trigger could have extra links to all the special offerings you have for your VIP members like internal sites or special forums that only VIP members have access to. It's something fun to consider!

Here is another idea: How do I add a disclaimer to my email messages to customers?

I hope those examples get your ideas rolling and help you make some useful customizations to your messaging! Again, always be careful to not edit too much and end up messing up your account's ability to send email updates on tickets!