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Mail API - Ticket creation with priority

  • October 6, 2021
  • 5 replies
  • 0 views
Noel11

Is there a way to have a tag within an email, that would set the priority of the ticket, when it is first created?  I know that you can use #priority tag within the body to set it once the ticket has been created.  However I need it when it is first created by an end-user.

 

Basically I wish to have an urgent tag that clients can add to their email (after hours) if something is critical.  Im trying to create a basic after-hours mechanism that will only notify the engineers if something is at the highest priority.

    5 replies

    Dave12
    • Dave12
    • October 7, 2021

    Hi Noel,

    You create a trigger that looks for new tickets (Ticket is Created), and then use the "Ticket: Subject" or "Ticket: Comment text" conditions to specify a text string (e.g., "#urgent"), and then use the Ticket:Priority action to set the priority based on that. For more information those trigger conditions and actions, see our Trigger conditions and actions reference

    If you can steer your customers to use a ticket form, you could alternately (or also) include a "Business Impact" dropdown field that allows them to specify the urgency of their issue, and create triggers that set the ticket priority based on the value of that field.

    Hope that helps!

    Noel11
    • Noel11
    • Author
    • October 7, 2021

    Thanks Dave for the great suggestion.  Im quite new to Zendesk and building triggers so don't mind my newbie questions. :) 

    With regards to a ticket form, Im sure we will investigate that once we get everything up and running smoothly.  Sounds like a simple and great alternative to email.

    Will test your trigger idea tomorrow in our test environment.  Again, appreciate the help!

      Peter11
      • Peter11
      • October 7, 2021

      Hi @Noel Riggs

      We use the Mail API since we started using Zendesk, almost 5 years ago.

      It is a very robust feature that is well liked, since 95-98% of our tickets arrive by mail; customers don't want to go to the support website just to set the priority and a few other settings.

      As long as you can define fixed strings to be recognized, you can set quite a lot of things. We currently support priority, status and ticket type (for this, we created our own ticket field since the standard types offered by Zendesk do not offer all the choices we need). Some of the actions are restricted to internal users or certain groups. We usually define this kind of strings:

      #PRIO HIGH

      #STATUS SOLVED

      etc. 

      One tip: Writing the #<command> as the first character in the mail will not work. Zendesk will just slip over it, it actually treats it as a comment; you have to add at least a space before it.

      It is too bad that Zendesk doesn't offer some kind of string extraction method, which would help make this a lot more flexible, but that's the current state of affairs.

      Noel11
      • Noel11
      • Author
      • October 7, 2021

      Thanks Peter.  So you're saying A) that if I decide to use a trigger with a comment text string of say '#urgent', that there would need to be a single space before it? Or  B) that I can use the #priority command within the email at the header, but if I do there needs to be a single space prior to the command?  I ask because my understanding was 'B' was not possible to do upon creation, only when updating a ticket.

      Thanks for clarifying

      Peter11
      • Peter11
      • October 8, 2021

      Hi Noel

      If you put # as the first character, it will skip over it.

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