Actions in a trigger

What a trigger can do to a ticket, and the two actions worth being careful with because they reach outside Zendesk.

What a trigger can do to a ticket, and the two actions worth being careful with because they reach outside Zendesk.

Changing the ticket

• Set a field. Status, priority, type, group, assignee, form, brand, or anything custom.
• Add or remove tags.
• Add a comment, public or internal.
• Set the skills or the queue, where you route by those.

Reaching outside

Two actions leave Zendesk, and both deserve a second look before you save.

• Sending an email. To the requester, the assignee, a group, or a specific address. This is the one that can reach hundreds of people if the conditions are wrong.
• Calling a webhook. Tells another system something happened. Wrong conditions here create work in a system you do not control.

Notifications are where the care goes

Three things worth checking on any trigger that sends a message.

• Who receives it. Requester and CCs is not the same as requester.
• What it says when a placeholder is empty. Test with a sparse ticket, not a complete one.
• Whether it can fire repeatedly. A condition on "is" rather than "changed to" turns one notification into many.

Order matters within a trigger too

Actions run as listed, and a later one overwrites an earlier one setting the same field. Two actions setting the group means the second wins, which is confusing when you are reading the first.

See also

• Building conditions: all, any, and the trap in between
• What a webhook is and when to use one
• Why there is a blank line where my placeholder should be
• Can a trigger add a comment to a ticket