Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Agent |
A macro that inserts its text but leaves a field untouched has one of seven causes, and all seven are quick to check.
Symptoms
- The comment appears but the status, group or custom field does not change.
- It works on some tickets and not others.
- It worked before somebody edited the ticket form.
Resolution steps
1. Is the field on this ticket's form?
Zendesk is explicit about this: if a macro updates a ticket field, that field must appear on the ticket form for the macro to apply. Move a ticket to a form without the field and the macro silently skips that action.
This is why it works on some tickets and not others, and it is where triggers differ: a trigger can set a field the form does not carry, a macro cannot.
2. Is the ticket being updated by something else at the same time?
When several sources update a ticket at once, a background workflow or another agent, macros cannot be applied until the latest changes are showing. You get an error asking you to wait and try again.
It looks like the macro is broken when it is a timing problem, and retrying a moment later works.
3. Does the value still exist?
A macro setting a drop-down to a value that has since been renamed or removed does nothing. Nothing warns you, because the macro is still valid: it points at something gone.
4. Did a trigger change it back?
Macros apply before you submit, triggers run after. A trigger that sets the group on update overwrites what your macro set, every time.
5. Did another macro run over it?
Where two macros applied to the same ticket set the same field, the last one wins and the first one's value is gone without a warning. Nothing on screen says a macro overwrote another; you just see the wrong value in the field.
6. Are you on the mobile app?
The mobile app has no rich content, and neither do a few channels. A macro whose comment is rich text falls back to plain text there, and if the macro has no plain text version the whole macro refuses with No plain text comment available. The fix is on the desktop: open the macro, switch on Include plain text fallback, save, then sign out of the mobile app and back in.
7. Did you submit?
Worth mentioning because it happens. A macro stages its changes and nothing is saved until you submit the ticket.
How to see what happened
Open the ticket's events by adding /events to its URL. They show every change in order and which rule made it, which turns guessing into reading.
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