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

More actions leave Zendesk than the word "trigger" suggests, and each deserves a second look before you save.

• User email. To the requester, the assignee, the current user, agents, or the requester and CCs. Those last two are not the same thing, and this is the action that can reach hundreds of people if the conditions are wrong.
• Group email. To the assignee's group or a named one.
• External target. An address outside your account entirely.
• Active webhook. Tells another system something happened. Wrong conditions here create work in a system you do not control.
• User text and Group text. SMS, which needs Zendesk Text.
• Zendesk integration. A notification into Slack.

The two autoreply actions belong in the same category, because they answer the customer for you: Autoreply with articles suggests help centre articles, and Autoreply using generative AI writes a reply from your help centre content.

Notifications are where the care goes

Four 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.
• Whether the comment is public. On a private comment the User email action to the requester and CCs is suppressed. The trigger's other actions still run, so it looks like it fired, and it did: only the email did not go.

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