Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
A trigger watches for something happening to a ticket and acts the moment it does. Most of what Zendesk seems to do by itself is triggers.
When it fires
On creation, and on every update. An update is anything that changes a ticket: an agent submitting, a customer replying, another rule making a change.
That last one matters here. A trigger can cause an update that fires another trigger, which is how loops happen.
Order is part of the design
Every create and every update runs all your ticket triggers as a cycle, in the order they are listed. A trigger near the bottom sees the ticket as the ones above it left it, so two rules that both set a priority do not argue: the later one wins, every time, and without telling anybody.
If a trigger updates the ticket during that cycle, the cycle starts over and they all run again, apart from the ones that have already fired and changed something. That rerun is how one rule sets off another, and that exception is what stops it running forever.
Categories exist so the order stays readable. The order of the categories and the order within each of them together decide what fires when.
The ceiling is 7000 active ticket triggers. Nobody arrives there on purpose, and long before it the problem is not the count but whether anybody can still say what runs first.
What it looks at
Two blocks of conditions. Everything in the all block must be true; at least one thing in the any block must be. If the ticket matches, the actions run.
Conditions can also compare the ticket before and after the change, which is how you write a rule that reacts to something becoming true rather than being true.
What it can do
- Send an email to the requester, the assignee, a group or an address.
- Set fields: status, priority, group, assignee, anything custom.
- Add or remove tags.
- Call a webhook, so another system hears about it.
Trigger, automation or macro
- Trigger: something changed on the ticket.
- Automation: time passed. Runs hourly, not on change.
- Macro: a person decided.
Nearly every rule people struggle with is one of these three doing a job meant for another.
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