Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
An automation runs because time has passed, not because something changed. That single difference explains most of its behaviour.
The difference from a trigger
| Trigger | Automation | |
|---|---|---|
| Runs | On create and on every update | Once an hour, on its own |
| Because | Something changed | Time passed |
| Typical use | Notify, route, categorise | Chase, escalate, close |
What it is for
- Closing solved tickets after a period.
- Chasing a customer who has not answered.
- Escalating something that has sat too long.
- Reminding an agent about a ticket on hold for a week.
All of those are about nothing happening, which is exactly what a trigger cannot detect.
Two boundaries come with that. Automations only look at tickets that are not closed, so a rule aimed at old tickets stops finding them the moment they close. And an account holds up to 500 active automations against 7000 triggers, which tells you something about how Zendesk expects them to be used: a handful of deliberate rules, not a layer of them.
Once an hour, not immediately
Automations run on a schedule. A rule that fires after 24 hours fires at some point in the hour after that, not at the moment the clock ticks over. That is fine for chasing and closing; it is not a timer.
The rule that catches everyone
An automation must change something that stops it matching. Otherwise it fires every hour, forever, on the same ticket, and your customer gets a reminder every hour.
Adding a tag as part of the action, and requiring the absence of that tag as a condition, is the standard way to make it run once.
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