If you’ve been using Zendesk for more than a few months, I bet you’ve encountered situations where triggers have misfired and caused issues.
It’s a super common problem.
When you’re using Zendesk, it’s a core part of your support system. In fact, it’s probably the most critical part of your support tech stack.
That means that when Zendesk starts acting up, everything else falls apart.
I’ve managed support teams using Zendesk for years, and Zendesk triggers are one of the most frequent and repetitive issues I’ve seen. They can be super powerful for automating common actions, routing tickets, and triggering notifications.
But they’re also highly interconnected, not intuitive, and very difficult to manage (especially as your team and ticket volume grows).
That’s why a regular Zendesk trigger audit is something every support team should do.
A quick refresher on Zendesk triggers
For those new to triggers or in need of a refresher: Zendesk triggers are automated workflows that perform specific actions when certain conditions are met within a ticket. They run each time a ticket is submitted.
Zendesk also includes automations that run on time-based intervals. Since triggers and automations are both automations that get triggered by different criteria, the two often get confused.
Zendesk triggers can do things like:
Send a notification to an agent when a high-priority ticket comes in.
Automatically close a ticket when its status changes to “Solved.”
Route tickets to different groups or agents based on the ticket form, keywords, or priority.
The order of your triggers is also incredibly important to keep in mind. Zendesk triggers are checked in the same order they appear within the Admin Center. Since triggers can overwrite each other’s changes, if your triggers aren’t in the appropriate order, it’ll cause all kinds of problems.
Triggers are powerful, but over time, they can get messy. The more triggers you have, the harder it becomes to visualize what each one is doing and how they interact with each other.
Why (and when) you need a Zendesk trigger audit
If you have dozens or hundreds of triggers, it’s virtually guaranteed that you’ll occasionally see triggers misfire or workflows accidentally interfere with one another.
You don’t necessarily need to do a full audit of your triggers each time an automation doesn’t run properly — sometimes one little issue is easy to fix and you’re back to serving customers.
But, every so often, it’s a good idea to sit down and work through all of your triggers to ensure they’re still doing what they should be. How do you know when it’s time to audit your Zendesk triggers?
Here are some common signs:
You have a growing backlog of support tickets: If tickets aren’t being handled as quickly as they should be, triggers could be misfiring or not firing at all. Sometimes the trigger conditions no longer match your current workflows.
Agent confusion or manual workarounds: When agents start manually overriding ticket automation, it's a red flag that triggers may be creating inefficiencies rather than streamlining processes. You’ll often hear about this through reporting or through complaints from agents and team leads.
High ticket escalation rates: If tickets are constantly being escalated, it could be a result of improper ticket routing or priority assignments by triggers. This can frustrate both customers and agents.
If any of these scenarios sound familiar, it’s probably a good time for a trigger audit. And, even if you’re unsure if the above issues are occurring, it’s also a Zendesk triggers best practice to audit your triggers a few times each year.
Step-by-Step Guide to Auditing Your Zendesk Triggers
Auditing your triggers can seem overwhelming — I’ve been there — but taking a methodical approach will help you avoid the overwhelm and make consistent progress.
Here are the steps I recommend:
1. Organize your triggers based on the ticket lifecycle
The vast majority of your Zendesk tickets follow a similar lifecycle. Since trigger order is so important, organizing triggers based on that lifecycle is usually the simplest way to ensure tickets aren’t interfering with or overwriting one another.
Here’s an example:
Ticket creation - actions that need to happen upon ticket creation
Ticket routing - triggers that route tickets to specific groups or agents
Workflow tickets - triggers related to specific workflows, like issuing a refund.
Notifications - triggers that send notifications to agents, other teams, or the requester
If you’re preparing to audit your triggers, you may already have them organized in this way within Zendesk’s Admin Center. If not, it’s helpful to sketch out the lifecycle or workflows your team uses and to pencil in categories that make sense before you dive into auditing. With these categories in mind, you’ll be better positioned to see the big picture and spot overlapping triggers that might be duplicating each other’s work.
2. Export your Zendesk triggers
Zendesk doesn’t make it easy to natively export trigger data. You’ll need to use an API call to do so. The specific way to do this based on your setup can vary, but here’s the core process:
Get an API token
Make the API request
Parse the JSON
Let’s tackle each one.
Get an API token
To make the API call, you first need an API token. To get it, follow these steps:
Go to the Admin Center in Zendesk.
In the sidebar, navigate to Apps and integrations > APIs > Zendesk API.
In the Settings tab, enable the Token Access option if it isn’t already.
Click Add API token, name it something recognizable (e.g., "Export Triggers"), and Zendesk will generate a token. Copy and store this token somewhere safe, as you’ll need it for making API calls.
Make the API request
You can use a tool like Postman to make the API call, but if you don’t have an account, you can also pull the data using Terminal (on a Mac or Linux) or Command Prompt (on Windows). You can use this template to make the request:
curl https://{your_subdomain}.zendesk.com/api/v2/triggers.json \-u {your_email}/token:{your_api_token}You’ll need to update the placeholders in the above with your Zendesk subdomain, your email address, and your API token.
Once you have the output, you can save it in your Google Drive with sharing permissions enabled, and you’ll then be able to parse it in a Google Sheet.
Parse the JSON
In order to make the JSON output easy to work with, you’ll need to parse it. The easiest way to do this is to pull it into Google Sheets. You can use an app to parse the data, or you can run a script using Apps Script (Extensions > Apps Script).
The format of this script will depend a bit on how your triggers are structured. Here’s a starting point you can use in Apps Script:
// Function to fetch JSON data from a URL and paste it into the sheet
function fetchJsonData() {
// URL to your JSON file (replace with your file URL or API URL)
const url = 'YOUR_JSON_FILE_URL';
// Fetch the JSON data
const response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url);
const json = JSON.parse(response.getContentText());
// Reference the active sheet in Google Sheets
const sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getActiveSheet();
// Clear any existing content in the sheet
sheet.clear();
// Extract headers (keys from the first JSON object)
const headers = Object.keys(json[0]);
sheet.appendRow(headers); // Add headers to the first row
// Extract data rows
json.forEach(item => {
const rowData = headers.map(header => item[header]);
sheet.appendRow(rowData); // Add each row of data
});
}Once you have the data in your Google Sheet, it’s much easier to audit your triggers.
3. Check your conditions and actions for conflicts or redundancies
Look closely at each trigger to see if it's overlapping with another. Your titles and descriptions may help with this, but to get to the core of it you’ll need to examine your trigger conditions and actions.
If two triggers do the same thing — or worse, if one cancels out the other — it’s time to clean up those triggers. Merge similar triggers or deactivated unnecessary triggers to make everything work together better.
You may find that some conditions and actions are no longer relevant. For instance, maybe you don’t use a certain tag anymore, or maybe your support organization’s structure has changed so routing triggers no longer make sense.
Wherever you identify these issues, update the conditions and actions so that they make sense. If you’re working out of a Google Sheet, you can take notes and make comments within the Sheet, then implement the changes in Zendesk once your audit is complete.
4. Test in a sandbox environment (if possible)
If your Zendesk plan includes a sandbox environment, test your changes there before pushing them into production.
This is critically important if you’re a large team with a high volume of tickets. The very last thing you want is for your trigger audit and updates to negatively impact customers (but negatively impacting agents is almost as bad).
While not everyone has access to a sandbox environment, if you do, make sure to take advantage of it!
5. Document your new trigger setup
As you make changes in production, make sure you’re accurately updating your trigger titles, descriptions, and so on. The output of your audit should be triggers that work well and more clarity on how each one works, so don’t skip this step!
Some teams find value in keeping an external log of their triggers (in an internal knowledge base, for instance). If that’s you, this is the perfect time to create or update that log.
Accurately updating these items will help you and your team stay on the same page, as well as making future audits easier.
Tools to help you visualize and manage Zendesk triggers
Auditing and managing Zendesk triggers manually can be tedious, but fortunately, there are tools designed to help.
Zendesk’s built-in tools for managing triggers
Zendesk has two primary ways to manage triggers:
Admin Center: This is your go-to place for managing all triggers. You’re already familiar with it, as it’s where you set up and organize any triggers in your Zendesk instance
Event Viewer: Within the Agent Workspace, you can click the Events button to see what triggers are firing on a specific tool. This is the best way to identify when triggers fire (and when things go wrong). To access this view, click the clock/arrow icon on the top right of any ticket.
Zendesk apps for managing triggers
Zendesk triggers are great, but they also have many built-in limitations. If you’re finding that Zendesk’s native trigger capabilities are limiting you team, you should check out Triggers+ChatGTP.
It's is a five-star app on the Zendesk marketplace that lets you extend the capabilities of your Zendesk triggers through ChatGPT. You can do things like pull info from tickets to store them in ticket fields, automatically merge tickets, automatically close out “thank you” tickets, and even automatically categorize your tickets for better routing.
Triggers are essential — when they do what you need them to do
Conducting a Zendesk trigger audit may seem daunting, but the payoff is well worth it.
An effective audit will make your team more efficient, reduce complaints, and make life better for your customers. There’s no arguing that Zendesk triggers are a powerful tool, but their complexity and limitations means they only fulfill their potential when they’re actively managed (and supplemented by apps that enable them to do more).
Set aside time to audit your triggers, implement the best practices we’ve discussed, and explore the right tools to help you stay organized.
And if you’re looking for other ways to get more out of your Zendesk environment, check out our suite of Zendesk apps designed specifically to help support teams do more with less. Apps include:
The completely free help center export and macro export apps
Each of these apps (and more) help you and your team get more out of Zendesk, so you can focus on what really matters—delivering exceptional support to your customers, every single day.