As your support team grows, automating parts of their Zendesk workflow is one of the most impactful things you can do.
Effective automation unlocks efficiency and productivity gains, making your customer support operation more scalable and freeing up your team members to spend more time on the most complex customer issues.
Every customer support leader knows that’s true, but many support agents spend far too much of their time taking repeatable actions throughout their days. This can be things like ticket assignment, filling in field values, writing common phrases, or manually moving or editing data between other tools.
Fortunately, Zendesk has several ways to automate these tasks, whether that’s through its pre-built automations or by building your own. The most common ways to get started is by leveraging triggers and webhooks.
Differentiating triggers and webhooks
These types of automations can get confusing, because the terminology is overlapping and often used interchangeably.
For example, Zendesk has a specific feature called "Automations,” but the word 'automation' is also used to describe the actions of automating actions with other features like Triggers or Webhooks.
Words matter, so let’s start by defining terms.
Triggers
Zendesk Triggers are event-based automations that execute when specific conditions are met within a ticket. They are ideal for ensuring consistency in a workflow, by always triggering a set of steps based on a given action.
For instance, you can set a trigger to automatically assign or escalate a ticket to a particular agent or group when a VIP customer opens a ticket.
Best For: Immediate, ticket event-based actions.
Webhooks
Webhooks allow you to send Zendesk data to external services or applications in response to ticket events. They are powerful for integrating Zendesk with other tools and extending its capabilities.
For example, you can use webhooks to push ticket updates to a Slack channel or to create records in a CRM system whenever a new ticket is created.
Best For: Integrating with external systems and services.
Automations
Zendesk Automations are similar to triggers, but in Zendesk they are time-based rules that perform actions on groups of tickets based on time elapsed.
Unlike triggers, which are event-driven, automations are scheduled to run at specific intervals, such as every hour or every day. They are useful for managing ongoing tasks like sending follow-up emails if a ticket remains unresolved for a set period.
For example, you can use an automation to mark a Zendesk ticket as closed three days after an agent set the Status to Solved.
Best For: Scheduled, time-based actions.
Integrations
Integrations expand and automate Zendesk's functionality by connecting it with other applications, such as CRM systems, project management tools, and communication platforms.
Integrations can automate data transfer and synchronize information across different platforms, enhancing the efficiency of your support operations. They are most often found in the Zendesk Marketplace. Integrations may use webhooks to send the information between systems.
For example, Swifteq offers a number of Zendesk apps that integrate natively with Zendesk, including Triggers+ChatGPT, Merge Duplicate Tickets, and Translate Conversations.
Best For: Creating a seamless workflow and extending Zendesk’s functionality.
Automate to unlock efficiency gains
Automating Zendesk workflows with Triggers
The most basic type of automation is the Zendesk trigger.
Zendesk triggers can be used at any stage of the ticket lifecycle to complete one or more repetitive actions based on the ticket's current field values and other metadata.
When a trigger runs, it is logged in the ticket events section. This allows you to see if and when a trigger is fired and then, in most cases, what actions it took. This is useful for troubleshooting problems or testing new automations.
When setting up trigger rules, the most important thing is to know the difference between the “All" and “Any” sections.
The "All" section means that a trigger must meet every condition specified.
The "Any" section means that a trigger must meet any one or more of the conditions specified.
When your trigger's rules are evaluated to be true, the trigger will take the set of actions you have defined.
Triggers can then do various actions, like setting fields, sending notifications, responding with automated answers, and calling Webhooks. Zendesk comes with some common use cases already set up, and you can create and categorize as many triggers as needed.
To get started with automating your team’s workflows, ask these questions:
What are our most common ticket types?
What are the repetitive tasks our team spends time on every day?
The answers to these questions will surface opportunities for automation — opportunities you may be able to solve with a Zendesk trigger.
If Zendesk’s native functionality doesn’t do the trick, you can also check out the Triggers+ChatGPT app (which comes with a 14-day free trial). Leveraging the power of ChatGPT combined with Zendesk triggers, this app can automate all kinds of common customer support tasks, including:
Automatically detecting ‘thank you’ messages from customers and re-solving those tickets
Automatically translating ticket content to any language you need
Categorizing tickets and identifying customer sentiment, which you can then use to route tickets more intelligently
Zendesk Webhooks
A webhook is a way to send data through an HTTP request to a system through a URL.
The webhook contains a "payload” (which is typically in a JSON format). The receiving system can use the data in the payload to take an action. You can use webhooks to build simple integrations, such as sending data to Slack or Asana. You can further simplify processes by connecting Zendesk webhooks to workflow automation tools like Zapier and Pipedream.
There are two ways webhooks work within Zendesk: subscription and rule-based.
Subscription
This is when a third party tool subscribes to one or more types of events. Zendesk will send the event's data to that webhook whenever the event occurs. Since this happens for every event of the type subscribed to, you can ensure they are consistently sent to the 3rd party tool.
Best Used For:
Data Synchronization: Keeping data consistent between Zendesk and other systems. For example, updating customer information in a CRM whenever it is changed in Zendesk.
Monitoring and Analytics: Sending data to monitoring or analytics platforms to track events and generate insights. For example, logging ticket creation events in a logging system for audit purposes.
Rule-based
This is when you use a custom rule, such as a Trigger or Automation, to send data to a webhook. Since these are rule-based, you can control when or if the webhook takes action.
Best Used For:
Real-Time Updates: Sending immediate updates to other systems. For example, notify a Slack channel only when a critical ticket is created.
Triggering External Processes: Initiating workflows or processes in other systems. For example, creating a new task in a project management tool when a ticket has a specific category set.
The most important part of setting up a Webhook is to ensure the JSON format is what the 3rd party expects and that the URL is in the correct format and is authenticated correctly.
The information about webhooks firing is found in the Webhook's Activity Log, which can help you troubleshoot and test your webhook automations.
Build efficient workflows with webhooks and triggers
Automating your Zendesk workflows with webhooks and triggers brings multiple benefits, including things like:
Reducing average handle time
Reducing manual errors
Increasing your agents’ job satisfaction (because they aren’t doing mindless repetitive tasks all day)
Eliminating silos by enabling the easier integration of your tech stack.
While there’s a bit of a learning curve, creating and using triggers and webhooks within Zendesk is relatively easy and highly flexible. There are infinite use cases for how you can take advantage of these features to improve the efficiency and connectivity of your team and data.
If you’re new to automating tasks in Zendesk, we’d encourage you to take advantage of the 14-day free trial of the Triggers+ChatGPT Zendesk app. Since it leverages ChatGPT, you’re able to automate common Zendesk workflows with normal human language — no need to learn JSON or dive deep into webhooks (although those are worthwhile skills to learn, too!).
Written by Craig Stoss With over 25 years of customer-facing experience collaborating with companies in 30+ countries, Craig has developed a deep understanding of customers' expectations for their vendors. He has worked with customers across e-commerce, health care, edtech, and SaaS industries. Craig spends his free time cheering on the Detroit Tigers, and building Lego with his sons.You can see all of Craig’s content at Stoss.ca. |
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