How to create an infinite loop notification in Zendesk
If you’ve been using Zendesk for some time, you probably know it’s one of the best Support systems out there. Great functionality and very user friendly interface. Overall an amazing user experience for you, your agents and especially your user base.
You might be thinking this is an homage article for praising Zendesk. No, not at all, I am here to complain about it for a bit, and then come to my senses and offer a solution. I’m doing it because as any Customer Experience person or CSM will know, you sometimes find yourself stuck trying to find the right technical solution to best suit your business needs. And you also want to provide an amazing experience for your team and user base. This solution goes out to help anyone looking for the same solution as I was and hopefully determine them not waste as much time testing as I did.
Use case
A client needed to put in place an escalation workflow. They needed to communicate with a supplier(a third party) in order to cater to support use some cases.
End-user reaches out via email or form, the agent cannot solve the ticket on their own and they need to reach out to a third party.
The third party cannot have Zendesk access as that would be a breach of confidential information. In order to bypass this issue, I’ve recommended using side conversation - which is productivity add on for Zendesk. Side conversations are spaces in a ticket where agents can have a side conversation with a specific group of people, or discuss a specific area of concern or course of action. Read more about it here.
Drill down of use case:
When Escalation Status is used and the “Supplier Case Reference” field is not populated, an email notification is sent to the ticket Assignee to remind them this needs to be populated.
The notification is sent 2 business days after a ticket is marked as Escalated to external supplier.
The notification is repeated every 2 business days until the Supplier Case Reference field is populated.
Can you believe Zendesk does not have an endless loop notification possibility? I’ve bashed my head quite a few times with testing which went in vain.
This is a famous solution that Zendesk offers, the “bump bump solve”. The idea behind it is that after two notifications - which are done with the help of a tag - the ticket is being set to solved. Very good, Zendesk, but not good enough. Haha.
Solution:
I have created a number of no less than 4 business rules to achieve my desired result.
Trigger: if “Supplier Case Reference” field not filled in -> Add a tag "case_ref_needed"
Automation: chase assignee 2 days later if ticket status is ‘On-Hold” and put ticket into “Open” status.
Trigger: if “Supplier Case Reference” field is still not filled in, change ticket status to “On-Hold” for automation to find and start the loop again.
(This trigger is the culprit as even if it puts the ticket back to On-hold, the Automation fires in a loop as it's already been On-Hold for 2 days).
Supplier Case field filled in -> Remove tag "case_ref_needed" to close the loop.
Now I obviously could have created a number of 4-5 automations from 2, to 4 days, to 6 days, to 8 days to chase the assignee to fill in this Case ref number, but that’s not a very 2020 solution, is it?
The problem above is that in Zendesk, a trigger does not add a timestamp to a ticket, however an automation does. Se where we’re getting?
So I’ve created the action item number 3 in the form of an automation. SUCCESS!!! Now the automation adds a timestamp to the ticket that it has been into “On-Hold” status and then the clock can restart for the other automation to find it 2 days later.
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