Automations in Zendesk

If you’ve worked with me on a ticket in the last couple of weeks, you may have noticed a new email come into your inbox from Reclaim Hosting support. It might look something like this: 

I’ve been experimenting with a feature of Zendesk that automates some of the processes that Reclaim would normally complete manually, in particular, following up with the client. 

Now don’t get me wrong, following up with the client is very important and we will definitely continue to do this where we can manually. With that said, it does take up time throughout the day and we were looking for ways to improve our agent’s experience while keeping in touch with the client. 

I recently took part one of Zendesk’s training for Support Administrators where they touched on automations. Reclaim already has a few automations set up where we send out a survey after closing out the ticket and closes out the ticket completely after a few days. I was inspired to see where we could use some more automations within Reclaim’s support infrastructure. 

Tim came across an automation method called the Bump Bump Solve where users are notified with automatic follow ups 3 days after there is no response from the Client. The article talks about following up twice before the ticket is solved. The entire process looks like this:

While this method follows up with the client twice, I decided that Reclaim doesn’t necessarily need to follow up twice so, I modified the method to only follow up once before solving the ticket. 

I first tested this out with only tickets assigned to me, this way I made sure everything was going well and the users were notified. To make sure the automations were running as scheduled, I set up an additional notification to send an email to myself whenever the first email was sent out. 

We decided to follow up with users 48 hours after no response, rather than the 72 hours mentioned in the article. This is what the first follow up looks like:

After the automation sends out the follow up, it adds the tag #bump1 to the ticket. That tag is vital to run the next automation, which solves the ticket. 

That automation is very similar to the follow up automation, but instead of sending out an email, it marks the ticket solved.

And that’s it! If we don’t hear from a client in 96 hours from their last update, the ticket is closed out. 

We wanted these automations to be a little nudge to the client to remind them they opened a ticket with us, and allows us to clear out our queues so we can focus what is important in the moment, like helping you!