Community Tip: How to set a reminder on a ticket

It’s great to be able to put a ticket on hold, but I’m sure you’ve suffered from tickets remaining in that status for too long. Sure, you could create an automation to change the state back to being open after X days, but life is never as simple as there being a constant value for X. And perhaps you don’t want to actually change the status—you just want to be reminded that the ticket is there.

In this Zendesk Community Tip, I’m going to tell you one way of using a special type of custom field—a custom date field to set a reminder on a ticket.

The high-level summary of this tip is: create a new custom field, allow the agents to populate it, and then send a notification to the agent when that date is reached. But before we start, there are a couple of small caveats.

• This is a date. Not a date and time, just a date. The date in question, therefore, starts at midnight—not when your business hours start.

• Currently, in a trigger you cannot test for a date being equal to “today”. Therefore we are going to use the logic of “remind me before” a certain date (although you could easily adapt this to “remind me after”).

You can set a reminder on a ticket by following these steps:

1. Create a custom field: Go ahead and create a Ticket Field and give it a suitable name. I called mine “Remind me before”.

2. Create an automation to notify agents of the reminder: We want to test whether the reminder date is within the next 1 day (we cannot set this to 0 days – I tried!). Any automation requires a nullifying condition, otherwise it will repeat every hour. The obvious solution is to set the reminder date to be blank, but unfortunately, this (at the time of writing) is not considered nullifying. Therefore, we are going to use a tag.
    
   For now, create an automation similar to one the one in the screenshot. In this automation, we test for the tag and when the reminder is due, and then send an email, blank out the date and remove the tag.

3. Create a trigger to add a tag on update: we just need to deal with the requirement to have the tag to nullify the conditions of the automation. This requires a trigger that will fire when a ticket is updated and if a date is present, then add the “reminder_set” tag.

See screen shots and more details from this tip.

This Community Tip is from Colin Piper.