Zen U Tip of the Week: How to customize auto-response triggers

Q: Can a ticket be created on behalf of a customer (via a phone call, for example) without an auto-response being sent to the customer?

A: Yes! Let’s start with some context to bring everyone up to speed. When a customer submits a ticket, the “Notify Requester of Received Request” trigger fires to let them know the ticket was received. While this makes sense for tickets created via email, the web widget, or the submit a request form, it doesn’t make sense when the customer calls or chats. Nor does it make sense for the trigger to automatically fire when an agent creates a ticket on behalf of a customer.

Since you mentioned a phone call scenario, I’ll start with some good news—a ticket created through Zendesk Talk will not set off a “Notify Requester of Received Request” trigger notification. Hooray! In the case of chat or an agent-created ticket, however, the “Notify Requester of Received Request” trigger will fire upon ticket creation.

In this ZEN U Tip of the Week, we’ll look at work-arounds to prevent this trigger from firing for chat and agent-created tickets.

Scenario One: Live chat with a customer
Currently, if an end-user initiates a live chat, they will receive a “Notify Requester of Received Request” trigger notification once the chat ticket is created. You can prevent that from happening in one step by adding the “Ticket:Channel is not Chat” condition in the trigger settings:

Scenario Two: Agent creates a ticket on behalf of a customer
If you create a ticket on behalf of a customer via the “+Add” tab, you can include the “Other: Current user is not (agent)” condition to the “Notify Requester of Received Request” trigger. This will prevent the trigger from firing on these agent-initiated tickets:

If you do want to create a trigger that notifies customers when you’ve created a ticket on their behalf—just add the following conditions:

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In this special Zen U Tip of the Week series, questions from Zendesk users are answered by Zen U instructors. For more tips, check out Zendesk’s Tip of the Week collection.