19 Best Integrations to Supercharge Zendesk Automation

Zendesk Automation can revolutionize your customer support. Learn how to automate tasks and improve satisfaction with ChatBee's AI solution.

Aug 23, 2024

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19 Best Integrations to Supercharge Zendesk Automation

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A customer submits a support request. Then, a few seconds later, they get a response, not from a human, but from a bot. A few minutes later, they receive another automated message that resolves their issue. Only after that do they hear from a natural person, a support team member who is already up to speed on their case. This is the power of Zendesk automation. This kind of smooth, speedy support is what customers expect today. Automating customer support with tools like Zendesk can help your team improve customer service KPIs.

This blog will explore Zendesk automation, its benefits, and how it works. You’ll also learn how ChatBee’s AI customer support solution can help you optimize your customer support and enhance the overall customer experience.

What Is Zendesk and What Is Its Purpose?

Zendesk is one of the most recognizable names in customer support software. The platform helps businesses manage customer interactions from a central location. You can connect Zendesk to various communication channels, so when customers reach out, their inquiries are automatically turned into tickets.

This way, every issue is tracked and organized for fast resolution. In addition to email and social media, Zendesk also supports:

Live chat

Voice

Omnichannel Ticketing

The omnichannel ticketing system that Zendesk boasts improves both the customer and agent experience. Customers get better service because their requests are handled quickly, and support teams are more efficient because they aren’t working in silos. Instead, they have a central hub that organizes all the incoming queries, no matter the channel.

What is Zendesk Used For?

Zendesk is primarily used to serve, support, and engage customers. It helps companies manage all customer interactions in one place for more efficient customer service. The software turns all customer inquiries into manageable tickets to ensure every issue is:

Tracked

Resolved promptly

Zendesk, the well-known end-to-end customer service solution, offers omnichannel support, a self-service platform, integrated analytics capabilities, and much more.

What Are Zendesk Automations & How They Work

Automations are tools within the Zendesk platform that can be used to change ticket properties or send email notifications. Like triggers, they are a type of custom business rule. There are some key differences users need to be aware of when setting up workflows:

Automations

Triggers

Triggers are event-based business rules. This means they perform actions when a ticket that meets set criteria or conditions is:

Created

Updated

Time-Based Automations

These actions fire immediately after the event (ticket creation or update). Automations are time-based business rules. Although they also perform actions when tickets meet certain conditions or criteria, they do so regularly. Once every hour, the automations will run on open tickets that meet their set criteria.

While triggers are useful for starting a workflow or set of actions, automations are helpful for reminders, closing tickets after a specific period, or reprioritizing tasks.

Essential Facts for Automation

We’ve gathered some essential facts about automation. Automations are time-based; they take action when a time-event occurs, not immediately after a ticket is created or updated. Automations run every hour but are not necessarily top-of-the-hour; they will start at some point during the hour. Automations do not run or fire on closed tickets. Automation must contain a true condition only once or an action that nullifies at least one of the conditions.

Automations, like all business rules, must be smaller than 65kb. All active automations must be unique. They can have some overlapping conditions, but they can’t be identical. You can have a maximum of 500 active automations at a time.

How Do Zendesk Automations Work?

Zendesk automation works by automatically reviewing open tickets that meet its criteria once every hour and triggering actions for those who still qualify. Unless automations are edited or removed, they will continue to review and perform their set actions every hour (not necessarily at the beginning of each hour). This means that to work most effectively, automations need to include either:

An action that cancels or replaces one of the set conditions

A condition that is only true once

Conditional Automations

When you’re looking to change the properties of tickets, setting an action to replace the set conditions is the most effective approach. If no action is taken on a ticket for a certain number of hours, you might want to change the ticket priority condition from normal to high. This can be done by combining the hours since created condition with the ticket priority condition in automation.

Suppose you’re looking to send email notifications or reminders to team members. In that case, using an actual condition only once will mean that this action can be automated without being repeated. If you use the hours since….is condition, you can set a notification or reminder to be sent to an agent after a certain time period has passed.

Tag-Based Workflows

If you’re building out workflows or setting conditions, you must be careful when using the hours since open is condition. This is because automations run every hour but not necessarily at the top of each hour. So, if you have an ‘hours since open is’ condition on your ticket and the condition isn’t met before the automation runs, it will never be considered true, and the workflow won’t function.

Using tags is an alternative way to ensure these workflows function correctly. When the automation checks a ticket, it will add a tag and act if a tag is not present and not perform the action if one is. This will allow the workflow to operate without repeating on an hourly loop.

How Can You Use Zendesk Automation?

Just like triggers, Zendesk automations are helpful when setting up business rules to deal with mundane or repetitive tasks. They can also help you optimize your sales pipeline or improve customer service. Some instances where automations are most commonly used include:

Letting assigned agents or teams know when a ticket has been unresolved or unassigned after several hours.

We remind teams of unassigned tickets via email or SMS, automatically close tickets after a certain number of days, and notify teams or agents about ticket modifications outside of office hours.

Sometimes, a workflow may require you to use a trigger and automation together. Here is one example of how you can notify external targets.

Examples of Using Automations

Automations help you manage your workflow and improve performance and customer satisfaction by alerting you to tickets that remain unresolved and need to be escalated. Here are some uses for automations:

Notifying agents when an assigned ticket remains unresolved for x number of hours.

Notifying agent groups when a new ticket remains unassigned for x hours.

Notifying the assigned agent after x hours when the requester has updated a pending ticket.

Closing tickets x number of days after they have been set to solve.

Finding abandoned tickets that have yet to be updated for specific days.

Sending an SMS text message when an urgent ticket has been unattended for more than 48 hours (using a target with automation; see Using targets in automations and triggers).

Close Ticket Automation

Zendesk provides an automation that demonstrates one of these common uses. This automation closes tickets 96 hours after they have been solved (96 hours is a support best practice for the minimum time a ticket should remain solved before it is closed). When the automation runs, any tickets that meet these criteria are closed.

The close action looks like this: Once a ticket is closed, it can't be modified anymore, and automations will no longer affect it.

This example also illustrates an important rule of automations: an automation must contain an action that cancels a condition.

The status equals the status cancels solved condition equals closed action. If there were no canceling action, the automation would continue to fire in an endless loop because the status would remain solved (not closed) and continue to meet the condition criteria.

Ensuring Your Automation Only Runs Once

Automations check every hour to see if their conditions are met. So automation must include one of the following:

An action that nullifies at least one of the conditions

A condition that can be confirmed only once

If there is no nullifying action or true-only-once condition, the unmodified conditions will continue to be met, and the automation will continue to fire in an endless loop. An example of a commonly nullified condition is a ticket priority condition. A ticket priority condition is usually paired with an hours since created condition.

If the ticket priority is Normal (Ticket: Priority > Is > Normal), the condition is nullified by including an action that changes the priority to High (Ticket: Priority > High) or some other priority.

One-Time Conditions

An example of a condition that can only be true once is the hours since open is condition. This condition doesn't require a nullifying action. If the hours since the ticket is open is 4 hours (Ticket: Hours since created > Is > 4), then the condition will only be true on one check. On the next check, the hours since open will be 5, and the condition will be false.

It’s essential to be thoughtful when using an hours since is condition. Because of the slight variation of run times for automations in any given hour, it’s unlikely but possible for an “is” condition to never evaluate to true. This situation is more likely for larger accounts or accounts with many automations. For details, see Using the Hours since condition in automations. An easy way to cancel a condition is to add a tag.

Tag-Based Check

The automation would check for a tag; if it is not present, it would add the tag to the ticket and perform any actions. The automation will not act again if the tag is on the ticket.

Understanding When Automations Run

All automations run once every hour on non-closed tickets to see if conditions are met. They execute, or fire, on tickets where conditions are met.

Note: Tickets not closed but have had more than 100 automation audits occur during the ticket's life are excluded from the hourly automations run.

Automation Scheduling

To view events for a ticket, see Viewing a ticket's audit trail. Your automations run every hour, but that does not necessarily mean top-of-the-hour. Your automations will start running at some point during the hour, 5 minutes after, or thirty-eight minutes after the hour. The entire time it takes your automations to run and execute depends on how many automations and tickets there are to process.

Automations run again at some point during the subsequent hour. Each automation can act on a maximum of 1,000 tickets each hour. Suppose there are more than 1,000 tickets where conditions are met for automation. In that case, 1,000 tickets will be processed in that hour, and the remaining tickets will be processed during the following hour if conditions are still met or the hour after that until all tickets are checked.

Automation Optimization

On huge jobs, it may take many hours to work through all of the tickets that meet the conditions of that automation. An extended automation cycle increases the chances for agents to be making routine ticket updates at the same time as automations are running. To prevent ticket update collisions, Zendesk automations double-check the state of the ticket at the time of the update instead of just acting based on the state of the ticket when the automation cycle started.

Automations only run on accounts with everyone signing in within the last 14 days to prevent unnecessary activity.

Understanding When Automation Actions Fire

Automations run in order every hour and fire on tickets where conditions are met. Each automation fires—that is, takes action on a ticket—when it runs, and conditions are met. That means the ticket is updated each time an automation fires during the cycle, so not all automations see the ticket in the same state.

The actions of one automation can affect another automation in the same hour. Consider you have three automations:

Automation #1: If the status exceeds 48 hours, notify the Assignee.

Automation #2: If status is Pending greater than 48 hours, change the priority to High.

Automation #3: If priority is High, notify the Escalation group.

Automation Order

Automations run and fire (if conditions are met) in order. So, if you have a ticket pending for 48 hours, when automations run in the 49th hour, Automation #1 runs and fires, then #2 runs and fires. After Automation #2 fires, the ticket is updated to High priority. This means that when Automation #3 runs, the condition is met, so Automation #3 will fire.

As mentioned previously, automations, unlike triggers, do not execute an action immediately after a ticket satisfies the conditions. And automations do not perform precisely one hour after conditions are met. For automations, ticket updates depend on when your automations run each hour.

Time-Based Events

Let's consider an example where the action will happen when the automation runs. Suppose a ticket update at 10:15 am satisfies the conditions for an automation to send an email notification. If your automations run at 11:10, the notification will be sent 55 minutes after the conditions are met. If your automations run at 10:20, the notification will be sent 5 minutes after the conditions are met.

Let's look at an example with a time-based hours-since condition. Time-based conditions must be satisfied within a window or after a minimum time. The first time an automation runs after an event occurs counts as zero hours since that event happened. Suppose you have an automation that acts two hours after a ticket is solved, and a ticket is solved at 9:15 a.m.

Time-Based Firing

If your automations run at 10:10 am, the ticket has been solved for only 55 minutes, and the automation will not fire. Automations run again at 11:10 pm, and the ticket was solved 1 hour and 55 minutes, which the automation counts as one hour. Automations run again at 12:10 pm; the ticket has been solved in 2 hours and 55 minutes, which the automation counts as two hours. This means the condition is met, and the automation will fire and update the ticket.

AI Optimization with ChatBees

ChatBees optimizes RAG with our AI customer support software for internal operations such as customer support, employee support, etc. It provides the most accurate response and easily integrates into workflows in a low-code, no-code manner.

ChatBees' agentic framework automatically chooses the best strategy to improve the quality of responses for these use cases. This improves predictability/accuracy, enabling these operations teams to handle more queries. No DevOps is required to deploy and maintain the service. Try our AI customer support software today to 10x your customer support operations.

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Ticket Resolution

Automated Ticketing System

Customer Service Knowledge Base

Slack for Customer Support

Ticket Triage

AI For IT Support

Ticket Handling Best Practices

Automated Email Response Customer Service

AI Ticketing System

What Is the Difference Between Triggers and Automations in Zendesk?

Triggers in Zendesk are event-based actions that occur immediately when certain conditions are met, such as assigning a ticket to a specific agent when it's created. Automations are time-based and execute actions after a certain period, such as reminding agents of pending tickets after 24 hours.

Zendesk triggers are powerful automation tools that streamline and enhance customer support processes. These triggers are event-driven and respond to specific conditions or events in real-time. When these conditions are met, triggers automatically execute predefined actions, eliminating the need for manual intervention and ensuring timely responses to customer inquiries.

Proactive Triggers

In Zendesk, triggers act as a proactive mechanism to address customer concerns and maintain service quality. They can be configured to perform various actions, such as:

Sending automated email responses

Assigning tickets to specific agents

Changing ticket properties based on the criteria you establish

Triggers are particularly valuable for handling urgent or time-sensitive issues, as they ensure immediate attention and resolution when the triggering conditions are met.

Automations in Zendesk: The Steady Routine Workers of Customer Support

Zendesk automations are time-based tools, unlike triggers. They perform actions at scheduled intervals rather than in real-time. Automations are typically used to handle repetitive, non-urgent tasks or to manage ticket follow-ups.

This helps to reduce manual effort and improve efficiency. These actions are executed automatically, making it possible to:

Send follow-up emails

Escalate unresolved issues

Categorize and prioritize tickets based on predefined criteria

Efficient Automation

Automations are especially beneficial for managing large volumes of tickets and ensuring a:

Consistent

Organized workflow

They are ideal for handling routine maintenance, updates, or long-term customer interactions that don’t require immediate attention. Besides automations in Zendesk themselves, Knots’ Zendesk apps cover a wide range of other automation tasks.

Triggers vs. Automations: What's the Difference?

In Zendesk, triggers and automations have unique roles in streamlining customer support processes. We can distinguish between these two tools by considering their purpose, timing of actions, visibility, and whether they operate based on events or time intervals.

Purpose

Triggers are designed to respond immediately to specific events, making them ideal for addressing urgent customer issues. If a customer submits a high-priority ticket, a trigger can automatically assign it to a specialized agent for swift resolution.

Automations, on the other hand, are focused on managing routine, non-urgent tasks. Consider a scenario where you want to send a follow-up satisfaction survey to customers two days after their issue has been resolved. Automation can handle this by running at specific time intervals.

Event / Time-Based

Triggers are event-driven. They activate when a predetermined condition occurs, such as a customer’s request for a refund. This event-based nature ensures that actions are executed in real time, improving responsiveness.

Automations, by contrast, are time-based. They carry out actions based on schedules and elapsed time, like closing tickets that have been unresolved for a defined period. This means automations operate independently of specific customer interactions, allowing for better management of repetitive tasks.

Time of Action

Triggers act immediately when specific conditions are met. When a customer’s inquiry meets the criteria for high priority, the trigger responds immediately by assigning it to the relevant agent. This ensures quick responses to customer inquiries and issues.

Automations act on a predefined schedule. An automation can be set to send out a weekly report summarizing ticket statistics every Friday, regardless of when individual tickets were submitted.

Visibility

Triggers are more visible to your support team since they respond instantly to events, providing:

Transparency

Immediate feedback

Automations are less visible since they work in the background. They can handle routine tasks without constant monitoring, freeing your team to focus on more critical issues. They can silently tag and categorize tickets without immediately altering their status.

Understanding these differences lets you choose the right tool for your customer support workflow's needs. It helps you strike a balance between:

Immediate responsiveness

Efficient task automation

Combining Triggers and Automation to Streamline Your Workflow

Combining triggers and automations in Zendesk can streamline your workflow even further! Triggers can act as catalysts, initiating immediate actions when specific events occur. Once triggered, automations can then take over for follow-up or scheduled tasks.

Here are three practical examples of how these tools can work in tandem:

1. When Prioritizing Urgent Tasks

You can set up a trigger automatically assigns high-priority tickets to specialized agents in real time. Then, automation should periodically review open tickets and escalate those that have remained unresolved for a specific duration. This way, you ensure that urgent issues are promptly addressed while preventing potential bottlenecks in your support queue.

2. When Sending Follow-Up And Gathering Feedback

After resolving a customer support ticket, use a trigger to send an immediate thank-you email. Simultaneously, automation should be created to send a follow-up survey to gather feedback a few days later. This combination enhances customer satisfaction by acknowledging their support experience and obtaining valuable insights for process improvement.

3. When Categorizing Tickets And Creating Reports

Employ a trigger to automatically tag incoming tickets based on specific keywords or criteria. Then, automation will be created to generate weekly or monthly reports summarizing the following:

Ticket statistics

Trends

Agent performance

This integration helps maintain organized ticket categorization while providing valuable data for strategic decision-making.

How to Set Up Triggers and Automations: A Guide

Configuring triggers and automations in Zendesk is a straightforward process. Follow these step-by-step guides to set up both triggers and automations effectively:

Setting Up Triggers in Zendesk

Log In To Your Zendesk Account

Access your Zendesk admin dashboard using your credentials.

Navigate To The Admin Panel

Click on the gear icon in the lower-left corner to access the admin settings.

Select Business Rules

Under the Settings section, choose Business Rules and then click on Triggers.

Create A New Trigger

Click the Add Trigger button to begin configuring your new trigger.

Define The Conditions

Set the conditions that trigger your action, such as ticket status or requester information.

Specify The Actions

Choose the actions you want the trigger to perform when the specified conditions are met, such as sending notifications or changing ticket properties.

Save The Trigger

After configuring your trigger, click Create to save it.

Activate The Trigger

Make sure to enable the trigger to work as intended.

Setting Up Automations in Zendesk

Log In To Your Zendesk Account

Access your Zendesk admin dashboard using your credentials.

Navigate To The Admin Panel

Click on the gear icon in the lower-left corner to access the admin settings.

Select Business Rules

Under the Settings section, choose Business Rules and then click on Automations.

Create A New Automation

Click the Add Automation button to start creating your new automation.

Define The Schedule

Specify when you want the automation to run daily, weekly, or at custom intervals.

Set Conditions (Optional)

You can choose to add conditions to determine which tickets should be affected by the automation.

Configure The Actions

Determine the automation's actions, such as sending reminders or changing ticket properties.

Save The Automation

Once configuring the automation, click Create to save it.

Activate The Automation

Ensure it is active so it will run according to the specified schedule.

Important: Test your triggers and automations to ensure they work as intended. Zendesk provides testing options to help you verify that your rules are correctly configured and that you are performing the desired actions.

What Are the Benefits of Using Zendesk Automation?

Automated customer service can save agents time by automatically tagging tickets and intelligently routing them to the correct agent based on skill, channel, priority, and availability—eliminating manual ticket routing. Automation features can help your team members effectively manage their workflow and keep things moving quickly.

You can set up an automation to close tickets four days after they’ve been resolved. Other automated service solutions like AI chatbots can handle recurring customer questions without human intervention, reducing costs as your support agents dedicate their time to the customers who need it most.

Deliver Fast, 24/7 Support

When it comes to good customer service, speed is king. Customers today expect to get what they want quickly. If your response times don’t keep up with your customers’ busy lives, you risk giving them a negative impression of your customer service. Automated customer service enables you to deliver fast, 24/7 support.

24/7 Support

Unlike human agents, AI chatbots never have to sleep, so your customers can get answers to their questions whenever they want. In addition to answering customer questions, automated customer service tools can proactively engage with your customers.

“Bots can help you get ahead of customer asks by reaching out with meaningful, timely, and personalized interactions that drive engagement and retention and increase sales and conversion rates,” says Lauren Hakim, group product marketing manager at Zendesk.

Gain Greater Insights

Another benefit of automated customer service is automated reporting and analytics. Automated service tools eliminate repetitive tasks and busy work, instantly providing you with customer service reports and insights that you can use to improve your business. Automated customer service software can automatically combine customer support and sales data across channels.

As a result, you gain visibility into all customer interactions and get the details you need to make informed decisions. Automated customer service solutions allow you to easily report on your success, whether using customizable charts or leveraging pre-built dashboards automatically populated with key customer service metrics.

AI Customer Service Software

Ticketing System Workflow

Help Desk Process

Hubspot Ticketing System

AI Customer Service Agent

Real-Time Agent Assistance

Ticket Management System

Digital Customer Service Tools

Slack Ticketing System

Service Desk Automation

Customer Service Automation Software

Help Desk Analysis

Automated Customer Support

Help Desk Automation

How to Create and Manage a Zendesk Automation for Time-Based Events

Setting up automations in Zendesk is simple and can significantly improve your customer support operations. Here's how to do it.

Create a New Automation

To create a new automation:

Go to the Admin Center

Click Objects and rules in the sidebar

Select Business rules and then Automations

Click Add automation

Name Your Automation

After you create a new automation, the first thing you need to do is name it. Give your automation a clear, descriptive title so you and your agents know exactly what it does.

Set the Automation Conditions

Your automation will need some conditions. Conditions are statements that must be true for an automation to run. There are two conditions:

Triggers, which activate the automation

Actions, which define what the automation does

When setting conditions for your automation, consider what you want to happen when the time-based task reaches a certain threshold. You should notify someone if a ticket has been waiting for a specific response for too long.

Set the Automation Actions

Your automation will need some conditions. Conditions are statements that must be true for an automation to run. There are two conditions:

Triggers, which activate the automation

Actions, which define what the automation does

Preview Your Automation

Once you create your conditions and actions, you can preview your automation. This allows you to check for accuracy and see how it will function before it goes live. Click Preview match to view a list of tickets that meet your set conditions.

Save Your Automation

Once you’ve completed setting up your automation, click Create automation to save your work. Your new automation will now appear in the list of active automations and start working behind the scenes immediately.

AI-Powered Support

ChatBees optimizes RAG with our AI customer support software for internal operations like customer support, employee support, etc. This software provides the most accurate response and easily integrates into workflows in a low-code, no-code manner. ChatBees' agentic framework automatically chooses the best strategy to improve the quality of responses for these use cases.

This improves predictability/accuracy, enabling these operations teams to handle more queries. No DevOps is required to deploy and maintain the service. Try our AI customer support software today to 10x your customer support operations.

Get started for free, with no credit card required. Sign in with Google and start your journey with us today!

How To Create a Zendesk Automation And Deflect Simple Tickets (for Free)

Automating simple tickets using Zendesk begins with setting up your help center so customers can resolve their issues independently. This process doesn’t require the Advanced AI add-on but is essential for effective self-service support.

To enable Help Center, navigate to Zendesk Products > Guide > Get Started. Your Help Center is structured into articles, sections, and categories, and you can customize it to apply your branding. Then, you can begin creating content and publishing it.

Adjust Standard Zendesk Automations to Support Self-Service

Zendesk offers native automations that help your CS team maintain and track SLAs for transactional support requests (like a change of address or account lockouts). You can enable these by navigating to Admin Center, clicking Objects and Rules, then Business Rules > Automations.

Make sure you enable these automations and adjust them if needed:

Close ticket 4 days after it’s solved: This automaton closes a ticket four days after its status is set to solve. You can change the time to more or less than 4 days.

Pending notification: This automation is turned off by default and sends a notification to the user if its ticket is pending for over 24 hours or 5 days. You can adjust the email notification to inform them that the ticket is pending or requires an extra step, like the user providing feedback.

Request customer satisfaction rating: This automation sends the customer satisfaction survey after a ticket is closed. It’s only available for Suite Growth plans and above.

Set Up Built-In Zendesk Triggers to Automate Simple Tickets

Triggers are automations that execute actions when a ticket meets specific conditions. You can use them to:

Notify customers

Route tickets

Manage SLAs

You can create a ticket by navigating to Admin Center, then clicking Objects and Rules > Business rules > Triggers > Add triggers. When adding a trigger, you must define the conditions under which it will fire and the actions that will be triggered. You can use triggers to notify customers when their ticket is updated or to direct a ticket to the appropriate team member based on conditions like a tag or a subject.

Build a Conversation Bot to Deflect Simple Tickets

You can use the bot builder to customize a chatbot that guides customers to a resolution. Chatbots can be used to:

Welcome customers

Gather data

Route conversations

Notify of updates

The bot builder allows you to design conversation flows for your bot. Check the Zendesk help page to Create answers and use answer templates. You can add multiple step types to your flow, and each step represents a message that the bot sends to the customer.

Bot Building Steps

Here’s a list of the steps you can use in the builder, with a link to the Zendesk help page on configuring each step:

Send a message with a piece of text

Present up to 10 quick replies as options for the user to interact‍

Show up to 6 help center articles to the customer‍

Add a carousel with up to 10 informational panels

Ask for details and add the information to the generated ticket

Ask if a question has been resolved‍

Make an API call

Escalate the conversation to an agent (or use Next Matter to trigger a workflow)‍

Add conditional logic to the answer flow

Use your business hours as a condition for the answer flow‍

Link to another answer in the same bot

Enable Email Auto-Replies to Suggest Articles and Self-Serve Tickets

All Zendesk plans also allow you to send auto-replies via email that suggest articles for solving a ticket. You can build an autoreply by creating a trigger for automatic ticket updates, then configuring:

A trigger condition: Launch the trigger as soon as a user submits a ticket

A trigger action: You can choose Autoreply with articles, creating an email (with a subject and body) using placeholders that include suggested articles.

Some of the placeholders you can use are {{autoreply.article_list}} (which uses AI to show three articles that match the ticket request) and {{autoreply.first_article.body}} (which displays the entire body of the first matching article within the email). You can see more placeholders on this Zendesk help page.

Use Suggested Macros for CS Agents Dealing with Simple Tickets

Macros are standard responses and actions that your agents can use repetitively to solve support requests. You can create macros for tasks like changing the assignee, adding followers, updating ticket fields, or adding ticket attachments.

As part of Zendesk AI, you can enable suggested macros and see actions that match the ticket you’re managing. I can help you with creating macros, too!

Automating Complex Tickets & Escalations with Next Matter

If we move from a simple ticket, like checking the status of an order, to a complex one, like returning a product, automation becomes increasingly complex, too. To define a complex ticket, you can look at the criteria we use for complex processes:

Applied to this example

A product return can require input from multiple team members

An integration with a CRM or e-commerce system

Several communication stages

Third-party suppliers and couriers

You must use Next Matter to automate complex tickets involving multiple stakeholders. You can request a demo here. Once your account is set up, visit the Zendesk Marketplace to get the Next Matter sidebar app. Then, navigate to Company > Integrations > Connect to Zendesk in your Next Matter portal.

Next Matter Setup

You must build the actual Next Matter workflow that you’ll trigger from Zendesk. To automate product returns, you must create a workflow with all steps up to the ticket resolution. You can use a guide like Building your first Next Matter workflow, but we’ll go with a more straightforward approach. Some workflows, like a product return, are already built in the automations library, so you simply click on Use template.

Workflow Triggers

It’s time to make a ticket trigger that automated workflow. You can use the Next Matter sidebar widget when viewing a ticket:

Search for the workflow you’d like to start

Press Link to run the workflow for this specific ticket

Press Open to see the actual workflow in Next Matter

It’s time to start a workflow instance from a Zendesk ticket. To do this, ensure that the workflow's first step (on Next Matter) contains a form field where you can write the Zendesk ticket ID. After this, you can use Next Matter to fully track and resolve the ticket.

Extra Steps for Advanced AI Add-On Users

A few exciting automation tools within the Advanced AI add-on expand the features already built within Zendesk AI. The add-on is priced at $50 per agent/month. You can only buy it if your plan is Suite, Support Professional, or above. Let’s look at the features it includes:

Automatically Triage Tickets

Intelligent Triage is the most exciting feature within the Advanced AI add-on. It uses AI to predict customer intent, language, and sentiment from your:

Tickets

Comments

To start using Intelligent Triage, navigate to Objects and rules within the Admin center, then Business rules > Intelligent Triage.

AI Predictions

After enabling this feature, you will see new fields within all your tickets. Here’s what AI predicts:

The language in which the ticket is written

The sentiment (how the customer feels) for the ticket, ranging from Very Positive to Very Negative

The intent (what the ticket is about) can belong to taxonomies like Account, Billing, Finance, Misc, Order, Sell, Service, Software, and more.

You also see the confidence level for the values in the three fields above. Intelligent triage opens up lots of possibilities. You could combine this with a trigger that starts a Next Matter workflow if a Very Negative ticket arises for a customer you identify as a key account, routing it directly to a senior CS agent.

Enable Advanced Auto-Replies

You can also set up advanced autoreplies if you have enabled intelligent triage. These autoreplies differ from the standard ones (which only provide predefined replies) in that they can deliver fully customized responses based on the following:

Predicted language

Intent

Sentiment

You can use advanced autoreplies in combination with triggers, which will now display the Autoreply action. You must select some conditions (e.g., deliver a specific autoreply for Very Negative sentiment and Account intent) and write the reply message yourself.

Extra Steps for Early Access Program (EAP) Users

If you join the Zendesk Generative AI EAP, you get access to message and call summaries. This exciting feature will become available only within the Advanced AI add-on when it leaves the EAP program, so I suggest you try it. With the GenAI features, you can summarize, expand, or enhance the comments added to a ticket, which helps you in several ways.

Ticket Summarization

Summarizing a ticket helps your agents handle it quickly. After joining the EAP, you simply have to click Intelligence within the sidebar for a ticket, then Summarize the conversation. Expanding or enhancing is available within the composer when replying to a comment. You can either develop your prompt (and turn it into a full message) or make it friendlier or more formal. Another exciting feature within the GenAI EAP is call summaries.

You can enable them by going to Settings within your Talk channel, then enabling Transcribe and summarize calls using Generative AI. After this, all recorded calls will display summaries and transcripts as internal notes for your agents.

19 Integrations to Supercharge Zendesk Automation and Elevate Your Support Game

1. ChatBees: Elevate Internal Operations and Improve Response Quality

ChatBees optimizes RAG with our AI customer support software for internal operations like customer support, employee support, etc.. This software provides the most accurate response and easily integrates into workflows in a low-code, no-code manner. ChatBees' agentic framework automatically chooses the best strategy to improve the quality of responses for these use cases.

Get started for free, with no credit card required. Sign in with Google and start your journey with us today!

2. Zapier for Automating Manual Tasks

The enemy of speed is leaning on too many manual processes. Zapier (and tools like it) help you level up your automation game by opening a world of integration possibilities to customer support teams.

3. Shopify for Displaying Order Details in Zendesk

What do you get when you connect Shopify and Zendesk? A unified business display where all your customer data lives. With this connection, your customer support team can access the necessary data without toggling between tabs. Once queried, Zendesk gathers key customer details from Shopify, including:

Recent orders

Cancellations

Billing and shipping information

Common Issues

This makes it a lot easier to process common customer support issues like:

Changing addresses

Refunds

Order cancellations

Zendesk also offers a Live Chat feature you can add to your Shopify store so customers can get help from support teams in real-time. Think of Zendesk as your chief customer data manager. Once it queries your customer data, quickly resolving customer issues becomes second nature.

4. Trello for Creating Tasks from Conversations

With this combo, you can create tasks in Trello from conversations in Zendesk. This Trello Power-Up saves you time, energy, and much toggling between tabs.

Once integrated, the Trello widget will appear within your Zendesk dashboard, so you can add tickets to existing cards or create a new one. You can get as specific as what board, list, or card you want your ticket attached. As teams work through tasks, you know they’ll have any Zendesk attachments they might need to do their best work.

5. Census for Syncing Customer Data

Census is a tool that automates your customer data pipeline from end to end without an engineering team. With its highly visual interface, Census enables users to:

Write queries

Map fields

Send customer data to your everyday marketing tools.

When Census automates your data processes, this includes Zendesk. With an easy-to-use integration, it seamlessly works to put you in control of your data so that you can:

Create actionable enhanced reports

Update your customer list

Improve your ticket routing process by automatically ranking them by importance

Decrease the amount of time it takes your team to resolve an issue

6. Geckoboard for Better Metrics

Your customer support team works hard to ensure that every support issue is answered to keep customers returning. But how can you get a glimpse of your customer support KPIs throughout the day to see how you’re doing?

You can use Zendesk with Geckoboard to do that. Geckoboard is a tool that creates dashboards with your company’s key metrics so everyone on your team can view this crucial data. This integration allows you to display ticket metrics to agents so they stay in the know. At a glance, they’ll know if they’re falling behind in one support area or excelling in another.

Dashboard Insights

Geckoboard enables you to create scannable dashboards that are easy to read. Once you connect your Zendesk account, support teams can get insight into key performance indicators like:

CSAT

Ticket volume

Response times

Unassigned tickets

Number of resolved tickets

Number of new tickers

SLAs achieved

7. TypeGenie for Lightning-Fast Response Speed

What do support teams spend a lot of time doing? Typing. Thankfully, Zendesk-friendly apps like TypeGenie can speed up the process. TypeGenie quickens the customer support process with autocompletion features that help teams write sentences faster with a unified brand voice.

Much of the grunt work that goes into customer support involves writing many of the same responses. With TypeGenie, you can predict repetitive sentences, so your team spends less time on each issue without sacrificing the benefits of live chat. Best of all, the sentence completions work in a handful of languages, including:

English

Spanish

French

German

Dutch

Swedish

8. Email Tracking for, Well, Tracking Emails

One of the best things businesses can do for their customer support workflow is to ensure it’s infused with as much visibility as possible. This can include easy access to ticket history or the ability to look up key customer data from anywhere.

Email Tracking

It can also look like tracking the delivery of email responses, which is precisely what the Email tracking integration was built to do. With email tracking, teams can:

View email read receipts

Generate downloadable email reports

Tag specific tickets by opens or unopens

Track specific link opens

Get automated real-time updates on customer interactions with your emails

Comply with GDPR and CCPA requirements

Installing Email tracking is easy to do with a one-click install process. It’s also available in both

Desktop

Mobile versions

9. ChargeDesk for Managing Payments

With the ChargeDesk integration, you can manage payment providers like Braintree, WooCommerce, Zuora, or PayPal, all within Zendesk. One of the most common tasks customer support teams deal with is:

Charging

Refunding

Cancelling orders

Payment Management

With ChargeDesk, you can handle these processes from one unified dashboard without having to do any additional coding. As you streamline your customer support process and enable all payment platforms, you can use ChargeDesk’s API and custom callback features to ensure a seamless payment processing dashboard for everyone on your support team. ChargeDesk enables teams to:

Look through the customer’s entire billing history

Send invoices

Generate payment pages

Add charges and subscriptions

Apply coupons

Send payment reminders

Securely update the payment information on file

10. Geckoboard

Geckoboard is a real-time KPIs dashboard that helps you track and visualize Zendesk data. In addition to displaying quantitative data, Geckoboard lets you incorporate qualitative feedback into your dashboards by including CSAT comments.

Each dashboard can also glance at the number of new, closed, or unassigned Zendesk support tickets. If you have omnichannel routing set up on your Zendesk account, Geckoboard will even show you agent availability and workload distribution across different channels.

11. eWebinar

eWebinar is an automated webinar platform that lets you create your presentation once and turn it into an evergreen asset available on-demand or set to run on a recurring schedule. It’s a poorly kept secret that webinars are hands down the best way to onboard and train users.

Disclaimer: Only some companies need webinars as part of their customer success strategy. Onboarding and training webinars are essential for those with complex products although impossible to scale without automation.

Webinar Training

Onboarding and training webinars create a two-way conversation between the user and the customer success manager, showing them the ropes and allowing them to answer any questions in real time.

12. Klaus

Klaus is an AI-powered quality management platform that automates the QA process to improve average handle times, reduce cost per ticket, and save time. The solution analyzes every customer conversation to evaluate your customer service team comprehensively.

Klaus automatically scores each conversation to measure performance over time and highlight trends. Its unified KPI dashboard shows IQS, CSAT, FCR, and NPS metrics in one place to give you an accessible overview of all data.

13. Nicereply

Nicereply is a customer experience platform with a survey tool built specifically for Zendesk. To maximize response rates, you can trigger a survey after tickets are resolved, embed it at the bottom of outbound support emails, or enable both.

You can use these surveys to measure:

Customer satisfaction

Customer effort

Net promoter scores

Admins can then analyze trends while monitoring each agent's average CSAT, CES, and NPS scores and the ratings they've received.

14. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform that integrates with Zendesk to turn messages from Facebook or Twitter into Zendesk tickets. With a single click, you can create tickets that include the entire conversation history and any attachments the customer has sent to your Hootsuite inbox.

Ticket Creation

Tip: When creating Zendesk tickets from Hootsuite, first go into contact attributes to verify that the customer's correct email is saved before generating the new record.

Once the ticket has been created, a link will be embedded in the top-right corner of the conversation so you can view it in Zendesk at any time. You'll also be able to update tickets, add comments, or leave internal notes for other team members.

15. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email marketing platform with a two-way integration with Zendesk to help you monitor platform activity. Your support team will be able to see which Mailchimp email campaigns a customer has received before opening a Zendesk support ticket.

Campaign Management

Warning: The separate Mailchimp Campaign integration doesn't work and refuses to load. If you'd like to manage your email campaigns within Zendesk, consider alternatives like Proactive Campaigns.

You'll also be able to review the exact actions the customer took on each Mailchimp campaign while handling their Zendesk ticket. The integration even lets you manage their mailing list subscriptions to take the customer off specific campaigns at their request.

16. PandaDoc

PandaDoc is a document automation platform with a Zendesk integration that helps you streamline workflows. For instance, you can use the integration to auto-populate PandaDoc fields using Zendesk data pulled from:

Support tickets

Customer information

You'll also be able to create documents using PandaDoc templates and then send them to customers for their electronic signature without leaving your Zendesk account. You can also add payment options to PandaDoc documents — which is helpful when dealing with failed payment support tickets.

17. Shredder

Shredder is a Zendesk app developed by Sparkly to help teams manage spam and process suspended tickets. You can bulk delete suspended tickets to get rid of them or search through them using filters to find tickets that shouldn't be there.

You can also recover a suspended ticket and add an internal comment so an agent sees it. You can do this in bulk or filter by tickets sent to a specific support email address.

Once you've cleared your backlog, Shredder lets you set automated processing rules to handle suspended tickets moving forward. This lets you automatically delete or recover suspended tickets based on several factors — such as:

Sender

Recipient

Subject

Content

18. Trello

Trello is a project management tool with a two-way Zendesk integration. When installed on your Zendesk account, you can click on the widget to attach Zendesk tickets to an existing Trello card or generate a new one.

Trello Integration

You can click on the Zendesk Power-Up widget within Trello to attach views or tickets to cards without having to switch tabs. All tags are also synced between platforms to standardize cross-department collaboration.

One example of how the integration might be used is support teams forwarding bug reports on Zendesk to Trello cards on a Kanban board used by developers. Once developers fix the bug, they can tag the issue as resolved so support can email the customer(s) who submitted the ticket.

19. Jira

Jira is Atlassian's project tracking software, which is two-way integrated with Zendesk. The integration helps bridge the gap between support and development by syncing all real-time data across the two platforms.

Jira Integration

This means that Jira issues and Zendesk tickets always reflect the same data regardless of which team is reviewing them. The integration can also automatically update a Zendesk ticket whenever the status of a linked Jira issue changes.

Creating a Jira issue within Zendesk is as easy as clicking on Create issue, specifying the type of issue, assigning it to a reporter, and selecting which project it should exist within. If you are still looking for the reporter to whom you'd like to assign the issue, just enter their full Jira username.

Use ChatBees’ AI Customer Support Software to 10x Customer Support Operations

ChatBees optimizes retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for internal operations like:

Customer support

Employee support

Our AI customer support software delivers the most accurate responses for these use cases. ChatBees easily integrates into existing workflows in a low-code, no-code manner. RAG works by combining a large language model (LLM) with a database of documents to produce responses that are not only coherent but also factually accurate.

RAG Integration

In customer support, RAG can help generate accurate answers to queries by pulling information from existing resources like:

FAQs

Knowledge bases

Past tickets

ChatBees' agentic framework automatically chooses the best strategy to improve the quality of responses for these use cases. This improves predictability and accuracy, enabling operations teams to handle high volumes of queries easily. No DevOps are required to deploy and maintain the service.

Start Improving Your Customer Support Operations Today

Try our AI customer support software today to 10x your customer support operations. Get started for free; no credit card required. Sign in with Google and get started on your journey with us today!