Automation #15: Automatically Adding Static Secondary Contacts

Rockel is a top-tier client of Zylker traders. Marcus handles communications with Rockel and would like to add Terence, the CTO of Zylker traders to the email conversations. In this case, the emails coming from user address rockel.com should have Terence looped in automatically as the secondary contact.

Like Zylker, many users have the requirement to include secondary contacts while communicating with their customers. Here's for you the custom function to automatically add static secondary contacts while responding to an email.

Prerequisite

1. Enable Secondary Contacts (CCs) in Tickets. 

Navigate to Setup >> Customization >> General Settings >> Tickets >> Secondary Contacts (CCs) in Tickets >> Configure(If not enabled) or Edit Configuration(If enabled), select the department to which you want to implement the automation.

2. Create a Connection

To establish a connection, perform the following steps:

      2.1 Go to Setup and choose Connections under Developer Space.
      2.2 Click Create Connection.
      2.3 Select Zoho Desk under Default Connection.
      2.4 Give the connection name as secondarycontact.
      2.5 Under Scope choose the below scope values:

            Desk.search.READ

            Desk.tickets.READ

            Desk.tickets.UPDATE

            Desk.tickets.CREATE

            Desk.contacts.READ

            Desk.contacts.UPDATE

      2.6 Click Create and Connect.
      2.7 Click Connect and click Accept.
Connection is created successfully.

Create a Workflow Rule

1. Go to Setup, choose Workflows under Automation.

2. Under Workflows, click Rules >> Create Rule.

In the Basic Information section

3. Select Tickets under Module.

4. Enter a Rule Name and Description for the rule.

5. To activate the rule, select the Active checkbox. Click Next.

In the Execute on section, follow these steps:

6. Select Create checkbox to execute this rule every time a new ticket is created. Click Next.

7. In the Criteria section, specify the criteria as "Email contains @zylker.com" and click Next

8. In the Actions section, click the + icon and select New next to Custom Functions.

9. Enter a name and description for the custom function.

10. Under Argument Mapping, give a desired Method Name. Map the arguments as below:  

   10.1 In the Argument Name field, type ticketId, and from the Value drop-down list select Ticket Id under Ticket Information.

   10.2 In the Argument Name field, type ticketContactId, and from the Value drop-down list select Contact Id under Contacts Information.

   10.3 In the Argument Name field, type orgId, and from the Value drop-down list select specify custom value and enter your Zoho Desk. OrgId. To get Zoho Desk OrgId, navigate to Setup >> Developer Space >> API.                  

11. In the script window, insert the Custom Function given below:

1. //--------------- User Input -----------------
2. Email = "STATIC_EMAIL_ID"; // Static email ID
3. deskURL = "https://desk.zoho.com";
4. //-----------------------------------------------
5. logs = Collection();
6. secondaryContacts = list();
7. ticketDetails = zoho.desk.getRecordById(orgId, "tickets", ticketId, "secondarycontact");
8. logs.insert("ticketDetails": ticketDetails);
9. secondaryCC = ticketDetails.get("secondaryContacts");
10. if (secondaryCC != "" && secondaryCC != null)
11. {
12. secondaryContacts = secondaryCC.toList(",");
13. }
14. searchParam = Map();
15. searchParam.put("from", 0);
16. searchParam.put("limit", 1);
17. field1 = "email:" + Email;
18. encryptEmail = zoho.encryption.urlEncode(field1);
19. searchParam.put("field1", encryptEmail);
20. contactSearch = invokeurl
21. [
22. url: deskURL + "/api/v1/contacts/fieldSearch"
23. type: GET
24. parameters: searchParam
25. connection: "secondarycontact"
26. ];
27. logs.insert("contactSearch": contactSearch);
28. if(contactSearch != null && contactSearch.get("data") != null && contactSearch.get("data").size() > 0)
29. {
30. contactId = contactSearch.get("data").get(0).get("id");
31. }
32. else
33. {
34. createConatctParam = Map();
35. lastName = Email.getPrefixIgnoreCase("@");
36. createConatctParam.put("lastName", lastName);
37. createConatctParam.put("email", Email);
38. createContact = invokeurl
39.     [
40.      url: deskURL + "/api/v1/contacts"
41.      type: POST
42.      parameters: createConatctParam.toString()
43.      connection: "secondarycontact"
44.     ];
45. logs.insert("createContact": createContact);
46. contactId = createContact.get("id");
47. }
48. logs.insert("contactId": contactId);
49. if(contactId != null && contactId != ticketContactId)
50. {
51. secondaryContacts.add(contactId);
52. updateParam = Map();
53. updateParam.put("secondaryContacts", secondaryContacts);
54. updateTicket = invokeurl
55.     [
56.         url: deskURL + "/api/v1/tickets/" + ticketId
57.         type: PATCH
58.         parameters: updateParam.toString()
59.         connection: "secondarycontact"
60.     ];
61. logs.insert("updateTicket": updateTicket);
62. }
63. info logs ;

Note: In Line 1 Email = "STATIC_EMAIL_ID", replace the "STATIC_EMAIL_ID" with the email address you prefer to be added in the secondary contact automatically. eg:  Email = "terence@zylker.com"

12. Click Save to save the custom function
13. Click Save again to save the workflow.

We hope this custom function fosters your experience with Zoho Desk. Stay tuned for regular updates and insights on our automation features in this space.

• Topic Participants

• Lydia | Zoho Desk

  

• Megan Kalafut

• Shivani | Zoho Desk

  

• Jaqueline Santos

• Dean Garcia

• Sticky Posts

• Register for Zoho Desk Beta Community

  With the start of the year, we have decided to take a small step in making the life of our customers a little easier. We now have easy access to all our upcoming features and a faster way to request for beta access. We open betas for some of our features

• Share your Zoho Desk story with us!

  Tell us how you use Zoho Desk for your business and inspire others with your story. Be it a simple workflow rule that helps you navigate complex processes or a macro that saves your team a lot of time; share it here and help the community learn and grow with shared knowledge. 

• Tip #1: Learn to pick the right channels

  Mail, live chat, telephony, social media, web forms—there are so many support channels out there. Trying to pick the right channels to offer your customers can get pretty confusing. Emails are most useful when the customer wants to put things on record. However, escalated or complicated issues should not be resolved over email because it's slow and impersonal.  When you need immediate responses, live chat is more suitable. It's also quick and convenient, so it's the go-to channel for small issues. 

• Welcome to Zoho Desk Community - Say hello here!

  Hello everyone! Though we have been here for a while, it’s time to formally establish the Zoho Desk Community; we’re really happy to have you all here! This can be the place where you take a moment to introduce yourself to the rest of the community. We’d love to hear all about you, what you do, what company or industry you work for, how you use Zoho Desk and anything else that you will like to share! Here’s a little about me. I am Chinmayee. I have been associated with Zoho since 2014. I joined here

• Webinar 1: Blueprint for Customer Service

  With the launch of a host of new features in Zoho Desk, we thought it’ll be great to have a few webinars to help our customers make the most of them. We’re starting off with our most talked about feature, Blueprint in Zoho Desk. You can register for the Blueprint webinar here: The webinar will be delivered by our in-house product experts. This is a good opportunity to ask questions to our experts and understand how Blueprint can help you automate your service processes. We look forward to seeing

• Recent Topics

• Automatically updating field(s) of lookup module

  I have a lookup field, which also pulls through the Status field from the linked record. When the lookup is first done, the Status is pulled through - this works perfectly. If that Status is later updated, the lookup field does not update as well. As

• Zoho Commerce and Third-party shipping (MachShip) API integration

  We are implementing a third-party shipping (MachShip) API integration for our Zoho Commerce store and have made significant progress. However, we need guidance on a specific technical challenge. Current Challenge: We need to get the customer input to

• Adding custom "lookup" fields in Zoho Customization

  How can I add a second “lookup” field in Zoho? I’m trying to create another lookup that pulls from my Contacts, but the option doesn’t appear in the module customization sidebar. In many cases, a single work order involves multiple contacts. Ideally,

• Can you import projects into Zoho Projects yet?

  I see some very old posts asking about importing project records into Zoho Projects. But I can't find anything up to date about the topic. Has this functionality been added? Importing tasks is helpful. But we do have a project where importing projects

• Allocating inventory to specific SO's

  Is there a way that allocate inventory to a specific sales order? For example, let's say we have 90 items in stock. Customer 1 orders 100 items. This allocates all 90 items to their order, and they have a back order for the remaining 10 items which could

• Zoho Inventory. Preventing Negative Stock in Sales Orders – Best Practices?

  Dear Zoho Inventory Community, We’re a small business using Zoho Inventory with a team of sales managers. Unfortunately, some employees occasionally overlook stock levels during order processing, leading to negative inventory issues. Is there a way to

• Automation #10 - Auto Assign Ticket based on Keywords

  This is a monthly series designed to help you get the best out of Desk. We take our cue from what's being discussed or asked about the most in our community. Then we find the right use cases that specifically highlight solutions, ideas and tips on optimizing

• Automate attendance tracking with Zoho Cliq Developer Platform

  I wish remote work were permanently mandated so we could join work calls from a movie theatre or even while skydiving! But wait, it's time to wake up! The alarm has snoozed twice, and your team has already logged on for the day. Keeping tabs on attendance

• Reusable Custom Functions Across Department Workflows

  Dear Zoho Desk Team, We appreciate the powerful workflow automation capabilities in Zoho Desk, particularly the ability to create and use custom functions within workflows. However, we have encountered a limitation that impacts efficiency and maintainability.

• Don't Allow Customer to Edit Values After Submitting Ticket

  After a customer submits a ticket through the customer portal, they can go into the ticket and see some of the values from the questions they answered in the sidebar. Currently, a customer can edit these values even after they submitted them. This makes no sense. We ask very specific questions that we don't want customers to later change! Please disable the ability for customers to edit the values to their submission questions in the portal. Screenshot attached.

• Analytics <-> Invoice Connection DELETED by Zoho

  Hi All, I am reaching out today because of a big issue we have at the moment with Zoho Analytics and Zoho Invoice. Our organization relies on Zoho Analytics for most of our reporting (operationnal teams). A few days ago we observed a sync issue with the

• text length in list report mobile/tablet

  Is there a way to make the full text of a text field appear in the list report on mobile and tablet? With custom layouts, the text is always truncated after a certain number of characters.

• Automation #4 - Auto Delete Tickets based on Rules

  This is a monthly series in which we pick some common use cases that have been either discussed or most asked about in our community and explain how they can be achieved using one of the automation capabilities in Zoho Desk. Unwanted tickets spamming

• Zoho Community Digest — Enero 2026

  ¡Hola, comunidad! 🌟 Aquí os traemos las novedades más interesantes de Zoho durante este mes de enero, incluyendo actualizaciones de productos, integraciones y un recordatorio sobre los workshops certificados que vuelven a España. 🎓 Eventos y Comunidad

• Automation #3 - Auto-sync email attachments to tickets

  This is a monthly series where we pick some common use cases that have been either discussed or most asked about in our community and explain how they can be achieved using one of the automation capabilities in Zoho Desk. Most of our customers use email

• Automation #11 - Auto Update Custom Fields with Values from Emails

  This is a monthly series designed to help you get the best out of Desk. We take our cue from what's being discussed or asked about the most in our community. Then we find the right use cases that specifically highlight solutions, ideas and tips to optimize

• Automation #13 - Auto assign tickets based on agent shift time

  This is a monthly series designed to help you get the best out of Desk. We take our cue from what's being discussed or asked about the most in our community. Then we find the right use cases that specifically highlight solutions, ideas and tips to optimize

• Automation #14: Capture Jira Issue Key/ID in a Ticket Custom Field

  Hello Everyone! This month's edition brings you a custom function to consolidate your records associated with Jira integration. Jira integration enables support engineers and R&D units to collaborate seamlessly on feature development, product improvement,

• Automation #16: Automate Ticket Reopening on Scheduled Timestamp

  Hello Everyone! This edition uncovers the option to schedule reopening a ticket automatically. Zylker Finance tracks insurance policyholder activities through Zoho Desk. For policyholders who pay monthly premiums, tickets are closed upon payment completion.

• Automation#19:Auto-Close Tickets Upon Task Completion

  Hello Everyone! We’re excited to bring you another custom function this week. In this edition, we’ll show you how to automatically close tickets when all associated tasks are marked as completed. Let’s see how ZylkaPure, a leading water filter company,

• Automation #15: Automatically Adding Static Secondary Contacts

  Rockel is a top-tier client of Zylker traders. Marcus handles communications with Rockel and would like to add Terence, the CTO of Zylker traders to the email conversations. In this case, the emails coming from user address rockel.com should have Terence

• Improved UX design for Projects CRM integration

  The current integration embeds the entier projects inteface into the CRM this is confusing and allows users to get lost. For example as a user i navigate to an account and go down to the related projects list and want to get information about a specific

• Link Purchase Order to Deal

  Zoho Books directly syncs with contacts, vendors and products in Zoho CRM including field mapping. Is there any way to associate vendor purchase orders with deals, so that we can calculate our profit margin for each deal with connected sales invoices

• Transformer vos stocks en décisions intelligentes avec Zoho Inventory et Zoho Analytics

  Zoho Inventory permet de suivre facilement les niveaux de stock et d’anticiper les restockages. Pour de nombreuses entreprises, cela suffit à gérer les opérations au quotidien. Mais à mesure que l’activité se développe, cette clarté peut commencer à montrer

• Zoho Commerce - Poor Features Set for Blogging

  Hi Zoho Commerce team, I'm sure you will have noticed that I have been asking many questions about the Blogs feature in Commerce. I thought that it would be useful if I share my feedback in a constructive way, to highlight the areas which I feel need

• Security Enhancements | Migrate to the Updated Policies

  Hello everyone, Zoho Directory's security policies have been updated and reorganized into three new policies with features that enhance the overall organization security. These policies provide a stronger and more secure sign-in methods and improve the

• Bring Zoho Shifts Capabilities into Zoho People Shift Module

  Hello Zoho People Product Team, After a deep review of the Zoho People Shift module and a direct comparison with Zoho Shifts, we would like to raise a feature request and serious concern regarding the current state of shift management in Zoho People.

• Facturation électronique 2026 - obligation dès le 1er septembre 2026

  Bonjour, Je me permets de réagir à divers posts publiés ici et là concernant le projet de E-Invoicing, dans le cadre de la facturation électronique prévue très prochainement. Dans le cadre du passage à la facturation électronique pour les entreprises,

• Quick Create needs Client Script support

  As per the title. We need client scripts to apply at a Quick Create level. We enforce logic on the form to ensure data quality, automate field values, etc. However, all this is lost when a user attempts a "Quick Create". It is disappointing because, from

• How to block a WhatsApp user for sending spam

  Is there a way to block those whatsapp users that just come to play and annoy our service, they also spam us. We have a waba service with sales iq

• Inquiry regarding auto-save behavior for Zoho Sign Embedded Sending

  Dear Zoho Support Team, I am currently integrating Zoho Sign's Embedded Sending functionality using iframes on my website. I would like to know if there is a way to ensure that the document state (including any added fields) is automatically saved as

• Introducing Connected Records to bring business context to every aspect of your work in Zoho CRM for Everyone

  Hello Everyone, We are excited to unveil phase one of a powerful enhancement to CRM for Everyone - Connected Records, available only in CRM's Nextgen UI. With CRM for Everyone, businesses can onboard all customer-facing teams onto the CRM platform to

• Automation#17: Auto-Create Tasks in Zoho Projects Upon Ticket Creation in Zoho Desk

  Hello Everyone, This edition delivers the solution to automatically create a task in Zoho Projects when a ticket is created in Zoho Desk. Zylker Resorts uses Zoho Desk for bookings and handling guest requests. Zylker resorts outsources cab bookings to

• Automation#20 : Auto-Add Ticket Tags based on Keywords

  Hello Everyone! Welcome to unveiling custom functions on our Community series. This week's post lets you add tags to your tickets automatically based on the keywords in the ticket subject and the ticket thread. Discover how this custom function helps

• Automation#21: Track Ticket Transfers Across Departments

  Hello Everyone! With Halloween just around the corner, we'd like to let you know the Zoho Desk team is always there to sweep away your customer service troubles! This week, we’re excited to introduce a custom function that tracks tickets moved between

• Email Integration - Zoho CRM - OAuth and IMAP

  Hello, We are attempting to integrate our Microsoft 365 email with Zoho CRM. We are using the documentation at Email Configuration for IMAP and POP3 (zoho.com) We use Microsoft 365 and per their recommendations (and requirements) for secure email we have

• Homepage not assignable to group

• MS Teams for daily call operations

  Hello all, Our most anticipated and crucial update is finally here! Organizations using Microsoft Teams phone system can now integrate it effectively with Zoho CRM for tasks like dialling numbers and logging calls. We are enhancing our MS Teams functionality

• Automation#22 Track Ticket Duration at Specific Status

  Hello Everyone! Welcome back to the Community Learning Series! Today, we explore how Zylker Techfix, a gadget servicing firm, boosted productivity by tracking the time spent at a particular ticket status in Zoho Desk. Zylker Techfix customized Zoho Desk’s

• Automation#23: Automate Guided Conversations in Zoho Desk with Business Hours

  Hello Everyone, This week's edition introduces a custom function designed to automate Guided Conversations in Zoho Desk, based on your business hours. With this feature, you can align the bot's behavior with your business schedule, ensuring a smooth and

• Next Page