Automation #8 - Auto Update Contact Fields

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 your customer support with the automation capabilities of Zoho Desk.

Zoho Desk makes it easy to manage your contacts by assigning them to an account.

A Contact is an individual or customer that you provide support for through various channels in Zoho Desk.
An Account is a company or organization that the contacts belong to or represent.

Quite often, multiple contacts from the same organization raise requests and it makes sense to associate them all to the same account for better efficiency.

With SLAs in place you can easily map your deliverables and maintain consistency. When SLAs are applied to an Account, Desk ensures that every ticket originating from a contact mapped to that account, follows the SLA, and is resolved in time.

The other time this comes in handy is when you need to do mass updates. Let's say you need to update the "City" of a particular organization or Account, and also have it reflected in all the Account's Contact's pages as well. This is possible in two easy steps:

Map all your contacts to the Account
Write a simple workflow rule

To create the workflow rule, perform the following steps:

Go to Setup, and under Automation, click Workflows.
On the left panel, under Workflows, click Rules > Create Rule.

In the Basic Information section, perform the following steps:
In the Module drop-down menu, select Accounts.
Enter a name and description for the rule.
If you want to activate the rule right away, select the Active checkbox. Else, you can just create the rule now and activate it later on the Rules page.
Click Next.

In the Execute on section, perform the following steps:
Select the Create checkbox to execute this rule every time a new ticket is created.
Click Next.
In the Criteria section, do not select any criteria and click "Next".

In the Actions section, perform the following steps:
Click the + icon under "Action" and select "New" next to Custom Functions
Enter a name and description for the custom function.
In the script window, input the Custom Function you find below:

ORGID = Paste your OrgId;
list = {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8};
for each rec in list
{
start = rec * 100;
search = zoho.desk.searchRecords(ORGID,"contacts",{"accountName":accname},start,100).getJSON("data");
//info search;
for each contact in search
{
contactids = contact.getJSON("id");
update =
zoho.desk.update(ORGID,"contacts",contactids,{"city":city});
info update;
}
}

Click "Edit Arguments"

In the Name field type Account Name, and from the Value drop-down list select Account Name under accounts module, add another column.
In the next column, in the Name field type City, and from the Value drop-down list select "City" under Accounts module, and click Done.

Click "Save" to save the custom function.

Click "Save" again to save the workflow.

Important Note: In line 1, replace your OrgId. You can get your OrgID by navigating to Setup > Developer Space > API > OrgId.

Once the workflow rule is set, go to the Account page and edit the "City" field to add/change the value. The value of the City field will automatically get updated in the all the associated Contacts page.

This specially comes in handy when you have direct assignment rules created based on Cities and not having the right city updated can affect the entire flow. In that case, you can set this easy workflow rule and have all your contacts updated in minutes and have your process in track.

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