What is automation and why do we need it in Zoho Desk?

1. Support tickets can be assigned to your agents automatically depending on their skill type.
2. If you want the support tickets to be closed if the customer doesn't reply within a pre-defined timeline, this can be achieved with automation.
3. The support ticket status can be put on hold when the agent replies to it and opened again when the customer replies back with automation.
4. You can use workflow rules to perform certain tasks when some conditions are met.
5. You can automate the ticket escalation process if the tickets are not answered within a fixed time line.
6. You can automate the supervise rules to get the desired results.

1. Go to the Desk setup page.
2. Click Notify under the Automation section.
   
3. Toggle on Receiving a new ticket for email or SMS under Contact Notifications. 

Once notifications are enabled, an acknowledgement email or SMS with their support ticket ID will be sent to the customer whenever they submit a ticket.

You can also customize the email template, and the sender email addresses along with the subject line of the message and the content. You can also add attachments up to 5MB with the email.

To edit the email template, click on the setup icon next to the toggle button.

How does an agent receive an email notification when a ticket is assigned to them?  

Now, every time a new ticket is assigned to an agent, they will be notified via email.

How do I close tickets automatically if the customer hasn't replied after a certain period? 

1. Go to your Desk setup.
2. Select Supervise under Automation.
3. On the Supervisor Rules page, click Create Rule.
   
4. On the New Time-Based Action page, fill in the Basic information such as Rule Name, Business Hours, and Description.
   
5. Click Next.
6. Under Criteria, select "Hours since requester response pending" from the dropdown and type in the desired time period.
7. Click Next.
8. Under Actions, click + and select Field Updates from the dropdown.
   
9. On the Create Assignment Value page, add the Assignment Value Name.
10. Under Assignment Values, set Fields to Status and set its value to Closed from the dropdown.
    
11. Click Save. Your action type has been linked to the Supervisor Rule.
12. Click Save again on the New Time-Based Action page.

Note:

• The time-based rules run once every hour on tickets that received a customer response in the past 30 days.

• The values for time-based Criteria should be a whole number. Decimals (like 1.5, 2.5, 5.25) are not supported.

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Why are my tickets showing transitions when the blueprint is disabled?

That said, you can at anytime revoke tickets that are stuck in a disabled blueprint. This ensures that the tickets are worked upon by your agents outside of the process.

1. Log in to your Zoho Desk with administrator privileges.
2. Click the Setup icon (  ) in the top bar.
3. Click Blueprint under the Automation menu.
   
4. Hover your mouse pointer on the Blueprint whose tickets you want to revoke, and then click the More icon (  ).
   
5. Click Revoke Tickets from the menu.
   
6. Click Continue to confirm the revoke.
   The tickets that entered the Blueprint process will be revoked.

Can I use ticket tags in automation?

Yes, you can create automation rules that trigger some actions when you add a specific tag to a ticket. For example, based on a tag, you can automatically assign tickets, send alerts, create activities, set due times, and more. You can add tags as a condition in assignment rules, workflows, blueprint, SLAs and supervise. To do this, build a condition statement to include or exclude tags by using the operators "is" or "isn't".

Notes:

• You cannot have the automation add a tag to your tickets when it runs.
  
• You can add a maximum 20 tags per condition as comma separated values.
  
• Each tag must be between 3 and 50 characters long.
  
• Special characters are not supported in tags.
  
• Multiple spaces in tags will be condensed into a single space.
  
• Tags are case in-sensitive, so they can be written either in lowercase or in uppercase, or any mixture of cases.
  
• Duplicate tags in condition statements are automatically removed.

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Is there a sequence or order of precedence in which rules are triggered ?

There can be instances when organizations configure more than one automation features to streamline their processes. In such cases, the order in which the automation rules will apply on a record is:

 

Skills based assignment rule > Direct assignment rule > Workflow rules > SLA > Round robin assignment rule > Blueprint > Supervise > Macros.

Note: Supervise is triggered periodically and Macros are manually triggered by the user (agents).

We hope that this list of frequently asked questions about Automation is informative. If you still have questions that haven't been addressed, please let us know. We will be happy to discuss them with our subject matter experts and add them in the future. And please don't forget to share your rating below!