Automation#25: Move Tickets to Unassigned When the Owner Is Offline

Automation#25: Move Tickets to Unassigned When the Owner Is Offline




Hello Everyone,

Welcome to this week's Community Series!

'Tis the holiday season—a time when work often takes a brief pause. 

The holiday spirit is in full swing at Zylker Techfix too, with employees taking some well-deserved time off. During this period, ticket owners are frequently offline at work.
Amid the holiday hustle and bustle, customers continued responding to tickets. Unfortunately, tickets assigned to agents on leave went unnoticed, as they were not listed under unassigned requests.

Zylker Techfix needed a solution to ensure such tickets were reassigned to "Unassigned," preventing any customer requests from being overlooked. This is where a custom function came to the rescue, just in time!

Here’s how you can use this custom function to move tickets automatically to "Unassigned" when the ticket owner is offline and a customer replies. 
Follow these steps to implement the custom function within a workflow rule.

Prerequisites
1. Create a connection
  1.1 Go to Setup(S) and choose Connections under Developer Space.
  1.2 Click Create Connection.
  1.3 Select Zoho Desk under Default Services.
  1.4 Set the connection name as deskconnection.
  1.5 Under Scope, choose the below scope values:
Desk.settings.READ
Desk.basic.READ
Desk.tickets.UPDATE
Desk.tickets.READ
  1.6 Click Create and Connect.
  1.7 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 from the drop-down menu under Module.
4. Enter a Rule Name and Description for the rule.
5. If you want to activate the rule right away, select the Active checkbox. Else, create the rule and activate it later.
6. Click Next.
 
In the Execute on section, follow these steps:
7. Select Customer Reply.  
8. Click Next.
 
9. In the Criteria section, select Ticket Owner is not empty. click Next

10. In the Actions section, click the + icon and select New next to Custom Functions.
11. Enter a Name and Description for the custom function.
12. Under Argument Mapping, give a desired Method Name. Map the arguments as below: 
  12.1 In the Argument Name field, type ticketId and select Ticket Id under the Tickets Section.     
                                      
13. In the script window, insert the Custom Function given below:
  1. // ----<<<< User Inputs >>>>----
  2. // --- Replace ".com" with appropriate domain extension based on customer's location/DC --- 
  3. deskURL = "https://desk.zoho.com";
  4. //Replace your Current Configured Department Id
  5. departmentId = "DEPARTMENT_ID";
  6. // ----<<<< Initial Configs >>>>----
  7. logs = Map();
  8. onlineAgentsId = List();
  9. //---------------------------
  10. try 
  11. {
  12. // ---- start your logic from here ----
  13. getTicketInfo = invokeUrl
  14. [
  15. url : deskURL + "/api/v1/tickets/" + ticketId
  16. type : GET
  17. connection : "deskconnection"
  18. ];
  19. logs.insert("getTicketInfo":getTicketInfo);
  20. assigneeId = getTicketInfo.get("assigneeId");
  21. onlineAgentsInfo = invokeUrl
  22. [
  23. url : deskURL + "/api/v1/onlineAgents?departmentId="+departmentId+"&limit=100"
  24. type : GET
  25. connection : "deskconnection"
  26. ];
  27. logs.insert("onlineAgentsInfo":onlineAgentsInfo);
  28. if ( onlineAgentsInfo != null && onlineAgentsInfo != "" && onlineAgentsInfo.get("data").size() > 0 ) 
  29.     {
  30. for each agentInfo in onlineAgentsInfo.get("data")
  31.         {
  32. onlineAgentsId.add(agentInfo.get("agentId"));
  33.         }
  34.     }
  35. logs.insert("onlineAgentsId":onlineAgentsId);
  36. if (!onlineAgentsId.contains(assigneeId.toString())) 
  37.     {
  38. ticketUpdate = invokeUrl
  39. [
  40. url : deskURL + "/api/v1/tickets/" + ticketId
  41. type : PATCH
  42. parameters : {"assigneeId":""}+""
  43. connection : "deskconnection"
  44. ];
  45. logs.insert("ticketUpdate":ticketUpdate);
  46.     }
  47. }
  48. catch (errorInfo)
  49. {
  50. logs.insert("errorInfo":errorInfo);
  51. }
  52. info "logs: \n" + logs;
  53. if(logs.containKey("errorInfo"))
  54. {
  55. throws "Error happen in the CF execution";
  56. }

NOTE
a. In Line 2, Replace ".com" with the domain extension based on your Data Center.
b. In Line 5, add the departmentId of the department where you want to configure this custom function.
How to fetch the DepartmentId? 
To find the departmentId, navigate to Setup (S) >> Organization >> Departments.
Select the department where you want to configure the custom function. Copy the numerical ID at the end of the URL from the address bar.

14. Click Save to save the custom function.
15. Click Save again to save the workflow.

Our Community Series is here to provide practical tips and solutions. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out to us at support@zohodesk.com—we’d love to hear from you!

Wishing you a joyful and productive holiday season. 

Until next time,
Best Wishes,
Lydia | Zoho Desk 


      Zoho Campaigns Resources


        • Desk Community Learning Series


        • Digest


        • Functions


        • Meetups


        • Kbase


        • Resources


        • Glossary


        • Desk Marketplace


        • MVP Corner


        • Word of the Day


        • Ask the Experts


          • 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

          Zoho CRM Plus Resources

            Zoho Books Resources


              Zoho Subscriptions Resources

                Zoho Projects Resources


                  Zoho Sprints Resources


                    Zoho Orchestly Resources


                      Zoho Creator Resources


                        Zoho WorkDrive Resources



                          Zoho CRM Resources

                          • CRM Community Learning Series

                            CRM Community Learning Series


                          • Tips

                            Tips

                          • Functions

                            Functions

                          • Meetups

                            Meetups

                          • Kbase

                            Kbase

                          • Resources

                            Resources

                          • Digest

                            Digest

                          • CRM Marketplace

                            CRM Marketplace

                          • MVP Corner

                            MVP Corner




                            Zoho Writer Writer

                            Get Started. Write Away!

                            Writer is a powerful online word processor, designed for collaborative work.

                              Zoho CRM コンテンツ




                                ご検討中の方

                                  • Recent Topics

                                  • Drop Down Value

                                    Hi, May I know why Zoho Flow treat this drop down as number and not as string. If so, how can I fetch the right value for filtering. This field is from Creator, in Creator upon checking by default it is a string since it's not a lookup field.
                                  • Zoho CRM's mobile apps: A 2025 Recap

                                    2025 marked a year of steady progress for Zoho CRM's mobile apps. We rolled out several updates and features to improve usability and make everyday CRM work a lot easier to manage. Here’s a look back at some of the key releases from 2025. Android releases
                                  • Facebook follower count doesn't match FB Analytics

                                    Hi all, I am wondering if anyone else has issues with follower counts for Facebook not matching FB's native analytics tool. On the Zoho dashboard, it's showing 1,007, but FB shows 1,060. All the other channels match up. Any insights are much appreciated!
                                  • Meta and Facebook data report discrepancy

                                    I have been currently gathering manually facebook follower data thru meta. In zoho marketing plus the social media reporting only allows for page likes, and so there is a discrepancy with the data. please the difference in files attached. Is there way
                                  • Unlocking New Levels: Zoho Payroll's Journey in 2025

                                    Every year brings its own set of challenges and opportunities to rethink how payroll works across regulations and teams. In 2025, Zoho Payroll continued to evolve with one clear focus: giving businesses more flexibility, clarity, and control as they grow.
                                  • Can I export all attachments from Zoho CRM?

                                    Can I export all attachments from Zoho CRM?
                                  • Community Digest — Noviembre y Diciembre 2025

                                    ¡Hola, Comunidad de Zoho en Español! Cerramos el año de la mejor forma con nuestro último Community Digest de 2025, donde podrás encontrar las últimas novedades de nuestros productos. ¿Todo listo para empezar 2026 con el mejor pie? ¡Vamos a ello! Zoho
                                  • Zoho Projects Plus’ 2025- the year we launched

                                    We’ve been building project management tools for the past 19 years, and a question we often hear is: Different teams in our organization prefer different project management methods; while the development team prefers agile, the marketing and sales teams
                                  • Zoho Books emails suddenly going to Spam since 11 Nov 2025 (Gmail + now Outlook) — anyone else?

                                    Hi everyone, We migrated to Zoho Books in July 2025 and everything worked fine until 11 Nov 2025. Since then, Zoho Books system emails are landing in customers’ Spam (first Gmail, and now we’re seeing Outlook/Office 365 also starting to spam them). Impacted
                                  • How do you print a refund check to customer?

                                    Maybe this is a dumb question, but how does anyone print a refund check to a customer? We cant find anywhere to either just print a check and pick a customer, or where to do so from a credit note.
                                  • Company Multiple Branch/ Location Accounting

                                    Hi All, anyone know whether company can maintain their multiple Branch Accounting in Zoho  Books. It will be chart of Accounts & Master Data will be same but different report available as per per Branch. Thanks & regards, Vivek +91 9766906737
                                  • Zoho Books Invoices Templates

                                    It would be really helpful to have more advanced features to customise the invoice templates in Zoho Books. Especially I´m thinking of the spacing of the different parts of the invoice (Address line etc.). If you have a sender and receiver address in
                                  • Email Administrators! Join our tips & troubleshooting series

                                    Greetings to all the admins out there! This announcement is exclusively for you. As we step into the New Year, we’re excited to start a dedicated series of admin-specific tips curated to support you. These posts will help you overcome everyday challenges
                                  • Free Webinar : Unlock AI driven business insights with Zoho Inventory + Zoho Analytics

                                    Are you tired of switching between apps and exporting data to build customized reports? Say hello to smarter & streamlined insights! Join us for this exclusive webinar where we explore the power of the Zoho Inventory–Zoho Analytics integration. Learn
                                  • Import Function: ONLY update empty fields

                                    When setting up an import from a spreadsheet to CRM, there is a checkbox "Don't update empty values for existing contacts" (see screenshot below). While I see some limited benefit from this functionality, I think there should also be an "ONLY update empty
                                  • Begin the year with best practices in the Zoho Desk mobile app : Part 2

                                    In focus: Optimizing collaboration and supervision Let's begin 2026 with Part 2 of our tips series on driving your ticketing operations at your fingertips. In Part 1, we explored streamlining operations within tickets. This helped individuals at Omniserve
                                  • How to update "Lead Status" to more than 100 records

                                    Hello Zoho CRM, How do I update "Lead Status" to more than 100 records at once? To give you a background, these leads were uploaded or Imported at once but the lead status record was incorrectly chosen. So since there was a way to quickly add records in the system no matter how many they are, we are also wondering if there is a quicker way to update these records to the correct "Lead Status". I hope our concern makes sense and that there will be a fix for it. All the best, Jonathan
                                  • JWT Token authentication problem that sometimes generates infinite redirect loops

                                    Description : Nous proposons un bouton sur notre plateforme permettant de rediriger l'utilisateur vers le portail ZohoDesk via un jeton JWT pour une authentification transparente. Cependant, il arrive que certains utilisateurs soient pris dans une boucle
                                  • ZOHO Work Drive Back Up

                                    I am looking for a ZOHO Work Drive backup solution. Something that is cloud based. There's lots of these kinds of options for Google Drive and other providers, but I have not seen anything for WorkDrive. Any suggestions?
                                  • ZOHO Reports - Filter Logic?

                                    Hi, I need a way to apply filter logics such as ((1 AND 2) OR 3). All I can see as of now is a way to enter different AND filters in the respective filter column. But how can I add an OR filter? Any advice would be highly appreciated. Mark
                                  • Recruit API search

                                    Hi all, Attempting to call the search api endpoint from Postman using the word element as mentioned in api docs Search Records - APIs | Online Help - Zoho Recruit When making the call to /v2/Candidates/search?word=Saudi receive response of { "code": "MANDATORY_NOT_FOUND",
                                  • Saving reading position + Keep screen on

                                    While Zoho Notebook is excellent for saving and annotating articles, its utility is severely limited by the lack of reading progress synchronization. On the Android app, if a user exits a long note after reading 50%, the app fails to save the position.
                                  • Multiple Vendor SKUs

                                    One of the big concerns we have with ZOHO Inventory is lack of Vendor Skus like many other inventory software packages offer. Being able to have multiple vendor skus for the same product would be HUGE! It would populate the appropriate vendor Sku for
                                  • Zoho LandingPage is integrated with Zoho One!

                                    Greetings to the Zoho One users out there! We're delighted to let you know that Zoho LandingPage is available in Zoho One too! With Zoho LandingPage, you can host custom-made landing pages, and persuade the visitors to dive deeper by making further clicks,
                                  • Android app sync problem - multiple devices have same problem

                                    Hello, I am having a problem with synchronization in the Android app. When I create a drawing, the data does not sync correctly—only a blank note is created without the drawing. I tested this on multiple devices, including phones and tablets, and the
                                  • How can i resend a campaign to only one of the recipients on the original campaign

                                    How can i resend a campaign to only one of the recipients on the original campaign ? Sincererly, Mike
                                  • How to show branch instead of org name on invoice template?

                                    Not sure why invoices are showing the org name not the branch name? I can insert the branch name using the ${ORGANIZATION.BRANCHNAME} placeholder, but then it isn't bold text anymore. Any other ideas?
                                  • Marketing Automation Requirements Questions

                                    I would like to set up a multi-email drip campaign- please see the structure below and confirm if I can achieve this set up in Zoho marketing automation. Where applicable, highlight gaps and workarounds. Thanks Drip email campaign- Can I create one drip
                                  • Question about using custom_fields in Storefront Add-to-Cart API (error 2003 – required details)

                                    Hi everyone, I’m working with the Zoho Commerce Storefront API, specifically the Add to Cart endpoint: POST /storefront/api/v1/cart According to the documentation, this endpoint supports a custom_fields parameter for adding line-item custom data. I’m
                                  • Can a project be cloned?

                                    Good afternoon, greetings. I would like to ask if it's possible to clone a project in Microsoft Project. I found a way to do it using templates, but I'm not sure if there's a direct way to clone a project. Thank you in advance for your attention, and
                                  • Timesheet Tasks in Zoho Books: associate to service item

                                    How do we associate a service item to timesheet tasks in Zoho Books? For example: Joe spent 5 hours on project:task1 which is Service Item#1 (Income:Service1). When the invoice is issued thru the Project Invoice section, this is not available. When the
                                  • Task/Activity indicator in SalesPipeline overview has disappeared

                                    I Just logged in my ZOHO CRM first 2026 checking my salespipeline overview , Every record card used to show an indication that there was an open task (Yellow if the expiry date was close, red if the expiry date was today and grey when it had expired).
                                  • Tip #56- Accessibility Controls in Zoho Assist: Hearing- 'Insider Insights'

                                    As we begin the new year, it’s a great time to focus on making our tools more inclusive and accessible for everyone. Remote support often involves long hours in front of screens, varying lighting conditions, and users with diverse accessibility needs.
                                  • Zoho Desk Android app update: Table view for All Departments view, custom button

                                    Hello everyone! In the latest version(v2.9.25) of the Zoho Desk Android app update, we have introduced Table view for the 'All Departments' view in the ticket module. We also have supported an option that allows tickets in the Table view to be sorted
                                  • What's New - December 2025 | Zoho Backstage

                                    In December, Backstage introduced a focused set of updates that improve how you manage registrations, communicate with attendees, and track participation. These enhancements are designed to give organizers greater flexibility and clearer control across
                                  • Add multiple users to a task

                                    When I´m assigning a task it is almost always related to more than one person. Practical situation: When a client request some improvement the related department opens the task with the situation and people related to it as the client itself, the salesman
                                  • A Roundup of Zoho Sprints 2025

                                  • Sorting Custom Date in API isn't working w pagination limit

                                    How can we sort a custom field with DATE using pagination? Starting at page=1 then moving to page=2 with a limit of 10 each, its all messed up and even shows some of the same records as page 1? https://www.zohoapis.com/crm/v2/INVOICE_MODULE/search?criteria=(FM_Contact_ID:equals:1234)&sort_by=Invoice_Date&sort_order=desc&per_page=10&page='
                                  • SAP Business One(B1) integration is now live in Zoho Flow

                                    We’re excited to share that SAP Business One (B1) is now available in Zoho Flow! This means you can now build workflows that connect SAP B1 with other apps and automate routine processes without relying on custom code. Note: SAP Business One integration
                                  • Enhancement in Role and Profile mapping of agents in Sandbox

                                    Hello everyone! We have brought in a modification in the way users are mapped to a particular role and profile in Sandbox. What has changed? When agents are copied from production to Sandbox: If a user's current role and profile is available in Sandbox,
                                  • Next Page