Want to categorize your tickets by topics as soon as an agent responds? Here's how…

We really needed to group our Zoho Desk tickets to categories to analyze them in Zoho Analytics. This custom functions does it for you. Thanks to Zoho employee John and his colleagues who gave me the idea at Zoholics 2022 in Frankfurt.

This custom function is fired via a workflow every time there is an agent response.

// Description: Fetches the topic of at ticket using a shortcode given from a template. Inserting the topic to the custom field cf_topic.
// ticketID is given as an argument for this function
// Inserting the Organisation ID:
orgID = 2**********8;
data = Collection();
data.insert("#SC_GEN":"General");
// +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
// Insert your topic, e.g.:
// data.insert("YOUR FIRST SHORTCODE":"YOUR FIRST TOPIC");
// +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
// Use the Shortcodes for the For-Loop:
dataKeys = data.keys();
// Get the latest agent reply as a thread:
thread = zoho.desk.getRelatedRecords(orgID,"threads","tickets",ticketID,0,1);
// Getting the HTML code of the latest reply
replyID = thread.get("data").toString().get("id");
reply = zoho.desk.getRelatedRecordById(orgID,"threads",replyID,"tickets",ticketID);
replyText = reply.get("content");
// Using foundKey as the resulting shortcode
foundKey = null;
for each key in dataKeys
{
if(replyText.containsIgnoreCase(key))
{
foundKey = key;
}
}
// Checking if shortcode was actually found
if(foundKey != null)
{
foundValue = data.get(foundKey).toString();
info "Found Value. Using: ";
}
else
{
info "Found no value.";
}
info foundValue;
// Extracting the topic for the found shortcode
customFieldsChild = Map();
customFieldsChild.put("Topic",foundValue);
customFieldsParent = Map();
customFieldsParent.put("customFields",customFieldsChild);
response = zoho.desk.update(orgID,"tickets",ticketID,customFieldsParent);

The prerequisite is that shortcodes are implemented in templates that stand for a topic. For example, we have inserted the string "#SC_DE_B2B" under the text of a ticket template and colored it white in order to be able to search for the text as a shortcode in the function. All B2B-regarding templates will contain this string and will result to the selection "B2B informations".

In addition, there is a "Topic" picklist in the ticket layout, in which the respective topics are stored.