Narrative 15: Blueprint - Automate, guide, and transform your support processes

Narrative 15: Blueprint - Automate, guide, and transform your support processes

Behind the scenes of a successful ticketing system: BTS Series 

Narrative 15: Blueprint - Automate, guide, and transform your support processes

Even organizations that deliver quality products and services can face low customer satisfaction when their processes for addressing issues are poorly defined. This problem often stems from communication gaps, inadequate training, or failing to involve the right stakeholders at the required stages. The problems may range from minor procedural errors to major organizational oversights, and the impact extends beyond customers; employees also face significant difficulties when structured processes are not correctly followed.
Using a Blueprint in Zoho Desk drives consistent, high-quality customer service by making support processes transparent and repeatable at scale, regardless of team size or industry. It enables teams to easily spot bottlenecks, monitor SLA compliance, and refine workflows for maximum efficiency. Whether for onboarding, escalations, or compliance management, Blueprint helps businesses accelerate case resolution, deliver timely experiences, and onboard new agents faster with clear, actionable guidance on every ticket.

Components of a Blueprint

In Zoho Desk Blueprints, "stages" represent distinct steps or milestones in a business process, while "transitions" define the movement and conditions required to progress from one stage to another. 

Stages

Stages are the specific checkpoints or states that a support ticket or record passes through in a process, such as "Assigned," "In Progress," "Awaiting Response," or "Closed." Each stage captures the ticket's status at a given point in time and provides visibility into the process's progress.

Transitions 

Transitions are the actions, criteria, and intermediate checkpoints required to move a ticket from one stage to another. A transition can enforce checks, require specific actions, or mandate that fields be completed before advancing to the next stage. Transitions can also be configured to trigger automations, send notifications, or assign ticket owners.

​
A transition typically includes:
  • The criteria for when the transition is allowed
  • The actions to perform during the transition (updating fields, completing checklists, sending messages)
  • Transition ownership (who can act)
  • Automated actions are triggered upon execution
​
Common transitions: These transitions can be accessed from multiple stages, such as a "Cancel Ticket" action available at any point in the process.
Parallel transitions: Multiple transitions can be configured to run in parallel, allowing a ticket to move through multiple paths simultaneously.

Highlights

Enabling Strict Mode ensures that agents strictly follow ticket processes. When activated, all other actions in the ticket interface are disabled, allowing agents to perform ticket-related actions exclusively through the transition bar.

Admins can now selectively set which actions and fields are required during a transition. The introduction of the Configure Mandatory option enhances this capability to provide greater control and flexibility in customizing Blueprints for various groups of agents and refining specific aspects of the support process.

Admins can now effortlessly prioritize and reorder transitions with a simple drag-and-drop feature. This allows them to easily arrange the sequence of transitions in a Blueprint to determine how they are presented to agents. In the past, this process required agents to delete and re-add transitions in the desired order, which was time-consuming and labor-intensive.

The number of Points and Transitions permitted in a blueprint dictates the complexity of the internal processes you can design for your team. We have increased the number of pointers and transitions to allow you to incorporate greater complexity into your support operations as needed. 

When developing a Blueprint, you may find the need to rename a State or modify its Status Type after it has already been linked to the blueprint. This was not an option previously, but we've now made it possible. You can now change the Status Type and rename states associated with a blueprint. 

Key Features

  1. Design sequential ticket workflows with defined states and transitions.  
  2. Assign transition ownership to agents or departments.  
  3. Control ticket progression by restricting actions until necessary steps are completed.  
  4. Automate notifications, field updates, task assignments, and custom functions during and after transitions.  
  5. Use a Blueprints dashboard to track the number of tickets in each stage, SLA violations, bottlenecks, and overall process efficiency.  
Idea

Commonly automated business processes

  1. Quote management
  2. Task management
  3. Library book lending
  4. Hospital management
  5. Converting leads to customers
  6. Order cycles
  7. Support request handling and escalations
  8. Recruitment
  9. Deal follow-up

Takeaway

Creating a Blueprint involves specifying the states (ticket statuses), transitions (actions to move between states), and, if needed, criteria to apply the Blueprint only to specific tickets. It provides structured guidance to agents and makes help desk operations more efficient and consistent across teams.


Please stay tuned for more in the Desk behind-the-scenes series.


Regards,

 

Kavya Rao

The Zoho Desk Team

    • Recent Topics

    • Auto Update Event Field Value on Create/Edit

      Hi there, I know this question has been posted multiple times and I've been trying many of the proposed similar scripts for a while now but nothing seems to work... what might I do wrong? The error I receive is this: Value given for the variable 'meetingId'

    • Payroll and BAS ( Australian tax report format )

      Hello , I am evaluating Zoho Books and I find the interface very intuitive and straight forward. My company is currently using Quickbooks Premier the Australian version. Before we can consider moving the service we would need to have the following addressed : 1.Payroll 2.BAS ( business activity statement ) for tax purposes 3.Some form of local backup and possible export of data to a widely accepted format. Regards Codrin Mitin

    • Problem with Email an invoice with multiple attachments using API

      I have an invoice with 3 attachments. When I send an email manually using the UI, everything works correctly. I receive an email with three attachments. The problem occurs when I try to initiate sending an email using the API. The email comes with only

    • Page Layouts for Standard Modules like CRM

      For standard modules like quotes, invoices, purchase orders, etc, it would be a great feature to be able to create custom page layouts with custom fields in Zoho Books similar to how you can in Zoho CRM. For example, and my current use case, I have a

    • Non-depreciating fixed asset

      Hi! There are non-depreciable fixed assets (e.g. land). It would be very useful to be able to create a new type of fixed asset (within the fixed assets module) with a ‘No depreciation’ depreciation method. There is always the option of recording land

    • Fixed asset management

      I want to know if there is any individual module for fixed assets management

    • One time sale item in billing automatically detects as service

      if i have some items which i don't want to add in my "item" list because its sold only for one time. but when i type item name in invoice, it (system) automatically takes it as a service and despite of HSN , it shows SAC code to be entered. if its selectable i.e. either item or service , it would be very helpful and a must have feature.

    • Project template after project creation

      How can I apply a project template AFTER the project has been created?

    • convert the project to templet

      i have some deployment ME product for different customer , i need to create a fixed template for use it rather then keeping creating this template every time

    • Related Module in Sharing Rules

      Zoho CRM team recently added the feature to filter records by Related Records It will be really beneficial if we can have this feature for Sharing Rules as well

    • Assignment Thresholds Resetting After Lead Conversion

      Hello everyone, We're facing an issue with Zoho CRM's lead assignment thresholds that makes them unsuitable for our workflow. I'm hoping to find a potential workaround or solution from the community. Here’s our current process: A new lead is created automatically

    • Territory view for custom modules?

      I have recently activated territories however I can't seem to find how to use territories for custom modules? These modules have territories:  Contacts /  Accounts / Opportunities These modules don't have territories:   Buildings (custom module) and 

    • Approval Process Comments

      Is it possible to view the comments entered during the approval or rejection of a record in the approval process? If not, is there a way to require a field to be completed upon approval or rejection?

    • Login for test case

      Had a few questions regarding authentication test cases and couldn't find an answer in the the docs. 1. If an app like Zoho Creator requires authentication before providing access, do I need to create a login function and add it to each test case? 2.

    • Customer members area

      Does FSM support a customer members area? If not what do you propose we use if we want the data used in FSM for customers to give them an area / login to see past orders, create new orders and general announcements.

    • Notes created in mobile can no longer be accessed in desktop

      Working with a 2013 Mac running OS 10.14.6; Desktop Notebook version 4.5.3. Using Motorola Moto G Power 5G - 2024; Android app version 6.7 I have been using Notebook for some years. Starting several weeks ago, the notes newly created ion the phone can

    • Function #49: Manage varying installment payments using Zoho Books

      . Hello everyone, and welcome back to our series! Last week, we discussed automating the collection of fixed installment payments in Zoho Books. But what if your payment structure involves charging varying percentages of the invoice total as installments?

    • Is it possible for contacts to "Re-enter" a workflow in Zoho Campaign?

      We are currently working on a way to automatically add users to from one list to other lists based on specific criteria, but can't seem to find a native way of doing this so we are trying to use Workflows to do this. So, for example, if a user's status is set to "Active," then they should be added to the list "Active Users." If the same user's status is then set to "Paused," they should be added to the list "Paused Users" and removed from the list "Active Users." This works fine for the first go

    • Bulk upload images and specifications to products

      Hi, Many users have asked this over the years and I am also asking the same. Is there any way in which we can bulk upload product (variant) images and product specifications. The current way to upload/select image for every variant is too cumbersome.

    • Out of Office for Just One of My Alias Email

      Can I set up the Out of Office Reply for Just One of my Alias Email Addresses?

    • Can I map multiple Surveys into the CRM using the same fields?

      Hello, We are a healthcare practice that offers two distinct services (Nutrition and Primary Care). We use Zoho Survey for our lead generation form (Get Started Survey), which allows people to express interest in one of the two services and even allows

    • Dealing with API responses where integers have more than 16 digits

      Hi there How do I deal with an api response contaning an int or float with more than 16 digits (before any decimal places for a float). I constantly receive the response "Unable to cast the 'BigInteger' value into a 'BIGINT' value because the input is

    • Add Zoho Mail for users who do not need Zoho One

      We have licenses for ZOho One for teams that need to use the suite of products that Zoho One offers.  We have 8 more people who only need email access and we would like to add just a Zoho Mail.  They do not need the Zoho One license.  We are currently

    • ZML vs HTML Snippet - which is better?

      Are there certain use cases where one is better than the other?

    • Load PO_Date field (Purchase Order) with current date in Deluge

      Hi, I'm not a full time developer, just helping to customize our CRM, in the small company I work for. There must be something wrong with me, because I can't do something so simple as complete a field with the current date in a function using Deluge.

    • Zoho CRM in Microsoft Power Automate Custom Connector

      Hi everyone, I’m building a Power Automate flow that integrates Microsoft Bookings with Zoho CRM. The goal is to automatically create a meeting (event) in Zoho CRM whenever a new appointment is booked via Microsoft Bookings. To achieve this, I created

    • Spell check sucks

      Come on guys, it's 2024 and your spell check is completely retarded. You gotta fix it.

    • Zoho One Login Issue - Unable to receive OTP

      Hi Support Team, I am experiencing a unique login issue with Zoho One. I am attempting to log in from India using Zoho Login credentials provided by a USA-based client. Their Zoho account is hosted on a US data center. After entering the username and

    • In the Zoho Creator Customer Payment form i Have customer field on select of the field Data want to fetch from the invoice from based on the customer name In the Customer Payment form i Have subf

      In the Zoho Creator Customer Payment form i Have customer field on select of the field Data want to fetch from the invoice from based on the customer name In the Customer Payment form i Have subform update Invoice , there i have date field,Invoice number

    • Problem of Import Client Users From CRM and or Expense

      I am premium plan user on Projects. I have about 500 customers on Expense and CRM that integrated with each other. According to at below link, I am trying to import clients from CRM, system not allowed to select any customer. If I import from Expense,

    • equest to Disassociate Bigin from Zoho One and Migrate to Standalone (Upgrade to Bigin Premier – 3 Seats, Annual)

      Dear Zoho One Support Team, I’m writing to request your assistance to disassociate (remove) the Bigin application from our Zoho One organization while preserving all existing Bigin data. After the disconnection is successfully completed, we intend to

    • Unable to enable tax checkboxes

      Hi Zoho Commerce Support, I'm writing to report an issue I'm having with the tax settings in my Zoho Commerce store. I've created several tax rates under Settings > Taxes, but all of them appear with the checkbox disabled. When I try to enable a checkbox,

    • Zoho Commerce - Enable Company Name and Tax Number collection for B2B orders in Global Edition

      Please enable Company Name and Tax Details option on checkout settings in Zoho Commerce Global Edition. It is still important to collect Company Name and Tax Number for B2B sales in many countries. My business is based in Ireland (in the EU) and I have

    • ZohoSign and ZohoBooks Integration/Workflow

      Hello All, We utilize ZohoSign for signatures on tax eFiles. We utilize Dynamic KBA. Additionally, we use ZohoBooks for invoicing for these services. Is there a way to accomplish the following: Send a copy of the Tax Return, Invoice and eFiles in one

    • Manage monthly tasks with projectsf

      Hi All I run a finance and operations team where we need both teams to complete monthly tasks to ensure we hit our deadlines. Can Zoho projects be used for this. There many finance focused tools but we have Zoho one so want to explore Thanks Will

    • Zoho Suite is very slow

      Since today Zoho is incredibly slow over all applications! What's going on?

    • Combine and hide invoice lines

      In quickbooks we are able to create a invoice line that combines and hides invoices lines below. eg. Brochure design         $1000 (total of lines below, the client can see this line) Graphic Design           $600 (hidden but entered to reporting and

    • Zoho Devops

      We have a Zoho one account which we have integrated with an SAS educational product, sold on a subscription model, using webhooks and API calls. We make some use of custom fields and cross module lookups and relationships. We utilize CRM, Books and billing

    • Fuel up your sales with the Zoho SalesIQ + Bigin integration

      Hi everyone! We’re happy to bring you the all-new Zoho SalesIQ + Bigin integration. With this, every prospect from your website instantly becomes a contact in Bigin, complete with transcripts and follow-up tasks, so you never lose a lead again. Let's

    • Introducing AI-powered Assessments & Zoho's native LLM, Zia

      We’ve shipped a cleaner, faster way to create assessments in Zoho Recruit. 🚀 Instead of manually building question banks or copying old templates, you can now generate ready-to-use assessments in just a few clicks, all tailored to the role you’re hiring

    • Next Page