Community tip: how to set a reminder on a ticket

It’s great to be able to put a ticket on hold but I’m sure you’ve suffered when tickets have stayed like that for too long. Sure, you could create an automation to change the state back to being open after X amount of days but life is never as simple as there being a constant value for X. And perhaps you don’t want to actually change the status – you just want to be reminded that the ticket is there.

In this Zendesk community tip, I’m going to explain one way of using a special type of customised field – a customised date field – to set a reminder on a ticket.

Quick summary for anyone in a rush: create a new customised field, allow agents to populate it and then send a notification to the agent when that date is reached. But before we start, there are a couple of small caveats.

• This is a date. Not a date and time, just a date. The date in question therefore starts at midnight – not when your business hours start.

• Currently, in a trigger, you cannot test for a date being equal to “today”. Therefore, we are going to use the logic of “remind me before” a certain date (although you could easily adapt this to “remind me after”).

You can set a reminder on a ticket by following these steps:

1. Create a customised field: go ahead and create a Ticket Field and give it a suitable name. I called mine “Remind me before”.

2. Create an automation to notify agents of the reminder: we want to test whether the reminder date is within the next 1 day (we can’t set this to 0 days – I tried!). Every automation requires a nullifying condition otherwise it will repeat every hour. The obvious solution is to set the reminder date to be blank but, unfortunately, this is not considered nullifying (at the time of writing). So, we are going to use a tag.
    
   For now, create an automation similar to the one in the screenshot. In this automation, we test for the tag and when the reminder is due, and then send an email, blank out the date and remove the tag.

3. Create a trigger to add a tag on update: we just need to deal with the requirement to have the tag nullify the conditions of the automation. For this we need a trigger that will fire when a ticket is updated and if a date is present, then add the “reminder_set” tag.

See screenshots and more details from this tip.

This community tip is from Colin Piper.