Lesson 5: Business rules

We've now arrived at the area of Zendesk that many people find a little harder to understand—at least initially. This lesson describes automated business rules. This means predefined actions that are automatically applied to tickets. There are two types of automated business rules in Zendesk Support: automations and triggers.

Let's start with what's common to both before we explain how they are different. Automations and triggers define a set of actions that will occur when a ticket matches specific conditions. For example, if a ticket is created by an end-user who belongs to a specific organization (this is the condition), it can be automatically assigned to the agent group that provides support to that organization (this is the action).

To make this even simpler to understand, it boils down to this easy formula: if x is true, then do y.

So what's the difference between an automation and a trigger? Each contains a set of conditions and a set of actions. Each modifies a ticket's data. Each affects tickets when specific events occur. The difference is the kind of events that cause the ticket to be modified. Automations act on tickets based on an event in time (for example, 4 hours after a ticket update). Triggers act on a ticket when a ticket is created or updated (the create and update events). If a ticket doesn't meet the conditions contained in your automations or triggers nothing will happen.

The purpose of creating automated business rules is so that your agents will no longer need to do these types of repetitive tasks manually. In the next few sections of this lesson, we'll dig a little deeper into both automations and triggers.

Who can create automations and triggers?

Only administrators can create and manage automations and triggers. This is because these business rules may affect every ticket in Zendesk Support and it's the responsibility of an administrator to define your custom automations and triggers as part of the overall support workflow that administrators set up.