Taming Zendesk Triggers: Best Practices for Managing Workflow Automation

Zendesk is a customer service software platform popular with many companies for ticketing, tracking, and managing customer support interactions. One of its most valuable features is Triggers, which allow you to automate specific business rules. You might wish to reply immediately when a new ticket is raised. Triggers can do this for you, by automatically sending a confirmation reply, complete with a ticket reference number, once the ticket has been successfully received.

While Triggers are powerful, they are based on a single cause and effect. Implementing business processes and workflows with Triggers can be complex and unmanageable.  Where business processes and workflows move beyond the basics, multiple Triggers are needed. When overused or not configured correctly they become troublesome. Worst case they can cause other Triggers to stop working. As your business and processes grow, you will likely need more Triggers to meet your needs. Where hundreds of Triggers are running simultaneously, keeping track of them becomes difficult. 

When Zendesk Triggers become overwhelming, it's not just a technical issue. It's a source of frustration for agents and customers alike. Fortunately, there are solutions to create more orderly workflows. Here are the most common challenges if Triggers are overused. 

Unintended Trigger Behaviour

Zendesk Triggers can behave in unintended ways. With potentially hundreds of Triggers all firing independently, it is sometimes unavoidable that Triggers will fire when you don't intend them to. It's easy to overlook a Trigger implemented six months ago that is now being impacted by a new Trigger. Without a full view of your Triggers, knowing the impact of future changes is difficult.

For Example;

• Trigger A: Your customer submits a ticket classified as a "Feature Request". This is routed by the Trigger immediately to the group "Product Team."
• Trigger B: The group receives the ticket and is marked as "under investigation."
• Trigger C: It looks for any ticket marked as "under investigation" and checks for missing details. When missing details are found, the ticket is automatically routed back to 1st Line Support and no longer marked as under investigation, which causes it to re-route to the Product Team. This ticket is then stuck in an unintended loop created when Trigger C was added. 

In this example, Trigger C looks reasonable as a stand-alone Trigger; however, when Trigger A & B are present, this causes an issue. Without a way to control the order of Triggers or view of dependencies, it can be easy for Zendesk workflows to become unstable over time. Even with well-planned Triggers, your help desk will inevitably encounter edge cases that result in unintended Trigger behaviour. 

Solution: To effectively handle your Triggers, it is crucial to maintain control over their sequencing and dependencies to prevent any conflicts from arising. When making changes, ensure you test the impact. 

Triggers Slowing Things Down

Zendesk Triggers are incredibly useful for automating workflows and processes. However, adding more Triggers to your Zendesk instance can impact system performance. With hundreds or even thousands of Triggers, Zendesk needs to evaluate each one for every ticket update. This can significantly slow things down. Agents and customers may experience a slower response when loading pages or updating tickets, or tasks may take much longer. Without optimising and streamlining Triggers, they can work against you instead of helping. The automated workflows meant to save time and effort may add to the load.

Solution: Run audits. You can streamline and optimise your Triggers by limiting the number of active Triggers, consolidating similar Triggers, and using more efficient actions and conditions. Review, assess, and amend frequently to maintain the good health of your Triggers. Any changes should be re-tested after they've been made. 

Triggers Becoming Unwieldy

Over time, Zendesk Triggers can become complex and disorganised as more are added to the system. With Triggers firing in response to multiple events across different workflows, it can be challenging to maintain a clear understanding of all your Triggers. The interdependencies between Triggers make modifying or optimising existing workflows tedious and error-prone. Changing one Trigger can unintentionally impact several others in unforeseen ways. Debugging and troubleshooting become exponentially more difficult as the number of Triggers increases. There is no way to visually map dependencies between Triggers, making it hard to understand how workflows are connected. Institutional knowledge of Triggers gets lost as team members change over time.

Solution: Diligent housekeeping and controls to limit modification and design.  Have a Trigger management plan that includes naming conventions, documentation, and a clear overview of all your Triggers. You can use diagrams and flowcharts to visualise the relationships between Triggers and identify interdependencies.

An Alternative Approach: Flowset from Cloudset

Flowset is a powerful workflow automation platform that takes Zendesk workflows to the next level. You can create flexible workflows with conditional logic, custom actions, and robust connectivity. It is easy to build sophisticated workflow automation, incorporating decisions, branches, loops, and parallel flows. Actions are tailored to their specific context within the workflow. You can freely change the conditions and actions that control a specific activity safely, knowing that the rest of your workflow will not be accidentally compromised. Built with a simple graphical workflow builder to model complex business processes, the advanced architecture delivers fast performance even with thousands of workflows running concurrently.

Flowset brings everything together into a single centralised visible workflow engine. This gives you a holistic view and improves the organisation of your workflows. It also makes it easy to monitor workflow execution and optimise processes. Flowset provides much more flexibility than Zendesk Triggers, which operate on a basic if-this-then-that logic. With Flowset, you're in the driver's seat of your workflow automation.

In summary, Flowset takes Zendesk workflows to the next level with flexible workflows, improved performance, and an enhanced unified management experience. Instead of wrestling with complex Triggers, Flowset provides the robust workflow automation platform teams need to streamline business processes and boost productivity. It's a breath of fresh air in the world of workflow automation.

Conclusion

When used correctly, Zendesk Triggers are powerful and can streamline your support tasks and customer journeys.  However, becoming over-reliant on Tiggers can be like a game of Jenga: it only takes one brick to destabilise the tower.  As your workflow requirements change over time and you build more Triggers, it's increasingly likely that you will encounter issues.

Flowset from Cloudset provides the ideal solution by letting you create flexible workflows with a unified view. You can build workflows across multiple dimensions, avoiding the common Trigger pitfalls. With Flowset, you get improved performance, better organisation, and a holistic view of your workflows. 

Discover How

If this sounds familiar, try Flowset today. It allows you to create dynamic workflows tailored to your unique needs. Sign up for a free trial to experience the benefits yourself.

Discover how Flowset is the must-have tool for your ticketing workflow each time you resolve a customer query.  At Cloudset, we offer a range of add-ons for Zendesk using Designed Intelligence to increase ticket resolution speed, efficiency and consistency. 

Cloudset Products

Formset: Simplify your Zendesk forms and eliminate unnecessary fields to boost agent efficiency and enhance customer satisfaction.

Flowset: Build powerful workflows that guide your agents through even the trickiest tickets. Use cleverly placed links within your guided ticket workflow to access relevant systems.

Performset: Understand performance metrics in real-time using proactive timers, helping you keep your customer promises. Identify what's working and what isn't, enabling you to make data-driven decisions for continuous improvement.

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