Чим займається компанія Relokia?

Relokia is a product software development company, which is specialized in data

migration industry. Due to the Relokia’s products it’s possible to migrate data from any
software or datebase without any loss or change of information. There are a security
measures to keep the data safe, which shows the respect to the customers’ trust. Among
the clients Relokia can be proud of Lenovo, Arkansas State University, Zyxel, Thule
Sweden, Lego and many other worldwide companies.
1. Які продукти пропонує компанія Relokia?
Most of Relokia’s products are connected with the work of different helpdesks and the
data migration between different systems.
1) One of the most popular is Help Desk Migration. Also, the company has developed a
tool that allows to migrate the data without the help of devs and even support managers
fast and effectively. A customer can use the tool to migrate the data between the
following helpdesks (Freshdesk, Deskpro, Zendesk) https://help-desk-
migration.com/supported-platforms/
One can migrate tickets, contacts, companies, groups, agents and knowledgebase from
one helpdesk to another one.
2) Growthdot (https://growthdot.com/ ) - is a service specializing in Zendesk and
Freshdesk addons and Zendesk themes customizations and account settings.
The main addons are the following
Email Tracking for Zendesk (https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/email-tracking/) -
allows tracking the email openings by end user.
Email tracking for Freshdesk performs the same functions.
CRM and Deals for Zendesk (https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/crm-and-deals/ ) -
pretty similar to most of the CRMs, but can be integrated into Zendesk, allows to connect
tickets to deals and synchronize all your work with Zendesk.
GDPR Compliance (https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/gdpr-compliance/) - allows
anonymizing (remove) user data from tickets, but keeps the tickets in Zendesk account.
Video Reply (https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/video-reply/) - allows recording
video replies and sending them in tickets instead of dull text messages.
Proactive Campaigns (https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/proactive-campaigns/ ) -
allows sending mass outbound emails directly from Zendesk.
2. Що означає термін “міграція даних”, хто і для чого може потребувати цього?
Data migration is the process of transferring data from one storage system or computing
environment to another. This process is an essential component of an organization's
overall data management strategy. It is a necessary process when upgrading or
consolidating server and data storage hardware, adopting a new application, or moving to
a new computing environment.
 Data migration is categorized as storage migration, database migration, application
migration and business process migration. These scenarios are routine IT activities, and
most organizations migrate data on a quarterly basis.
Data migration occurs for a variety of reasons, including:
 Server or storage equipment replacements or upgrades
 Website consolidation
 Server maintenance
 Data center relocation
3. HelpDesk. Що це і для чого використовується?
A helpdesk is a tool that organizes customer communication to help businesses respond
to customers more quickly and effectively. Using a helpdesk allows your support team to
offer the best possible experience to your customers. Helpdesk tools are one of the most
integral tools when it comes to supporting a customer base successfully.
Helpdesk systems bring everyone’s interactions into one interface and allow different
conversations to be cross-referenced and used for more context in the customer
experience. It also allows for use of features such as categorization and automation as a
means to keep track of what kinds of issues your customers are experiencing.
A helpdesk tool helps create organization out of chaos by keeping your ticket process
clean and giving your agents the tools that they need to best do their job.
4. Назвіть 5 популярних хелпдесків. Поясніть, що таке контакт, тікет і
компанія (організація) як сутності хелпдеска.
Ticket – is a digital record with details about the customer’s problem or request. (events,
alerts, incidents, requests)
For example, John Doe is a contact record and his email address, johndoe@email.com is
stored in the Email contact property. His company, Orange Inc., is a company record, which
can then be associated with John Doe to show the relationship between the two. As John
interacts with your sales and support teams, you can create and associate deals and tickets
with John and his company.
Among the most popular helpdesks I can mention
 Monday.com - Best for helping teams to manage their tasks and workflows.
Price: monday.com offers four pricing plans i.e. Basic ($39 per month), Standard
($49 per month), Pro ($79 per month), and Enterprise (Get a quote). All the
mentioned prices are for annual billing and for 5 users. A free trial is available for
the product.
 ProProfs Help Desk - Best for easily managing all incoming customer
communications with a user-friendly and intuitive ticketing system.
Price: ProProfs Help Desk comes with a forever free plan with limited features.
To enjoy more features, you can go for the paid plans that start at $10/user/month.
It also offers a 15-day free trial for its customers.
 Zendesk - Best For: All customer interactions across phone, chat, email, social
media, and any other channel you can imagine, come together in one place. Price:
 US $5 – US $199 per agent per month. It also comes with a one-month trial
version for the users to experience its features.
 Freshdesk - Best For: It is mainly known for its intelligent automation feature
which automates repetitive help desk task and thereby increases productivity.
Price: US $19 – US $99 per agent per month. It offers a 21-day free trial version
for its customers.
 SolarWinds Web Help Desk Software comes with the features of automated
ticketing management, incident tracking, SLA reporting, asset management, and
remote support integration. Its automated ticketing management system will allow
you to automate tasks like ticket assignment, routing, and escalation. The system
will alert you for the unattended or unassigned tickets. It provides a simplified
project and task management with relational ticketing. The price starts at $700 per
tech. There will not be any monthly fees.
5. Zendesk. Що це і для чого використовується?
Zendesk is more than a help desk software, it is customer service and engagement
platform that provides support for Omnichannel. This means that all the customer
interactions across emails, chats, social media, mobile, etc come all together in one place.
It has everything which a customer needs to build good customer experience.
Features:
 It provides highly flexible ticket management with automated workflows along with
multi-channel support.
 It has a strong knowledge base portal and community forum with a customer-facing web
interface.
 It provides robust reporting and advanced analytics with open API, thereby enabling
seamless integration into your business.
 It has both public and private forums with good mobile support for iPhone, iPad,
Android, etc.
- Створити тестовий акаунт Zendesk
- Створити 3 кастомних поля для тікетів (одне поле типу дропдаун з назвою
Location і 5-7ма опціями з назвою країн, одне поле числового типу з назвою Price і
поле типу дата з назвою Expire date)
- Створити декілька тікетів
6. Поясніть як створюються тікети, поля і в загальному як працює Zendesk
7. Zendesk Marketplace Що це і для чого використовується?
Zendesk Marketplace is a one-stop shop to find partners, apps and integration to increase
agent productivity and streamline workflows. There are apps for support service, live
chat and messaging and Sales CRM. Also you can fin here the right design for your Help
Center in the themes directory
Data migrations come in different types and involve different business drivers. Data migrations
typically cover databases, applications, storage, and cloud environments.
  Database Migration
This type of data migration occurs when moving information from one or more source databases
to another target database. This migration is typically needed when updating database software,
migrating to the cloud, or switching between database vendors.

This requires a lot of planning and careful testing due to the many tasks involved in the
migration process, from determining the target database's storage capacity to ensuring data
integrity.
 Application Migration
These migrations involve moving data from one vendor application or platform to another. For
example, a small business can move from an on-premises version of Microsoft Office to a cloud-
based service. It can also mean migrating to a new application from a different provider.
 Storage Migration
Storage migrations deal with moving data between two or more storage systems, such as an on-
premise server and the cloud. These migrations are usually driven not so much by lack of
storage, but by a need for technology upgrades.
Тікет — запит на отримання допомоги чи виправлення помилки. створюється системою на
вимогу користувача, присвоюється виконавцю і тримається на контролі адміністратором.
Вендор (vendоr, вендер) - компания-поставщик (зачастую, производитель) товаров и
услуг под своей торговой маркой. Вендор - компания, которая выпускает, поставляет
продукцию под собственной раскрученной торговой маркой.
Вендор занимает верхнюю ступень в маркетинговом канале, в современной торговле:
производитель - вендор – дистрибьютор – дилер - покупатель. Вендоры не всегда
являются производителями товаров и услуг. Ключевое в деятельности вендора - владение
маркой и управление продвижением и распределением товаров и услуг. С точки зрения
маркетинга, вендор всегда принимает на себя ответственность за продвижение и
поддержку товара на рынке.
В IT-сфере вендор - поставщик отбрендованного товара, включаемого компанией-
системным интегратором, в качестве комплектующего, или части в итоговое IT-решение
для последующей продажи покупателю.
На software-рынке Independent Software Vendor - вендор-компания разработкик и
поставщик программного обеспечения для специализированных(нишевых) рынков:
программное обеспечение для аппаратно-программных комплексов автоматизированного
производства, обслуживания склада, риэлторов, считывания штрих-кода и тп.
В b2b-сфере понятие вендор – это широкая маркетинговая категория, применяемая для
описания взаимоотношений партнеров в тесно интегрированных комплексах
производства и сбыта сложных технических товаров.
аддон — дополнительный модуль (встраивается в программу, чтобы расширить её
функциональность)
Regardless of the type of customer support you provide, the one constant for all support
organizations is that customers seek you out to help them resolve their issues. Here are some of
the options that your customers have for contacting you:

Send an email
Fill out a support request form in your Zendesk Support portal
Fill out a support request form on your own web site
Call you on the telephone
Text chat with you
Send you a Tweet
Post on your Facebook wall
All of these communication options are referred to as channels. You decide what channels you
want to enable in your Zendesk account and how your customers can reach you.

You can open even more ways of communicating with your customers by adding apps to your
account. These give you additional functionality and connect you with many popular internet
products and services such as Salesforce, JIRA, and SugarCRM.

All support requests, from all channels, become Zendesk Support tickets. Tickets capture your
customer's initial request for support and all the conversations your agents have with the
customer along the way to solving their support issue
If you've already set up your trial account, you can create a test ticket right now, start testing out
Zendesk Support, and see what a typical ticket looks like.

Imagine you've just purchased a new product (in this case a camera) and something's not
working correctly. You’re going to ask for help by requesting support using your email account.
Send an email from an email account that you did not use to set up your Zendesk Support trial to
your Zendesk account. You do this by simply addressing an email to
support@thenameofyouraccount.zendesk.com. When you send the email, a new ticket will be
created.
Log in to your Zendesk account, then click the Views icon () in the sidebar.
You'll find your new ticket in the Unassigned Tickets view. Click the title of that view.
Ticket creation
This ticket was automatically created based on the request you sent in earlier. At the top of the
ticket interface you see a tab with the ticket number for this ticket. When you receive a request in
your account, a new ticket is automatically created.
Click the title of the new ticket to open it.
We'll take a look at all the components of a ticket on the next page.

However, there are certain times when you need to create a ticket manually, on behalf of your
customer. You can do so using the +Add button.
Ticket subject and comments
In the main body of the ticket, you can see that the ticket includes the subject and description of
the support request you sent by email. The support request you submitted earlier is the first
comment in the ticket and the email subject becomes the title of the ticket.
The first comment of the ticket contains the content of the email request you sent. Below the first
comment, you see that a new empty comment is open and ready for you (as the agent) to enter a
response. The comment area includes a text toolbar you can use to format your response, add
attachments, and so on.

By default, a comment you enter as a Public reply will be public and visible to everyone who
views this ticket, including the person who requested support. The ticket also includes a CC
field, you can use to copy other external users on your reply.

You can also add private comments (referred to as an Internal Note). The requester never sees
these notes, they are used for internal communication only. For example, an agent may need to
get advice from another agent to solve the requester's support issue. If you want to add an
internal note, click that tab.

Just below the title (subject) of the support request, you see the name of the ticket requester, the
date and time the ticket was created, and where the ticket originated from. In this case, the
request was sent via email. Zendesk shows you what channel was used to generate the support
request.

Ticket properties panel

To the left of the ticket conversation you'll see the ticket properties, including ticket fields, which
include the person or group assigned to the ticket and any internal users (followers) who will
receive ticket updates.

Above the ticket fields are two buttons you can use to toggle between the ticket properties () and
context information () about the user who submitted the request. If you're using the Zendesk
Agent Workspace, context information about the user appears on the right side the ticket
conversation, instead of the left.
For now, we're only concerned with the Assignee field (we'll explain the others in another
lesson).

All tickets need to be assigned to an agent so that they can be solved and closed. Assuming
you've just started your trial account, you're the only user in your Zendesk Support instance so in
the next step you'll assign the ticket to yourself.

Ticket actions
At the bottom of the ticket, you see a Submit button.

When you finish adding a comment to the ticket, click this button to save your comments and
submit the changes you’ve made. By default, any public replies you add to a ticket are sent to the
ticket requester when you click Submit.

When you submit a ticket, you can also change the ticket status. A ticket status can be New,
Open, Pending, or Solved.

The bottom of the ticket also includes an Apply macros button. You can use macros to reply to
support requests that can be answered with a single, standard response.

Ticket user roles

As you begin to work with tickets you’ll see that there are several types of users associated with
a ticket:

Every ticket contains the name of the person who requested support, referred to as the requester.
Once an agent is assigned to the ticket, the agent becomes the assignee.
If an agent opens a ticket for a customer, the agent is the submitter.
If the agent invites other internal users to view the ticket, they are followers.

Ticket actions
At the bottom of the ticket, you see a Submit button.
When you finish adding a comment to the ticket, click this button to save your comments and
submit the changes you’ve made. By default, any public replies you add to a ticket are sent to the
ticket requester when you click Submit.

When you submit a ticket, you can also change the ticket status. A ticket status can be New,
Open, Pending, or Solved.

The bottom of the ticket also includes an Apply macros button. You can use macros to reply to
support requests that can be answered with a single, standard response.

Ticket user roles

As you begin to work with tickets you’ll see that there are several types of users associated with
a ticket:

Every ticket contains the name of the person who requested support, referred to as the requester.
Once an agent is assigned to the ticket, the agent becomes the assignee.
If an agent opens a ticket for a customer, the agent is the submitter.
If the agent invites other internal users to view the ticket, they are followers.
Try it yourself: Assigning a ticket to yourself
If you want to try assigning and opening a ticket, follow these steps:

Open the ticket you created, then click the down arrow next to the Assignee field and select your
name. Alternatively, to save searching for your name, click take it next to the Assignee field.
You can also set the Type and Priority fields. Each are drop-down lists with pre-defined options.
Set Type to Problem and Priority to Normal.
To save these changes click the Submit as new button on the bottom right of the page. When you
assign a ticket to an agent, it is automatically set to Open.
After a ticket is assigned to an agent, they'll work to solve the ticket and ensure that the customer
is happy. Some tickets can be solved with a simple standard response for a common issue such
as resetting a password. Other issues that are more complex may require research, collaboration
with other agents or people within your company, or gathering more information from the
customer.

How are tickets assigned to agents?

Tickets can be assigned both manually and automatically. You can manually assign a ticket to
yourself or to another agent, allow agents to assign themselves to tickets, or you can set up
Zendesk Support to automatically assign tickets to a group or specific agent.
You'll most likely set up a mix of both manual and automatic ticket assignment. Some larger
support teams delegate management of their ticket queue to a support lead or manager and those
people assign tickets to agents.

On the next page you'll see the typical journey a ticket takes from arriving in Zendesk Support to
being solved.

Here are the typical stages:

When a Zendesk Support request first arrives, it becomes a ticket and is automatically set to
New.
When an agent is assigned to the ticket, the ticket is automatically set to Open.
If the agent has a follow up question for the customer, the agent will set the ticket to Pending,
which means that the agent is waiting for more information from the customer.
When the agent resolves the issue, they will set the ticket to Solved.
Finally, after a certain number of days, the ticket is automatically Closed and archived for later
reference. Agents will never manually set a ticket to closed (which is why you don't see it as an
option on the Submit button).
Agents expect that when they set a ticket to solved the customer's issue has been resolved and the
conversation around that particular issue is over. However, if the customer doesn't feel the same
way, they can respond back to the agent by replying to the "ticket solved" email notification.
When this happens, the ticket is reopened and it's the agent's job to follow up and go through the
ticket lifecycle again.

In the next lesson, we'll show you how you can view your tickets using any number of criteria.
For example, you can quickly see all the tickets that have been set to Solved, all the tickets
assigned to a particular agent, and so on.
Lesson 1: From support requests to tickets
Regardless of the type of customer support you provide, the one constant for all
support organizations is that customers seek you out to help them resolve their
issues. Here are some of the options that your customers have for contacting you:
Send an email
Fill out a support request form in your Zendesk Support portal
Fill out a support request form on your own web site
Call you on the telephone
Text chat with you
Send you a Tweet
Post on your Facebook wall
All of these communication options are referred to as channels. You decide what
channels you want to enable in your Zendesk account and how your customers can
reach you.
You can open even more ways of communicating with your customers by adding
apps to your account. These give you additional functionality and connect you with
many popular internet products and services such as Salesforce, JIRA, and
SugarCRM.
All support requests, from all channels, become Zendesk Support tickets. Tickets
capture your customer's initial request for support and all the conversations your
agents have with the customer along the way to solving their support issue.
Try it yourself: Create a ticket now
If you've already set up your trial account, you can create a test ticket right now,
start testing out Zendesk Support, and see what a typical ticket looks like.
Imagine you've just purchased a new product (in this case a camera) and
something's not working correctly. You’re going to ask for help by requesting
support using your email account. Send an email from an email account that you
did not use to set up your Zendesk Support trial to your Zendesk account. You do
this by simply addressing an email to
support@thenameofyouraccount.zendesk.com. When you send the email, a new
ticket will be created.
Log in to your Zendesk account, then click the Views icon () in the sidebar.
You'll find your new ticket in the Unassigned Tickets view. Click the title of that
view.
Click the title of the new ticket to open it.
We'll take a look at all the components of a ticket on the next page.
Anatomy of a ticket
With your ticket open in front of you, you can see all the different parts of the
ticket.

Ticket creation
This ticket was automatically created based on the request you sent in earlier. At
the top of the ticket interface you see a tab with the ticket number for this ticket.
When you receive a request in your account, a new ticket is automatically created.

However, there are certain times when you need to create a ticket manually, on
behalf of your customer. You can do so using the +Add button.

Ticket subject and comments

In the main body of the ticket, you can see that the ticket includes the subject and
description of the support request you sent by email. The support request you
submitted earlier is the first comment in the ticket and the email subject becomes
the title of the ticket.
The first comment of the ticket contains the content of the email request you sent.
Below the first comment, you see that a new empty comment is open and ready for
you (as the agent) to enter a response. The comment area includes a text toolbar
you can use to format your response, add attachments, and so on.

By default, a comment you enter as a Public reply will be public and visible to
everyone who views this ticket, including the person who requested support. The
ticket also includes a CC field, you can use to copy other external users on your
reply.

You can also add private comments (referred to as an Internal Note). The requester
never sees these notes, they are used for internal communication only. For
example, an agent may need to get advice from another agent to solve the
requester's support issue. If you want to add an internal note, click that tab.
Just below the title (subject) of the support request, you see the name of the ticket
requester, the date and time the ticket was created, and where the ticket originated
from. In this case, the request was sent via email. Zendesk shows you what channel
was used to generate the support request.
Ticket properties panel
To the left of the ticket conversation you'll see the ticket properties, including
ticket fields, which include the person or group assigned to the ticket and any
internal users (followers) who will receive ticket updates.
Above the ticket fields are two buttons you can use to toggle between the ticket
properties () and context information () about the user who submitted the request.
If you're using the Zendesk Agent Workspace, context information about the user
appears on the right side the ticket conversation, instead of the left.

For now, we're only concerned with the Assignee field (we'll explain the others in
another lesson).

All tickets need to be assigned to an agent so that they can be solved and closed.
Assuming you've just started your trial account, you're the only user in your
Zendesk Support instance so in the next step you'll assign the ticket to yourself.

Ticket actions
At the bottom of the ticket, you see a Submit button.
When you finish adding a comment to the ticket, click this button to save your
comments and submit the changes you’ve made. By default, any public replies you
add to a ticket are sent to the ticket requester when you click Submit.

When you submit a ticket, you can also change the ticket status. A ticket status can
be New, Open, Pending, or Solved.

The bottom of the ticket also includes an Apply macros button. You can use
macros to reply to support requests that can be answered with a single, standard
response.

Ticket user roles

As you begin to work with tickets you’ll see that there are several types of users
associated with a ticket:

Every ticket contains the name of the person who requested support, referred to as
the requester.
Once an agent is assigned to the ticket, the agent becomes the assignee.
If an agent opens a ticket for a customer, the agent is the submitter.
If the agent invites other internal users to view the ticket, they are followers.
Try it yourself: Assigning a ticket to yourself
If you want to try assigning and opening a ticket, follow these steps:

Open the ticket you created, then click the down arrow next to the Assignee field
and select your name. Alternatively, to save searching for your name, click take it
next to the Assignee field.
You can also set the Type and Priority fields. Each are drop-down lists with pre-
defined options. Set Type to Problem and Priority to Normal.
To save these changes click the Submit as new button on the bottom right of the
page. When you assign a ticket to an agent, it is automatically set to Open.
After a ticket is assigned to an agent, they'll work to solve the ticket and ensure
that the customer is happy. Some tickets can be solved with a simple standard
response for a common issue such as resetting a password. Other issues that are
more complex may require research, collaboration with other agents or people
within your company, or gathering more information from the customer.

How are tickets assigned to agents?

Tickets can be assigned both manually and automatically. You can manually
assign a ticket to yourself or to another agent, allow agents to assign themselves to
tickets, or you can set up Zendesk Support to automatically assign tickets to a
group or specific agent.

You'll most likely set up a mix of both manual and automatic ticket assignment.
Some larger support teams delegate management of their ticket queue to a support
lead or manager and those people assign tickets to agents.
On the next page you'll see the typical journey a ticket takes from arriving in
Zendesk Support to being solved.
The ticket life cycle
Each ticket has a life cycle. In other words, the stages it goes through as it arrives
in Zendesk Support until it is solved.
Here are the typical stages:

When a Zendesk Support request first arrives, it becomes a ticket and is

automatically set to New.
When an agent is assigned to the ticket, the ticket is automatically set to Open.
If the agent has a follow up question for the customer, the agent will set the ticket
to Pending, which means that the agent is waiting for more information from the
customer.
When the agent resolves the issue, they will set the ticket to Solved.
Finally, after a certain number of days, the ticket is automatically Closed and
archived for later reference. Agents will never manually set a ticket to closed
(which is why you don't see it as an option on the Submit button).
Agents expect that when they set a ticket to solved the customer's issue has been
resolved and the conversation around that particular issue is over. However, if the
customer doesn't feel the same way, they can respond back to the agent by replying
to the "ticket solved" email notification. When this happens, the ticket is reopened
and it's the agent's job to follow up and go through the ticket lifecycle again.

In the next lesson, we'll show you how you can view your tickets using any
number of criteria. For example, you can quickly see all the tickets that have been
set to Solved, all the tickets assigned to a particular agent, and so on.
Tip: The final stage in the ticket lifecycle is understanding your customer's
happiness with the support you provided. In Zendesk Support, you can enable a
brief customer satisfaction survey to be sent after the ticket is solved. The customer
is asked one simple question with two possible answers.

Lesson 2: Organizing tickets and users

In the previous lesson, we introduced views. Views are used to organize all your
tickets at all stages in the ticket life cycle. In this lesson, we'll take a more in-depth
look at how views can be used to organize your tickets. We'll also look at the tools
you have available for organizing users. Your users include both your customers
and your support staff.

Let's begin with views.

Views are essential for managing the ticket workflow because they enable you to
create meaningful groupings of tickets as they progress through the ticket lifecycle.

Zendesk provides some pre-defined, editable views. These views were created for
the essential day-to-day running of Zendesk Support and are based on customer
service best practices.

You can see the list of views when you click the Views icon () in the sidebar.
Every Zendesk account contains these views to get you started:
ince views organize tickets based on a ticket's properties, a ticket can appear in
more than one view. For example, a new ticket can appear in the Unassigned
tickets, All unsolved tickets, and New tickets in your groups views. This is because
a new ticket meets all the criteria for how these views were defined.

You can create new views or modify the existing views to suit your needs.

Shared and personal views

The pre-defined views provided in your Zendesk account are available to all of
your agents. These are shared views. You can edit these views or create your own
views and define who has access to them.

Admins can also create views that only a specific group of agents can see. These
are referred to as restricted views.

Lastly, all agents can create personal views that no one else has access to.
Try it yourself
Let's quickly create a new view for the tickets assigned to you, solved or not. Since
you created a test ticket in the previous lesson, you'll have one ticket for your view.

Click the Views icon () in the sidebar.

At the bottom of the list of views, click More. This opens the Views administration
page.
Click Add View.
Enter a title for your new view (for example, My tickets).
Conditions are used to define what tickets are shown in a view. You can think of
conditions as a simple formula for selecting data in tickets. In this example, we're
trying to create a view of the tickets that are assigned to you. To do that, click the
drop-down list below the label Meet all of the following conditions. Select Ticket:
Assignee. Two more drop-down lists will appear. The first should already be set to
Is. Now click the next drop-down list and select (current user) or your name (either
will work) from the list of agents. You've just defined a condition.
If you want to immediately see the results of the condition you defined, click the
Preview match for the conditions above button. Your ticket will be displayed in a
table.
When defining a view you can also define the formatting and who has access to it.
For now, accept the default formatting but scroll down and under Available for
select Me only.
Click Create View. Congratulations, you've just created your first personal view.
Your new view is listed along with all the pre-defined views in Zendesk Support.
Segmenting agents and their tickets with groups
You may have noticed that several of the pre-defined views refer to groups. In
Zendesk Support you organize your agents into groups. When you assign a ticket
to an agent you're also assigning it to a group that the agent belongs to (agents can
belong to more than one group).

You can also assign a ticket to just a group and not a specific agent within the
group. Doing this allows the agents within that group to determine who should be
assigned to the ticket.
You can create groups of agents for any reason you'd like. Typically, groups are
used to organize agents by specialty or expertise (product support vs advanced
support for example) or by location or language.

You can create views that list all the tickets assigned to each of your groups.

It's up to you to think about how you want to organize your tickets and the views
your team needs. For example, if you only have a few agents, you might just need
an "Unassigned" view where agents can pick tickets to work on. If you have a
larger team, it might be a good idea to set up views for each group and have tickets
routed accordingly.

Think about how you want to manage you ticket queue and then create the views
and groups you need to support that workflow.

The default group

In Zendesk Support, you'll see a group called Support. This is the default group
that you and any agents you add are automatically added to. You can create new
groups and add or remove agents from any of the Zendesk Support groups. The
default Support group is there because a group is required to assign and solve a
ticket.

Try it yourself: Creating a group

You can create as many groups as you need to support your unique ticket
workflow. In this example, you'll create a new group for your advanced support
group. To see how to create a group, take a look at this video:
Try it yourself
If you'd like to try creating a group, follow these steps:

Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select People.

At the top of the People administration page, click Add Group.
Enter a name for your new group (for example, Advanced support).
Below the title you'll see all the Zendesk Support agents. Select your name.
To create your group, click Create group.
You now have two groups: the default Support group and the Advanced support
group you just added. We'll show you how to use this group shortly.
Organizing customers
To help manage your support workflow, you can add each of your customers to
one or more organizations. You can then provide different types of support for
each organization.
The default organization a user belongs to is associated with every ticket they
create and can be used to automate how incoming tickets are handled.

Common uses of organizations include supporting a service level agreement you

have with customers, tracking and managing tickets by company names or email
domain, and by location or language.

You can also use organizations as a way to control access to Zendesk Support
tickets. You can allow specific users to see all the other tickets in their
organization, which gives them visibility into Zendesk Support issues that affect
the entire organization. Doing this may prevent additional tickets from being
created for a support issue that affects an entire organization (for example, an
essential application being temporarily unavailable to everyone).

You can also add agents to organizations. You might do this to restrict an agent's
access to only tickets from a specific organization (Note: you can also restrict an
agent's access to the tickets in a specific group). And you can automatically assign
tickets from an organization to a specific group.

User and organization tags

Both the user profile and organization profile can contain additional information
that can be used to customize your Zendesk Support workflow. You can add tags
to both and use these tags to automatically assign or track tickets.

For example, if you add a tag called premium_support to a user or an organization,

that tag is automatically added to every ticket from that user or users within that
organization. You can then, for example, use the tag to define a new view that
tracks your premium support tickets.
Zendesk Support doesn't contain any default organizations. If you choose to use
organizations, you will need to create them. To see how to create organizations,
take a look at this video:
Creating an Organization (1:01)
Try it yourself
If you'd like to try creating an organization, follow these steps:
Open a new support ticket like you did before. Ensure that the ticket has a
requester name that you haven't already added to an organization. You could create
a new user for testing purposes.
You'll see that there are three tabs within the ticket. The first is the Organization
tab, the second is the User tab, and the third is the Ticket tab.
To create a new organization, click Organization (create).
You'll be prompted to enter an organization name. Enter a name. For example, you
might just call this organization Customers.
You can additionally add one or more email domains, which will automatically
add every other new user with the same email domain into this organization. You'd
probably do that if you're providing support to specific companies and want to
segment them into organizations. For example, every user from
@somecompany.com could be added to an organization called Some Company.
You can skip this for now and add it later if you need to.

Click Save and the new organization is created and added to the user's profile as
associated with the ticket.\
User roles
So far we've talked about agents and customers. These are the two primary user
roles involved in Zendesk Support transactions. Customers have issues that need to
be fixed and agents fix them. However, there are several other user roles that you
should be aware of.

First, be aware that the term customer is often used interchangeably with end-user.
You'll see both used in the Zendesk Support interface and in our documentation
and training. Both refer to the people who use Zendesk Support to request
assistance.
Now let's look at the Zendesk Support staff roles. You know about the agent role.
Agents primarily solve tickets. However, you can assign specific permissions to
agents to control their access to the different parts of your Zendesk. For example,
you can allow just a few agents to manage and moderate your Help Center.

In addition to agents, there is the administrator role. You can have one or many
administrators in your Zendesk account. You can think of this role as the manager
of your Zendesk account. They set up your account with the channels you want to
support, define new shared views, manage users, and so on.
If you originally created your Zendesk account, you are the account owner. This
role is the super administrator role and can do everything that's possible to do in
Zendesk.

Custom agent roles

In the Enterprise version of Zendesk Support, you can create custom agent and
administrator roles. In other words, you can craft a role specifically designed to
support your workflow from a list of permissions. We've defined some common
roles that you can use as is or customize.
Try it yourself: Adding a new agent and assigning to a group and organization
Now that you have an understanding of the Zendesk Support user roles, let's add a
support agent. To do this, you'll need to use an email address that hasn't already
been used in your Zendesk account. In other words, you can't use the email address
you used to create your Zendesk account.

This video shows you how to add an agent to Zendesk Support:

Try it yourself
In Support, position your mouse over the Add tab in the top toolbar, then click
User.
Enter the name and email address of your new agent.
Click the User Role drop-down list, select Agent, then click Save.
This new user's profile is displayed. Here you can add your new agent to other
groups, define their access to tickets and other parts of your Zendesk account, and
add any other user profile information you want.
Click the Groups field and you'll be prompted to add the agent to another group.
Select the Advanced support group you created earlier.
Now set the agent's access permissions. Click the Access field and select Tickets in
agent's org.
Now to complete that access restriction, add the agent to the Customers
organization. Do that by clicking the Org. field and selecting Customers.
That's it, you're done. Zendesk automatically saves the changes you make to a
user's profile. You've just added an agent, added them to a group, and restricted
their access to only tickets within the Customers organization.

Lesson 3: Solving tickets

In this lesson we'll focus on how agents solve tickets. This applies to
administrators and account owners as well since these roles are just agents with
more power to manage Zendesk Support.

Solving a ticket typically involves any or all of the following tasks:

Telling the customer that you received their Zendesk Support request
Troubleshooting a problem with the customer
Troubleshooting a problem with another agent
Reviewing the history of a ticket
Solving a ticket
Solving recurring problems
The test ticket you created in the first lesson should still be open in Zendesk
Support. If not, you can find it by clicking the Views icon () in the sidebar. The
ticket should be in your list of unsolved tickets. The ticket should look like this,
ready for your response:

We'll explore the ticket life cycle in more detail in the following sections of this
lesson.
Ticket update notifications to the customer
As an agent, the first order of business is to reply to the customer to acknowledge
that you received the support request.
But with Zendesk Support there's no need, we already took care of it for you.
When a ticket is created, an email is sent to the customer acknowledging that the
ticket was received. We refer to these as email notifications and these are
automatically sent to the customer after certain types of ticket updates.

When a new support request is received, an email notification is sent to the user to
acknowledge that request. A link to the ticket that was created by that support
request is included so that customer can track and update the ticket if needed.
Alternatively the end-user can also reply back to the notification to update the
ticket. Each email reply adds a new comment to the ticket.
Many Zendesk customers only interact with their customers via email and don't
provide other channels for customers to contact them. You can easily do the same
thing and modify your email notification template to omit the link back to the
ticket. You can also customize your template and change the visual design to
match your branding.

Introducing triggers
The request received email is an example of a Zendesk trigger at work. A trigger
consists of one or more actions performed immediately after a ticket is created or
updated. A trigger fires when specific conditions are met—in this case, a ticket was
created.

Zendesk Support comes with a number of pre-defined triggers. You can modify
them or define your own. We'll cover triggers in more detail in an upcoming
lesson.
Ticket type and priority
You know now that a ticket's status changes as it goes from new to solved. These
changes in status are essential for monitoring where each ticket is on its journey to
being resolved. There are two optional (but very helpful) ticket properties that are
used for sorting and managing your ticket queue. They both can convey how
urgently a ticket needs to be addressed.

Type
The first property is the ticket type and there are four pre-defined choices:
Question, Problem, Incident, and Task. The ticket type is optional and selected
manually by an agent when triaging a new ticket.
Question is used to indicate that the requester's issue is a question rather than a
problem that needs to be solved.

Problem is used to indicate that the requester is having an issue with your product
or service that is likely to be experienced by other customers.

Incident is used for occurrences of a problem that affects more than one person.
Incident tickets are linked to a problem ticket and when the problem ticket is
solved all the incidents of that problem are solved automatically at the same time.

Task is used when you want to assign the ticket as a task to a specific agent. When
you select Task, you also set the Task Due Date.

Priority
The ticket priority helps you to convey the level of urgency for each ticket and can
be used in the rules you set up in Zendesk Support to manage tickets.
There are four values for priority: Low, Normal, High, and Urgent. How you
weight the priority of your tickets is up to you. For example, you might assign a
ticket to Urgent based on the customer who submitted the request or based on how
many hours have passed since the ticket was created.

A problem and incidents example

To demonstrate how problem and incidents tickets work, imagine that you provide
support for a large corporation and suddenly no one has access to the internal wiki
and can't get to their documents. Support requests start pouring in. Rather than
handle each one individually, you create a new ticket that summarizes the problem.
You then link all the individual support requests to that problem ticket. When the
problem is resolved, you solve the problem ticket you created and all the incident
tickets are automatically solved as well.

Responding to recurring questions

Some support issues that affect more than one customer aren't the result of
something working incorrectly. Sometimes you just have issues or recurring
questions that you need a standard reply for. For example, many customers are
asking about a feature you don't provide yet or they need to reset their password.
To handle these types of recurring requests, you use macros.

Macros are pre-defined responses that you can easily apply to any ticket. An
example of where a macro is useful is replying to customers' requests to reset a
password. Rather than having your agents respond to each of these inquiries by
creating separate responses, you create one response that all agents can use.
Like views, you can create global macros that all agents can use, restricted macros
that only agents in a specific group can use, and personal macros.

Macros can be created from scratch or by saving one of your responses to a ticket.

Macros are a big productivity enhancer and Zendesk includes macros for some
common situations to get you started.

Another way to handle recurring questions is to create a knowledge base that your
customers can access in your Zendesk Support portal so that they can search for
and find answers themselves. We'll discuss developing a knowledge base and self-
service in more detail in an upcoming lesson.

Personalizing your macros with placeholders

It's always best to personalize your communication with customers so that they feel
you are speaking directly to them rather than sending them an automated response.
With macros, and other notifications to customers, you also need to include
customer specific data (for example their name and a link to the ticket). You do
this by adding placeholders.

Placeholders are references to ticket and user data that you can add into messages
to customers. For example, if you want to start your macro with the customer's first
name, you add the {{ticket.requester.first_name}} placeholder. Then, when the
macro is processed and the ticket is updated, the customer receives a message that
starts "Hello Caitlin!" rather than a generic greeting like "Dear customer".
Try it yourself: Creating and applying a macro
Let's demonstrate how macros work by creating a macro and then applying it to a
ticket in Zendesk Support.

First, create the macro, following these steps:

Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Macros.

Select the Shared tab.
Click Add macro.

For this example, we'll create a macro that asks the customer for more information.
We'll change the ticket status to Pending (because we need information from the
customer and can't proceed until we receive that information) and add a message
explaining what we need.

Enter a title (for example, Need more information).

Macros contain actions that update the ticket and can generate notifications to the
customer. Click the action drop-down list and select Ticket: Status, then select
Pending.

Next, add the email notification message by adding a new action (click the plus
sign) and then select Ticket: Comment/description. A text box will appear. Add
this message or something similar to it:

Thanks for contacting us {{ticket.requester.first_name}}. To help you fix this

problem we'll need a little more information from you. We need your model
number and the serial number (you can find this on the bottom edge of your
device).

Specify who can use the macro on your team. Select Available for all agents.
Click Create Macro.
Now that you've created a macro, you can apply it to a ticket.
Look at your test ticket again.
At the bottom of the ticket window, you'll see a button called Apply Macro. Click
that and you'll see the pre-defined macros that come with Zendesk Support and
also the macro you just created.
Select your macro from the list and the ticket will be updated with the actions
contained in the macro.
Save the updates and generate the email notification to the customer by clicking
Submit.
Reviewing a ticket's history
As mentioned earlier, when a customer replies to an email notification a new
comment is added to the ticket. As an agent works to resolve a problem, there may
be many messages back and forth between the agent and the customer. We refer to
this as the ticket conversation. Along the way, a ticket may be updated by macros
and other automation tools like triggers that alter a ticket's properties and content.

There are two views of the ticket data: the one we've shown you so far (the ticket
properties and comments) and also a ticket's events and notification history.

To see this, look at your test ticket and above the first ticket comment, you'll see
the Conversations drop-down list. Use this to choose what to display in the body of
the ticket.

Conversations displays only communication between the agent and the customer,
or the agent and other agents.
Events displays all replies, status changes, and so on, applied to the ticket by an
agent or a business rule.
We mentioned triggers earlier in this lesson and you know that they're used to
automatically update tickets based on some ticket criteria. This events view of the
ticket shows you when a trigger updated the ticket. You'll also see when another
agent was CC'd on the ticket and so on.

Merging users and tickets

When users are allowed to self-register in your Zendesk account, they may
sometimes create more than one user account. They might also create more than
one request for the same support issue. Both of theses situations are easily handled
in Zendesk by merging a user's duplicate accounts and by merging multiple
support requests for the same issue into a single ticket.

These merge actions are also included in the ticket's event history.

Sharing tickets with colleagues and other Zendesk instances

The agent assigned to a ticket isn't necessarily the only person who will work on a
ticket. In the journey from new ticket to solved ticket any number of agents may be
assigned to a ticket. You can also CC other people on a ticket. This includes both
agents and end-users. Being able to CC other people allows you to easily
collaborate with others who might have the information you need to solve a ticket.
Other agents who are CC'd on a ticket can add both public and private comments,
while end-users can only add public comments.

Zendesk doesn't limit collaboration on resolving tickets to just the users of your
own Zendesk account. If you work with other companies or teams within your own
company who use a separate instance of Zendesk Support, you can easily share
tickets to those other companies or teams. This feature is called ticket sharing.

Ticket sharing allows you to assign tickets to affiliated Zendesk Support accounts
and their agents either provide information toward resolving the issue or solve the
issue themselves. The ticket status and comments can stay synced between the
tickets in each account. In the Enterprise version of Zendesk Support, you can
automatically share tickets based on business rules (for example, a new ticket is
received from someone with a specific tag and a trigger automatically shares it to
another Zendesk Support instance). In all other Zendesk Support plans, you can
manually share tickets one at a time.

Formatting your ticket comments

You can add headings, bullet lists, and other useful text formatting in your
comments by enabling Rich content or a simple text markup called Markdown.
Rich content allows you to use the formatting toolbar at the bottom of the comment
field. In the standard agent interface, you can chose which formatting option you
want your agents to use. In the Zendesk Agent Workspace, agents can switch
between rich content formatting and markdown formatting within the same editor.
Lesson 4: Helping customers help themselves
If your customers can find solutions to their questions or issues without contacting
support, you can cut down on the number of tickets in your support queue. A
shorter support queue can help increase customer satisfaction and control costs.

Providing a knowledge base is great way to help customers find solutions to

problems on their own. This is referred to as ticket deflection and it's essential for
scaling the support you provide to your customers.

Using Zendesk Guide you can create a branded customer-facing support site,
called Help Center. Help Center is where you can publish knowledge base content,
and it's also a place your customers can make support requests.
The Submit a Request form is automatically added to your Help Center. No set up
required.
Help Center themes
Themes let you change the look and feel of your Help Center. You can apply
different pre-made themes or with some versions of Guide, you can create your
own themes.
Guide comes with The Copenhagen theme which is a responsive theme, designed
for mobile devices. This theme is enabled by default when you set up your Help
Center, or you can switch to it if you are currently using a different theme (see
Changing the theme of your Help Center).
Getting started with Guide
Before we continue with this lesson, take a minute to check out our Getting Started
with Guide.
Try it yourself: Creating your Help Center
To get started with your Help Center, you first need to create it. After you create it,
the Help Center will be in setup mode and only you and your agents will be able
view it. Your end-users won't have access to it until you decide that it's ready to go
live and you activate it.

Try it yourself
Follow these steps to create your Help Center:
In Zendesk Support, click the Zendesk products icon (), then select Guide.
In the page that appears, accept the terms and conditions, then click Enable Guide.
Your Help Center is created using the default theme.

You have many options for customizing the look of your Help Center. We'll talk
more about customization shortly.
Guide user roles
In an earlier lesson, we mentioned Zendesk Support user roles (end-user, agent,
administrator, and account owner). Guide adds a user role called Guide Manager.
Guide managers have full access to the Help Center. By default, all administrators
are Guide Managers. All agents are Guide Viewers. You can extend the Guide
Manager role to select agents as well. For example, you may need web designers,
writers, editors, and production specialists to work on your Help Center. To give
them access, add them as Zendesk Support agents and then assign the Guide
Manager role to them.

If you don't want to give agents full access to the Help Center, you can grant
editing access for agents at the section level as needed. This give agents the ability
to add, edit, and delete content in designated sections.

End-users can't contribute to the knowledge base; the community (if available) is
where they can post questions and help other customers by providing answers.

Controlling access to your Help Center

You can control who can access your Help Center. Why would you ever restrict
access to your Help Center? It depends on who your customers are: a select group
or groups of people or everyone. In addition, you can set access restrictions on
specific areas of content in your Help Center. For example, restricting part of your
knowledge base or community to just VIP customers.
Customizing your Help Center
Extending your brand to your Help Center is an important part of creating a
seamless user experience. You have a lot of flexibility to change the look and feel
of your Help Center. To keep it simple, you can quickly add your product logo and
your brand's colors and web fonts using simple WYSIWYG tools such as color
pickers and font choosers.
Underlying the design of the Help Center is your theme. Copenhagen theme is
enabled by default when you set up your Help Center. This is a best practices,
responsive theme.

You can override how a theme looks by editing the underlying CSS code or add
your own JavaScript code to create a customized theme.

Chatting with your customers

If you've enabled Zendesk Chat, your customers can initiate a chat session with
one of your agents by simply clicking the Chat button.
The conversation between your agent and customer is captured in a ticket.
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.
The building blocks: conditions and actions
Automations and triggers consist of sets of conditions and actions. If a ticket meets
the conditions then the actions are applied. Let's take a closer look at conditions to
get started.

Conditions are references to ticket and user fields and the data contained in those
fields.

There are two types of conditions – all conditions and any conditions. The all
conditions, as you've probably already figured out, must all be true. If any of the
condition statements fail (are not true), the automation or trigger will not act on the
ticket.

Additionally at least one of the any conditions must also be true. For example, you
might want an automation or trigger to act only on tickets that are submitted from a
list of specific email addresses, as in this example:

If either of these conditions is true, the automation or trigger will act on the ticket.
If you use only one condition in the any section, it will behave like an all condition
and therefore must be true for the automation or trigger to act on the ticket.

Action statements follow the same format, but rather than testing for conditions to
be true or not, actions set ticket properties and send email notifications, as in this
example:

Conditions, unlike actions, contain operators that you can use to build condition
statements. For example, using the Is not operator allows you to single out a value
to exclude from a condition, just as we did in this example (Ticket: Status is not
Solved). You'll also use other operators such as Less than, Greater than, Changed
to, and Changed from
Standard Zendesk Support notification triggers
Your Zendesk Support instance comes with a number of helpful triggers that are
used to notify ticket requesters, agents, and groups when certain events occur.
They are all activated by default and are ready to take action on any tickets that
meet the conditions.

You can review these triggers by selecting the Triggers page in the Zendesk
administrator view (in the sidebar click the Admin icon () and then select Business
Rules > Triggers).

Let's look at the Notify requester of received request trigger. This trigger sends an
email message to the ticket requester when a new ticket is received by Zendesk
Support. Here are the conditions:

The Ticket > Is condition is used to capture the two trigger events that we
discussed earlier: created and updated. If you only want a trigger to act on new
tickets, you select Created. This is the choice we want for this trigger because we
only want the ticket requester to receive the new ticket confirmation email once,
when the ticket is created. There are other triggers for notifying the requester when
an agent has added a comment and when the ticket has been solved. Each of those
triggers use Ticket > Is > Updated.

The second condition, Status > is not > Solved, is used because we only want the
trigger to apply to active tickets—not our solved tickets.

Now let's look at the actions contained in this trigger and what will happen when
the trigger is applied to a ticket.
The purpose of this trigger is to notify the requester that their support request was
received and a ticket was created. To do that, we create an email notification using
the combination of actions shown here:

Take a quick look at each of the notification triggers and you can see how they all
work.

This video will give you a quick introduction to how triggers work:

Using placeholders in automations and triggers

Just like macros, you use placeholders in automations and triggers to dynamically
insert user and ticket specific data in to ticket replies and the email notifications
that are sent to the ticket requester.
Try it yourself: Building an escalation trigger
To exercise a little bit of what you've just learned, let's create a simple but very
useful trigger to add to Zendesk Support. This trigger will escalate all tickets from
VIP customers. If you recall from a previous lesson, you can add tags to user and
organization profiles and those tags are automatically added to every ticket from
those users or users within those organizations. In this example, we'll use a tag to
identify the incoming tickets that need to be escalated.

Here's a video that shows you how to create an escalation trigger:

Wistia video thumbnail

Building a Trigger (1:07)
Try it yourself
If you'd like to try creating an escalation trigger, follow these steps:

Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Triggers.

Click Add Trigger.
Enter the title Escalate VIP tickets.
Add the Status condition and then select Less than as the condition operator and
then Solved.
Click Add condition and then select Tags. The condition operator is Contains at
least one of the following, which is what we want. Now, enter vip as the tag.
Now we need to add the actions. When a ticket contains the vip tag, we want it to
be assigned to the Advanced support group that we created in a previous lesson. In
the actions section, select Group then select Advanced support.
We also want to set the ticket's priority to Urgent. Add a new action by clicking the
+ button and select Priority then select Urgent.
Save the trigger by clicking Create.
Whenever a ticket contains the vip tag, this trigger will act on it.
Automations
As you learned in a previous section, both automations and triggers are built with
conditions and actions. However, since automations are based on events in time,
they contain additional conditions that allow you to make ticket updates a certain
number of hours after certain events occur. For example, you can create an
automation that sets a ticket's priority to Urgent after some number of hours have
passed since it was created.

That's one example of how an automation might be used. In Zendesk Support,

tickets are closed by automation, not manually. This is one of the automations
included with Zendesk Support. It's called Close ticket 4 days after status is set to
solved and you can review it by selecting the Automations page in the
administrator view of Zendesk Support (in the sidebar click the Admin icon () and
then select Business Rules > Automations). We've found that closing tickets 4 days
after they have been solved is a best practice; however, you can of course change
this automation and set it to as many days as you'd like up to 28 days. After that,
Zendesk will automatically close the ticket.

Time-based conditions provide you with the flexibility to craft automations based
on specific events in the ticket lifecycle. Here are the common uses of
automations:
Notifying agents when an assigned ticket remains unresolved for x number of
hours
Notifying agent groups when a new ticket remains unassigned for x number of
hours
Increasing a ticket's priority if a certain amount of time has passed without the
ticket being touched
Notifying the assigned agent after x number of hours when a pending ticket has
been updated by the requester
Closing tickets x number of days after they have been set to solved
A safe place for testing your business rules
As we mentioned earlier, only administrators can create automations and triggers
because these business rules potentially affect all of the Zendesk Support tickets. If
your Zendesk plan includes it, you can also create a test version of your Zendesk
account, referred to as a sandbox, that you can use to test and fine-tune, new
automations, triggers, or anything else without actually making changes to your
actual tickets.
Try it yourself: Building an escalation trigger
To exercise a little bit of what you've just learned, let's create a simple but very
useful trigger to add to Zendesk Support. This trigger will escalate all tickets from
VIP customers. If you recall from a previous lesson, you can add tags to user and
organization profiles and those tags are automatically added to every ticket from
those users or users within those organizations. In this example, we'll use a tag to
identify the incoming tickets that need to be escalated.

Here's a video that shows you how to create an escalation trigger:

Wistia video thumbnail

Building a Trigger (1:07)
Try it yourself
If you'd like to try creating an escalation trigger, follow these steps:

Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Triggers.

Click Add Trigger.
Enter the title Escalate VIP tickets.
Add the Status condition and then select Less than as the condition operator and
then Solved.
Click Add condition and then select Tags. The condition operator is Contains at
least one of the following, which is what we want. Now, enter vip as the tag.
Now we need to add the actions. When a ticket contains the vip tag, we want it to
be assigned to the Advanced support group that we created in a previous lesson. In
the actions section, select Group then select Advanced support.
We also want to set the ticket's priority to Urgent. Add a new action by clicking the
+ button and select Priority then select Urgent.
Save the trigger by clicking Create.
Whenever a ticket contains the vip tag, this trigger will act on it
Automations
As you learned in a previous section, both automations and triggers are built with
conditions and actions. However, since automations are based on events in time,
they contain additional conditions that allow you to make ticket updates a certain
number of hours after certain events occur. For example, you can create an
automation that sets a ticket's priority to Urgent after some number of hours have
passed since it was created.

That's one example of how an automation might be used. In Zendesk Support,

tickets are closed by automation, not manually. This is one of the automations
included with Zendesk Support. It's called Close ticket 4 days after status is set to
solved and you can review it by selecting the Automations page in the
administrator view of Zendesk Support (in the sidebar click the Admin icon () and
then select Business Rules > Automations). We've found that closing tickets 4 days
after they have been solved is a best practice; however, you can of course change
this automation and set it to as many days as you'd like up to 28 days. After that,
Zendesk will automatically close the ticket.

Time-based conditions provide you with the flexibility to craft automations based
on specific events in the ticket lifecycle. Here are the common uses of
automations:
Notifying agents when an assigned ticket remains unresolved for x number of
hours
Notifying agent groups when a new ticket remains unassigned for x number of
hours
Increasing a ticket's priority if a certain amount of time has passed without the
ticket being touched
Notifying the assigned agent after x number of hours when a pending ticket has
been updated by the requester
Closing tickets x number of days after they have been set to solved
A safe place for testing your business rules
As we mentioned earlier, only administrators can create automations and triggers
because these business rules potentially affect all of the Zendesk Support tickets. If
your Zendesk plan includes it, you can also create a test version of your Zendesk
account, referred to as a sandbox, that you can use to test and fine-tune, new
automations, triggers, or anything else without actually making changes to your
actual tickets.
Try it yourself: Building an escalation automation
As a companion to our escalation trigger, let's build an automation that alerts the
assigned group and agent that the VIP ticket hasn't been handled in the amount of
time we've promised.

This automation will escalate all VIP tickets that have not been responded to
within 1 day. In this case, escalation means raising the priority from High to
Urgent. We'll also send an email notification to the agent to make sure that they're
aware of the Urgent status.

Watch this video to see how an escalation automation is created:

Building an Automation (1:34)
Try it yourself
If you'd like to try creating an escalation automation, follow these steps:

Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Automations.

Click Add Automation.
Enter the title Escalate unsolved VIP tickets to Urgent.
Add the Ticket: Status condition and then select Less than as the operator and then
Solved.
Add another condition by clicking the + button and then select Ticket: Hours since
created and then (calendar) Is as the operator and 24 for the number of hours that
have passed since the ticket was created.
Add another condition by clicking the + button and then select Tickets: Tags. The
condition operator is Contains at least one of the following and the tag is vip.
Finally, we add the actions. The way we have our VIP trigger from a previous
section of this lesson set up is that when a ticket is received from a VIP customer,
the tag is detected and the ticket's priority is set to High. To escalate this ticket, we
now want to set the ticket's priority to Urgent. Add the action Ticket: Priority =
Urgent.
Our last action is to email the assigned agent. We do this by adding Notifications:
Email user = (assignee). We then enter a subject and a description for the email
notification.
Save the automation by clicking Create automation.