Zendesk: how to avoid notifying a customer of a specific update

Is it possible to prevent a ticket from sending an email notification to a customer, if it contains a specific expression or value? Yes, and we’ll need three Zendesk triggers to do this.

The challenge here is that it’s an isolated event: we want to keep notifying the customer in the future. We just have to prevent the notification on this single occasion, when a particular keyword, expression, or field value is present.

A use case

We don’t want to notify the requester whenever there’s an incoherent order confirmation. For example:

• The agent applies a macro confirming that the order is on its way
  • Let’s assume the macro also updates an Order status custom drop-down field, and sets it to “Items shipped”
  • The macro sets the ticket to Solved
• An API-loaded custom field, your Order ID, is empty…

How can an order without an ID be in progress, though?

We don’t want to risk confusing customers, so maybe we should double-check the order status before notifying them.

Trigger #1: detect and tag

Our first trigger will detect the criteria that constitute the event.

Under ALL conditions:

• Ticket is updated
• Order Status = Items shipped
• Order ID = Not present

And in our trigger’s Actions:

• Status = Open
• Priority = High
• Order Status = “Review”
• Add tag = admin_nonotif
• Add an internal note (with an extension/target) = “Missing order ID, please review (customer not notified).”
• Optional: if your notifications include the whole thread/conversation, you might want to convert the current public comment to an internal note

So if the ticket elements correspond to our incoherent situation, this trigger will apply the actions above.

The most important action is adding the admin_nonotif tag.

Trigger #2: do not notify (just this once)

The second trigger is your usual requester notification. There’s only one thing you have to do:

• Add a condition (under ALL) to exclude the admin_nonotif tag (ie. “contains none of the following”)

This condition will prevent it from firing the notification.

Trigger #3: reset notification status

Following trigger #2, add a third trigger positioned below in your triggers page.

Under ALL conditions:

• Ticket is updated
• Tags contain admin_nonotif

Under Actions:

• Remove tag admin_nonotif

We’re therefore disabling the customer notification, and then enabling it, during the very same ticket update. This means we’ll be able to notify the customer on any future public comments on that ticket.

Remember:

Zendesk triggers: the order matters

It’s important to double-check that you’re looking at your triggers sorted by position. A useful link to save on your bookmarks/favorites bar would be:

That’s it. Let me know if something’s unclear in the comments section below, and happy configurations.