When I wrote my Custom Objects series earlier this year, one of the main items I missed in building out flows was the ability to use the values of custom object fields when using macros or triggers.

For example, while you could use a macro that said "Thanks for contacting us about {{product.name}}", we couldn't use the same to e.g. reference the purchase date or product type of the selected record.

Similarly, if we have a user contacting us, and we need to contact that users' company main contact person, we couldn't create a side conversation for {{ticket.organization.main_contact.email}}.

Luckily, this has now changed with the release of placeholders for Custom Objects

Let's put this into practice.

Overview

Imagine we're the support department for a small movie theater. We've got a series of movies playing and store those movies in Custom Objects so we can easily provide information to our customers.

Similarly, we also leverage custom objects to store mobile ticket purchases in Custom Objects so we can quickly reference a customers' bookings.

In our demo scenario we've got a customer contacting us requesting information about a movie playing in the theater. They decide they like the movie, and purchase tickets.

We'll use a combination of macros and custom object triggers to handle this scenario.

Using placeholders in Macros

Custom Object

As mentioned above, we've got a list of movies stored in Custom Objects. Each movie has a title (name), director, summary, genre and a list of actors.

To make the demo easy to setup, I used the new Data Importer in the Admin Center to import a set of movies.

This new importer allows you to import CSV files and create and/or update organizations and custom objects in bulk in your instance. For example, the csv table below can be imported into our custom object and it would create all movies.

name	director	genre	external_id
Inception	Christopher Nolan	science_fiction	1
The Dark Knight	Christopher Nolan	action	2
Forrest Gump	Robert Zemeckis	drama	3
Titanic	James Cameron	romance	4

If I'd later import a similar file, but this time add columns for summary and actors then the importer would update the existing movies, as long as the external_ids match.

movies

movies.csv

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Ticket Fields

Our ticket form for this scenario has a custom field to log the Movie the customer is interested in. Since our movies live in custom objects we're using a lookup field, linked to the Custom Object, instead of a text field to store this value. This way we can reference the chosen movie in our flows and macros.

The Macro

Macros in Zendesk are an easy way for agents to reply with a predefined text. They've always supported placeholders to reference a requesters' name, custom field values or an assignee's name in the macro text, making the replies more personal and contextual.

If for example you want to use a requesters' name in a macro, you can use {{ticket.requester.first_name}}. Or if you want to print the Order Number stored in field 123456789 you can use {{ticket.custom_fields.custom_fields_123456789}}.

With the new placeholders for custom objects we can do a couple of fun things in our macros. Let's assume we have the following movie stored in our objects, and we have a lookup field on our ticket form with ID 123456789:

name,director,genre,external_id
"Inception","Christopher Nolan","science_fiction","1"

{{ticket.ticket_fields_123456789.name}} will return Inception,
which is the name of the custom object.
{{ticket.ticket_fields_123456789.external_id}} will return 1,
which is the external id of the custom object.
{{ticket.ticket_fields_20080718149010.custom_fields.director}} will return Christopher Nolan,
which is the value of the custom field director on the custom object.
{{ticket.ticket_fields_20080718149010.custom_fields.genre.title}} will return Science Fiction,
which is the value (not the tag) of the dropdown field genre on the custom object.

You can find a full overview of all placeholders in this support article:

Our macro will have the following content:

Hey {{ticket.requester.first_name}},
It seems you're interested in knowing more about {{ticket.ticket_fields_20080718149010.name}}

Here's some info:
Director: {{ticket.ticket_fields_20080718149010.custom_fields.director}}
Genre: {{ticket.ticket_fields_20080718149010.custom_fields.genre.title}}

Summary
{{ticket.ticket_fields_20080718149010.custom_fields.summary}}

Some actors you might know
{{ticket.ticket_fields_20080718149010.custom_fields.actors}}

Putting it all together

With the setup complete, we can test out our flow.

We get an email from a customer interested in the Gladiator movie.
The agent goes to the ticket fields and selects Gladiator in the Movie lookup field.
They then select the macro that returns movie information.
The comment field gets filled with our macro text, with all the placeholders replaced with the information stored in our custom object.

Conclusion

As you see above, we can leverage all the available fields in our custom object in our trigger and create rich replies with a lot of contextual data.

There's however still a few scenarios that aren't possible yet. Currently our placeholders all make a single hop. We can return a movies' title or director as shown in the macro above.

But imagine the director field is a lookup field itself that references a user in Zendesk. That user has an email, age, Oscars won and other custom fields.

What we currently can't do yet is returning a director's age or Oscars won in a macro. Something like {{movie.custom_fields.director.custom_fields.oscars}} is not possible for now.

We can return these so called second hops for ticket requesters and organizations though. So something like {{ticket.requester.custom_fields.manager.email}} would return the email of a customers' manager, stored in a lookup user field on that user.

Object Triggers

Macros are one of the scenarios where we can leverage placeholders. A second feature in Zendesk that supports them is Object Triggers.

Object triggers are a new feature in Zendesk that allows you to automate processes based on changes in custom objects.
Similar to how a Ticket trigger gets fired when a ticket gets updated or created, object triggers run when the same action happens on a custom object.

What's possible

Why would you use this? Well, custom objects are mainly used to store associated data on top of tickets, users or organizations. If you use Zendesk to handle support tickets, and you sell Service Contracts to customers, you can leverage custom objects to store the contract data (types like gold or silver, renewal date, associated services,..) and link it via a lookup field to an organization.

Similarly, in an asset management scenario you might link newly purchased assets to users or locations.

Object triggers can be used in these scenarios to automate processes on top of your records. When a service contract is renewed, or is about to expire, you can use an object trigger to send out a notification to the customer.
Or when you've received the new laptop or license for an employee, you can send out the serial code or confirmation to the employee when you log the asset in your custom object records.

Conditions

Object triggers can fire when certain conditions are met:

A custom object of a specific type is created or updated
A custom object field has (or hasn't) got a certain value
(e.g. order status is updated to shipped)
A lookup field attached to the object is linked to a certain other record
(e.g. manager is John)

Actions

Once the conditions are met we can:

Update a value of the custom object
(e.g. set notified to true)
Notify someone via email, webhook, or text
(e.g. ticket requester, the assignee, or a linked user via lookup fields)

Example flow

To show how object triggers work in practice, we'll continue our previous demo scenario. This time the customer is interested in buying tickets for their movie of choice, Gladiator.