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Leveraging Custom Ticket Fields in Action Builder
Action Builder Automations

Leveraging Custom Ticket Fields in Action Builder

This article shows how to enhance Zendesk Action Builder flows by using custom API Actions to retrieve ticket and user data, including custom fields. It outlines how to connect, authenticate, and use this data to build smarter, more contextual flows—even before native support is available.

Thomas Verschoren

Thomas Verschoren

— 6 min read

Zendesk’s new Action Builder brings modular, logic-based automation to support teams. This guide builds on last week’s introduction and shows how to enrich your flows with ticket field data via the API.

From Triggers to Flows: How Action Builder Automates the Support Process
Zendesk’s Action Builder introduces visual, logic-driven automation flows to replace complex trigger setups. This article explores how Action Builder simplifies business rules, integrates with external platforms, and signals a shift from reactive to process-oriented CX in Zendesk.
Internal NoteThomas Verschoren

Action Builder is currently in EAP meaning that, although feature rich, it's still in development and some features and capabilities are still missing.

Zendesk has outlined a rough roadmap of planned improvements in the article below. One of the most important additions will be native access to custom ticket fields.

Planned improvements to the Action Builder EAP
During the Action Builder EAP we will roll out additional features that address product limitations and enable more complex and diverse automation use cases.To smooth out updates we intend to relea…
Zendesk 도움말

In my article I described an example flow that leveraged a value stored in a ticket field to retrieve data in an external API. I purposefully glanced over the details of that step since I thought that concept would be better positioned in a dedicated article.

So that's exactly what we're going to do here.

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Available action types

Action flows have three kinds of steps.

  1. Native ticket actions (update status, add comments, etc.)
  2. Prebuilt integrations (Slack, Google Sheets, Jira)
  3. Custom actions (HTTP requests with parameters and output)

Custom Actions use the same engine that powers Agent Copilot. They can call any HTTP API, with input parameters and mapped outputs.

While native steps don’t expose custom fields yet, you can access them through custom actions that call the Zendesk API. This unlocks dynamic branching, ticket enrichment, and more contextual automation — all without code.

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