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.
When I talk to customers about deploying Zendesk one of the elements I always note is that, out of the box, Zendesk works from the get go.
If you forward email, enable the web widget or link a social channel and add a few agents you basically have a working environment with zero code and in a matter of minutes.
Naturally even though you're able to receive and respond to customer conversations, that setup is far from productive. It lacks a configuration that is tuned to your business processes. To get the most out of your Zendesk setup you should, at least:
- Import your knowledge content to the Help Center
- Enable Intents (or add a category field) and setup Service Level Agreements
- Define your business rules via triggers and automations to categorize and prioritize tickets
- Setup agents, groups and routing via queues or triggers
- Train agents how to work in Agent Home and explain ticket statuses
- Setup CSAT
Zooming in on these core setup steps, one of the most tricky to setup is your business rules. They reflect your business processes and make sure that tickets are tagged correctly, that actions happen based on ticket updates and they can be used to automate a big part of the ticket lifecycle.
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Traditionally setting up business rules meant diving into the world of triggers and automations. Condition based flows that take an input (ticket creation, ticket update), and execute actions like adding a comment, executing a webhook or changing ticket fields or statuses.
You can further tweak these triggers with conditions so they'll only run for specific ticket categories, forms or customer types.
Triggers (and automations) work great but any seasoned Zendesk admin knows the terror of opening an existing Zendesk environment and peaking into the triggers list. You're often greeted with dozens and dozens of triggers without any logic to them. Within those triggers you'll find complex conditions to include (or exclude) certain tickets without any obvious rhyme or reason.
Leveraging a structured category approach to your triggers is one way to see the forest through the trees. As I described in my article, I prefer a categorized approach that follows a normal ticket life cycle, starting with categorization, deflection, routing and notification triggers nicely grouped per type.
Thomas Verschoren
But even though Trigger Categories create some structure, a crucial issue remains. Since triggers are rule based with linear conditions, and don't support nested or complex conditions, you often end up with multiple triggers to handle variants of the same use case.
For example if you want to set a low priority to bronze customers, normal priority for silver customers and a high priority for gold customers you currently need to create three triggers. Or four, if you also want to account for customers without any service contract applied to them.
The above is a simple example, but for each scenario where we want to apply a similar logic with different output to a set of tickets, we need to create multiple triggers. In scenarios where you want to make changes to those flows (eg sometimes you want to raise the priority for silver customers if they raise tickets about specific topics) you need to further branch out your triggers, and make sure to apply those changes to all triggers related to this rule set.
Action Builder
This is where Action Builder with its flows comes into play. Flows are similar to how Zendesk Bot and AI Agent Advanced have their dialogue builders to handle use cases.
