Workflow: How to manually close a ticket

Admins and agents sometimes want to force a ticket status to Closed for these reasons:

Closed tickets can't be modified in any way

Business rules may make changes upon or after a ticket is solved

The Zendesk API may make changes upon or after a ticket is solved

This article provides a workaround to apply in these situations, with triggers that automatically close tickets based on certain conditions. For example, you can use the presence of a particular custom field value or a specific tag.

The workflow includes the steps below.

Step 1: Create a trigger

Step 2: Create a macro for your agents

Step 3: Ask an agent to refresh the page and use the macro

Step 1: Create a trigger

To create the trigger:

In Zendesk, click the product name (Support, Knowledge, etc) from the menu in the top left corner > Admin Center

Click Objects and rules in the sidebar > Business rules > Triggers

Click Create trigger

Enter a Name and a Trigger category

Under Meet ALL of the following conditions, add:

Object > Ticket > Status category | Less than | Closed

Object > Ticket > Tags | Contains at least one of the following | closenow

Under Actions, add:

Object > Ticket > Remove tag | closenow

Object > Ticket > Status category | Closed
This order of actions prevents issues with follow-up tickets being automatically closed upon creation.

Click Create trigger

Step 2: Create a macro for your agents

To make sure that your agents don't forget to add the closenow tag, add a macro.

To add a tag with a macro:

In Zendesk, click the product name (Support, Knowledge, etc) from the menu in the top left corner > Admin Center

Click Workspaces in the sidebar > Agent tools > Macros > Create macro

Enter a Macro name

Select who can use the macro from Available for: All agents

Under Actions, add Add tags | closenow

Click Create

Step 3: Ask an agent to refresh the page and use the macro

To apply that macro:

Ask an agent to refresh the page on Zendesk

Then, open a Support ticket to close > click Apply macro > select the name of the macro you created

Click Submit as Solved

This applies the macro from a ticket, the ticket is automatically tagged, which will start the trigger.

Note: In accounts with custom ticket statuses deactivated, use Status for the condition and action instead of Status category in the trigger recipe above.