Setting up triggers for side conversations

Triggers run, or check conditions, immediately after tickets are created or updated. Any time someone creates, replies to, closes, or reopens a side conversation, they are making a change to the ticket. This means the ticket was updated and so, as a result, triggers run.

Related articles:

Using side conversations in tickets

Using macros to start side conversations

Enabling and disabling side conversations

Trigger conditions for side conversation

The default behavior for side conversations is that the assignee on the ticket doesn’t receive emails, but they do see Growl notifications. If you want the assignee to get emails about side conversations, you need to use triggers.

You can create trigger conditions for side conversations so that assignees know when a side conversation is created, closed, replied to, and reopened. Without them, the agent assigned to the ticket (who, ideally, is also the creator of the side conversation) may have a hard time knowing what’s going on with a particular issue.

You can use these trigger condition statements with side conversations:

Side conversation + Is + Created
Created is the initial state of a newly created side conversation.

Side conversation + Is + Closed
Closed is the state of a side conversation after the agent clicks the Mark done button to close the side conversation.

Side conversation + Is + Replied to
Replied to is the state of a side conversation after someone adds a reply.

Side conversation + Is + Reopened
Reopened is the state of a side conversation after the agent clicks the Reopen button to reopen a side conversation.

For a complete list of the different conditions and actions that you can use to create triggers, see Trigger conditions and actions reference.

These ticket events are accessible as ticket conditions for triggers, which means you can do things like:

Set ticket status to pending or on-hold upon creation of a side conversation

Automatically assign the author of a side conversation to the ticket

Send an email notification to the ticket assignee when a conversation side conversation is replied to by others

Set a ticket’s status to open if a side conversation is replied to by anyone but the assignee

Example 1: When side conversations are created

Here’s an example of a trigger condition about how to handle side conversations when they are created.

Example 2: Updating ticket status when side conversations are replied to

Here’s an example about updating ticket status when side conversation replies are replied to.

Example 3: Notifying ticket assignees when side conversations are replied to

Here’s an example about notifying ticket assignee when side conversations are replied to:

Note: When someone replies to an email notification about side conversation activity, the reply becomes a public reply on the ticket, not a reply to the side conversation. This means that they are replying to everyone on the ticket, including any customers on the ticket, instead of a limited subset of people in a side conversation. For more information, see Viewing and replying to side conversations.