Announcing hourly workflow scheduling for action builder

Announced on | Rollout on
August 28, 2022 | August 28, 2026

Zendesk is pleased to announce enhancements to the scheduling feature for action flows.

This announcement includes the following topics:

What is changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What is changing?

Until now, action flows could be initiated by Zendesk events or scheduled to run daily. With this release, admins can now configure action flows to run daily or hourly and specify additional options for the scheduled action flow, including the timezone and whether the action flow should run as scheduled if a previous run is still going.

This enhancement to the schedule action flow trigger supports recurring operational work, such as ticket-follow up, incident synchronization, cleanup, reporting, and administrative oversight. For example, you could create an action flow that checks, every hour, for open tickets that were last updated more than five hours ago, then adds a follow-up tag to those tickets and notifies the agents when action is needed.

Additionally, this enhancement adds more options to customize the schedule action flow trigger, such as the timezone, and other options that vary based on the frequency selected. If you configure the action flow to run daily, you can specify the start date and time. If you configure the action flow to run hourly, you can specify the number of hours that should elapse between each run and which days of the week apply.

For more information, you can watch this demo and see Creating action flows to automate processes across Zendesk and external systems.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

Zendesk understands that many business processes run on a schedule rather than beginning with a Zendesk event. To address this, we first made it possible to schedule action flows to run daily. With this release, we're enhancing the scheduling feature to support hourly schedules as well.

What do I need to do?

This enhancement is available to all accounts with access to action builder and action flows. You can create or edit action flows to use the schedule action flow trigger. See Creating action flows to automate processes across Zendesk and external systems.

If you have feedback or questions related to this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support.