About Zendesk triggers and how they work

Zendesk has a variety of business rules that can be used to automate record updates and notifications across products. Triggers are business rules you define that run immediately after a record, such as a ticket, is created or updated and automatically perform actions if specified conditions are met. This article explains the different types of Zendesk triggers and essential facts about them.

This article contains the following topics:

Types of Zendesk triggers

Essential facts about Zendesk triggers

Anatomy of triggers

Types of Zendesk triggers

Triggers are managed separately by Zendesk product.

The following trigger types exist, organized by Zendesk product:

Support

Ticket triggers: The first and most common type of trigger, running any time a ticket is created or updated. There are several standard ticket triggers that Zendesk provides to help you get started with your Support workflows.
Although ticket triggers are traditionally thought of as only applying to email tickets (including tickets submitted through web forms and APIs), tickets are also created for live chats, messaging conversations, and calls. Ticket triggers support a "Ticket channel is {channel}" condition that allows you to select most of the Zendesk channels. Because of this, it can be helpful to think of chat and messaging triggers as a subset of ticket triggers that just happen to be managed on a separate page in Admin Center.

See Creating ticket triggers for automatic ticket updates and notifications.

Object triggers: Run any time a record is created or updated for the specified custom object. Requires you to activate and create at least one custom object.
See Understanding object triggers.

Managed on Admin Center > Objects and rules > Business rules > Triggers.

Chat

Chat triggers: Run when a selected event occurs. When creating a chat trigger, admins must specify a single event that causes the trigger to run. There are several standard chat triggers that Zendesk provides to help you get started with your live chat workflows.
Managed on the Chat dashboard: Admin Center > Objects and rules > Business rules > Chat triggers.

See Working with chat triggers.

Messaging triggers: Messaging triggers function the same way chat triggers do. When creating a messaging trigger, admins must specify a single event that causes the trigger to run. There are several standard messaging triggers that Zendesk provides to help you get started with your messaging workflows.
For some accounts, messaging triggers are managed in Admin Center > Objects and rules > Business rules > Messaging triggers. If you don't see this page, your messaging triggers are still created and managed on the Chat dashboard: Admin Center > Objects and rules > Business rules > Chat triggers.

See Working with messaging triggers.

Essential facts about Zendesk triggers

This section distills some essential facts about triggers as a whole. These are explained in greater detail in the documentation. See Triggers resources.

Triggers are created from conditions and actions. Conditions set the qualifications needed for the trigger to fire, and actions represent what will be performed when those qualifications are met.

Triggers always run, or check the conditions, immediately after the qualifying event happens. For ticket and object triggers, qualifying events are record creation and updates. For chat, messaging, and sale triggers, the qualifying event is defined by an admin when configuring a trigger.

The one exception is ticket triggers don't run or fire on tickets after they are closed. However, ticket triggers can fire when a ticket is being set to closed, except when the ticket is automatically closed by the system after 28 days.

Changes that automations make to tickets can cause triggers to run. Configure triggers and automations with the understading that changes made by automations can impact triggers and vice versa. See About automations and how they work

Triggers only fire, or apply their actions, if the trigger's set conditions are met.

Actions applied by one ticket trigger can affect how other triggers run and fire for a ticket. However, other types of triggers run simultaneously without this looping behavior.

Triggers, like all business rules, must be smaller than 65 KB.

Anatomy of triggers

Triggers are comprised of two parts: conditions and actions. You combine these to create ‘if’ and ‘then’ statements. If the record contains a certain set of conditions, then the actions make the updates to the record and can send notifications. Chat, messaging, and sales triggers also require an admin to specify the event that must occur for the trigger to run.

Conditions

Condition statements are the "if" part of a trigger. They're structured as a condition (sometimes called category), an operator, and a value.

The available condition options vary by type of trigger. For ticket triggers, messaging triggers, and chat triggers, there are predefined lists of supported conditions. For object triggers, the supported conditions depend on the custom object's fields.

There are two types of conditions – all conditions and any conditions. In practice, all of the all conditions must be true in order for the trigger's conditions to be met, while one or more of the any conditions must be true in order for the trigger's conditions to be met. For ticket triggers and object triggers, you can use a combination of all and any conditions. However, for chat and messaging triggers, you must choose between using all and any conditions.

For more information, see:

Building ticket trigger condition statements

Building object trigger condition statements

Chat and messaging trigger conditions

Creating sales triggers

Actions

Action statements describe what happens when a trigger's conditions are met. These are the "then" parts of a trigger. When we say a trigger fires, we mean it's applying the actions.

Action statements are structured as an action and a value.

Similar to conditions, the available actions vary by type of trigger. A predefined list of supported actions are available for ticket triggers, messaging triggers, and chat triggers. For object triggers, there are some predefined notification actions, but the rest of the available actions depend on the custom object's fields.

For more information, see:

Building ticket trigger action statements

Building object trigger action statements

Chat and messaging trigger actions

Creating sales triggers

Run events

When we say a trigger runs, we mean the trigger's conditions are evaluated and, if met, the specified actions occur. Ticket triggers and object triggers run automatically any time a ticket or a custom object's record, respectively, is created or updated. However, chat, messaging, and sales triggers only run when a user-specified event occurs. When creating one of these triggers, an admin must select the run event from a drop-down.

For more information, see:

Chat and messaging trigger run events

Creating sales triggers