Resolve tickets sooner, improve communications and Increase customer satisfaction rating by optimising your bump, solve, and close procedures.

Bump, solve & close refers to specific actions taken within a ticketing platform such as Zendesk to manage and resolve customer issues or service requests more efficiently.

In this post, we'll address the bump stage.

Previously I described the bump stage of the bump, solve and close process. I gave examples of how to semi-automate and fully-automate bumping your tickets to ensure they don't go stale or get forgotten completely. You can find that post here.

This post looks more closely at the solve stage of the ticket lifecycle and how you can auto-solve pending tickets using two automations.

Auto-solving Pending Tickets

This is the most basic workflow every Zendesk implementation should have.

🎯 Goal

Ensure tickets in Pending status (i.e. waiting for the Requester to respond) are addressed automatically which means your agents don't need to manually follow up with requesters.

In this scenario, I will use two automations.

Automation #1: Customer Follow Up: Pending notification 48 hours
Automation #2: Customer Follow Up: Pending notification 7 days - auto solve

One could argue the first one belongs in the 'bump' rather than 'solve' stage but for clarity, I'm including them both here.

Automation #1: Customer Follow Up: Pending notification 48 hours

Create a new automation

Add All conditions as shown.
Note: Tags or 'update' conditions are not necessary as the status changes to Open automatically if/when the Requester updates the ticket.
1. Ticket: Hours since status category pending > (business) is > 16.
  [Checking the ticket exactly 2 business days/48 hours after setting the status to Pending]
2. Ticket: Privacy > Ticket has public comments
  [This ensures we only act on tickets raised by an external user thus avoiding tickets created by our agents with no public comment present]
3. Ticket: Status category > Is > Pending
  [Only act on those tickets if the status is still Pending]
You can optionally add conditions unique to your setup if you want to further restrict the scope of tickets.
For example, I have also put several Any conditions to restrict the forms to ensure the automation doesn't act on customer onboarding forms.
1. Ticket: Form > Is > Technical Request Form
2. Ticket: Form > Is > Service Request Form

💡 Important Note:

The next step leverages a webhook to update the ticket via the Zendesk API. You can learn how to create this webhook here.

Perform these actions

Notifications: User email > (requester and CCs)
This action is emailing the Requester and anyone on CC. As you may notice, I'm using Dynamic Content tags below because we have customers with multiple languages.
Notifications: Active webhook > Update Ticket with JSON
This action posts an internal note to our agents informing them that a follow up was sent to the Requester. This ensures our agents don't mistakingly send a manual follow up also which would be a poor customer experience.

In summary, this automation will act on tickets exactly 2 business days after they are set to Pending. It will send an email to the Requester and CCs as well as pinging a message as an internal comment for the agent's awareness.

Now let's look at the next stage which is to auto-solve if the Requester has taken no action.

Automation #2: Customer Follow Up: Pending notification 7 days - auto solve

Similar conditions as before with a different timeframe.

Create a new automation

Add All conditions as shown.
1. Ticket: Hours since status category pending > (calendar) is > 168.
  [Checking the ticket exactly 7 calendar days after setting the status to Pending]
2. Ticket: Privacy > Ticket has public comments
  [This ensures we only act on tickets raised by an external user thus avoiding tickets created by our agents with no public comment present]
3. Ticket: Status category > Is > Pending
  [Only act on those tickets if the status is still Pending]
Like before, you can optionally add conditions unique to your setup if you want to further restrict the scope of tickets.
For example, I have also put several Any conditions to restrict the forms to ensure the automation doesn't act on customer onboarding forms.
1. Ticket: Form > Is > Technical Request Form
2. Ticket: Form > Is > Service Request Form

The key here is the status changing to Solved.

Perform these actions

Notifications: User email > (requester and CCs)
[This action is emailing the Requester and anyone on CC. As you may notice, I'm using Dynamic Content tags below because we have customers with multiple languages.]
Notifications: Active webhook > Update Ticket with JSON
[This action posts an internal note to our agents informing them that a follow up was sent to the Requester. This ensures our agents don't mistakingly send a manual follow up also which would be a poor customer experience.]
Ticket: Status category > Solved
[Changing the ticket to solved is the critical action not included in the first automation]

In summary, this automation will act on tickets exactly 7 calendar days after they are set to Pending. It will send an email to the Requester and CCs as well as pinging a message as an internal comment for the agent's awareness.

Finally and crucially, it will set the ticket status to Solved.