Realtime Ticket Automation - Knowledge Base

We’re introducing our first real time automation trigger, ‘Ticket Created’, to trigger automations near instantly as new tickets are created in your Syncro account. This new automation type is available only in our new Team Plan in Syncro.

By applying automations in real time, partners can create help desk automation without the risk of delays, or disruptions in their workflows. Some examples use cases include:

  • Automatically assigning incoming tickets to specific technicians
  • Automatically assigning incoming tickets to specific ticket boards or views
  • Generating custom alerts to keep you and your team notified of important incoming issues— either by email or via our Slack or Microsoft Teams integrations
  • Any automations you’d like to apply at ticket ingestion

For the scenarios above, these actions can all be triggered based on conditions of the ticket itself or the client submitting the ticket, and can be defined in each of your automations.

More information about our new ‘Ticket Created’ real time automation in the section Ticket Created Automation Overview further in this document.

Table of Contents

Hourly Automations

Our ‘Hourly’ automations are still available and, in this update, behave the same as they have previously as documented in our public knowledge base available here.

There are still plenty of use cases for leveraging ‘Hourly’ automations in addition to our new ‘Ticket Created’ automations in your helpdesk workflows. Some example use cases include:

  • Automatically checking whether a ticket has gone stale after X amount of time and generating an alert for your team or escalating to another technician
  • Automatic follow up communication to your client if your team has been awaiting their response for X amount of time
  • Generating a custom notification for the ticket assignee when a part order associated with the ticket has been received
  • Any automations that you’d like to apply over the lifetime of a ticket

Viewing your Automation Types

We’ve updated the main automation table to clearly separate your Ticket Automations by type. As demonstrated in the screenshots below, you can select among the ‘Hourly’ or ‘Ticket Created’ tabs at the top of the table to view and manage your automations.

With ‘Hourly’ tab selected, you can view and manage your existing hourly automations:

With the ‘Ticket Created’ tab selected, you can view and manage your existing Ticket Created Automations:

Managing your Automation Types

When creating a new automation or updating an existing automation, you’ll be presented with the option to choose between the ‘Hourly’ or ‘Ticket Created’ automation type, as demonstrated in the screenshot below.

‘Hourly’ Automation Type selected:

‘Ticket Created’ Automation Type selected:

Changing Automation Types

On the Team plan, your existing ‘Hourly’ automations can be converted to ‘Ticket Created’ automations by simply changing the automation type and saving your changes. Conversely, ‘Ticket Created’ automations can be changed to the ‘Hourly’ type.

When attempting to convert an ‘Hourly’ automation to ‘Ticket Created’ our system will validate that the existing conditions are compatible with ‘Ticket Created’ automations as there are select conditions that are not applicable when a new ticket is created in the system as described in the section below.

Unsupported Ticket Created Conditions

The following conditions are not supported for ‘Ticket Created’ automations as they’re not applicable when new tickets are created and have been omitted them in order to ensure your automations runs as you’d expect:

  • Hours until due date
  • Due Date is Passed
  • Not Updated in hours
  • Part Order Received
  • Ticket Billing Status
  • Ticket last comment subject

‘Ticket Created’ Automation Overview

Below is a rundown of what to expect when using the new Ticket Created Automation.

  • Ticket Created Automations are evaluated as new tickets are created in your account

  • Ticket Created Automations apply to any new ticket created in your account with the exception of tickets imported from 3rd party PSAs

    • Supported ingestion points for new tickets include:
      • Manually created tickets
      • Tickets created via:
        • Inbound email
        • Automated Remediation
        • RMM Alerts
        • Scripting
        • Agent Contact Form
        • Mobile App
        • Recurring tickets
        • API
        • Widgets
  • Ticket Created Automations are evaluated in their sort order (More info in the following section, ‘Ticket Created’ Automation Sort)

  • When a newly created ticket matches the condition of the evaluated automation, then the ‘Ticket Created’ automation will apply its corresponding actions on the ticket in near real time

  • Given Ticket Created automations are applied as the ticket is created, any upstream settings you’ve configured in Email Rules or your Mailbox settings that may affect Assignee, Ticket Status, or Issue Type will be applied prior to Real Time Automations condition checks

  • Once a matching ‘Ticket Created’ automation is run, no other Ticket Created automations will be considered or applied to the ticket

    • Any matching Hourly automations will continue to apply over the lifetime of the ticket as they have previously
  • Unlike ‘Hourly’ automations, the options ‘Run Now’ or ‘Next Run Tickets’ are intentionally omitted on the automation list for ‘Ticket Created’ automations, given these actions aren’t applicable as they’ll run on tickets in real time as they’re created

‘Ticket Created’ Automation Sort

Given ‘Ticket Created’ automations are evaluated in their sort order, you may find that you’ll want to adjust the sort of your automations to ensure that each rule is evaluated in a specific order based on your workflow.

To adjust the sort order of your Ticket Created automations, simply hover over the corresponding automation and you’ll see the sort icon in the left-most section of the row:

When you create a new ‘Ticket Created’ automation or convert from ‘Hourly’ the new automation will automatically be saved at the bottom of your ‘Ticket Created’ automation list.

New Automation Conditions and Actions

In addition to our new Real Time Automation trigger, we’ve added new conditions and actions available on all plans and for either ‘Ticket Created’ and ‘Hourly’ automations, described below.

Ticket Tag Conditions

Ticket Tag Includes

Returns true when the tag(s) defined in the condition are associated with the ticket.

Entering multiple tags in this field will apply ‘OR’ logic

Example: If a condition is set to include tickets with tags ‘needs review’ and ‘ready for review’, then the condition will return true for tickets with just the tag ‘needs review’, just the tag ‘ready for review’, or for tickets with both tags included

Includes Untagged

With this box checked, the condition will return true if the tag(s) defined in the condition are associated with the ticket OR if the ticket is untagged.

To return only untagged tickets, you can leave the tag input field blank with just the ‘Include Untagged Tickets’ checkbox selected. Screenshot of this example condition below.

Ticket Tag Excludes

Returns true when the tag(s) defined in the condition are not associated with the ticket. This condition will also include untagged tickets by default.

Example: If a condition is set to exclude tickets with the tag ‘vip’ then this will return true for any ticket with tags other than ‘vip’ as well as tickets without any tag at all

Entering multiple tags in this field will apply ‘OR’ logic.

Customer Tag Conditions

Customer Tag Includes

Returns true when the tag(s) defined in the condition are associated with the Customer submitting the ticket. This condition will also return true if a contact associated with the customer submits the ticket.

Similar to Ticket Tags, entering multiple tags in this field will apply ‘OR’ logic.

Includes Untagged

With this box checked, the condition will return true if the tag(s) defined in the condition are associated with the customer OR if the customer is untagged.

To return true only for untagged customers, you can leave the tag input field blank with just the ‘Include Untagged Customers’ checkbox selected.

Customer Tag Excludes

Returns true when the tag(s) defined in the condition are not associated with the ticket. This condition will also include untagged Customers by default. Entering multiple tags in this field will apply ‘OR’ logic.

Ticket Tag Actions

Add Ticket Tag

This action will add any tags you’ve defined to the associated ticket when the automation is run. Given tags do not support duplicate tags, if the tag is already associated with the ticket, then the automation will not apply the tag and skip this action.

Remove Ticket Tag

This action will remove any tags you’ve defined in the associated ticket when the automation is run. If the tag selected is not already associated with the ticket, then this action will be skipped.

Active / Inactive Toggle

Given our new real time automation trigger can be leveraged for automatically assigning tickets to designated technicians, we wanted to provide an easy way to pause automations in the event that one of your technician’s are temporarily unavailable or out of office for an extended period.

To this end, we’ve introduced a new active toggle for all automation types, allowing you to deactivate your automations without having to delete them and avoid recreating and re-sorting them when you’re ready to reactivate them.

The active toggle can be managed from either the main automation list or on the automation detail page itself as demonstrated below.

Managing the active toggle from the automation list:

Managing the active toggle directly from the automation create / edit page:

With the automation deactivated, it will be skipped when automations checks are run at either Ticket Creation or during hourly runs depending on the automation type. To resume the automation, simply reactivate the toggle and your automation will resume running right away.

Deleting and Recovering Automations

Deleting Automations

If you’d like to delete any of your automations, you can do by selecting the ‘trash can’ icon for the corresponding automation from the main automation list

Restoring Deleted Automations

We offer the ability to recover deleted automations should the need arise. To recover your automations, you’ll want to head to Admin > Reports > Tickets and select the option ‘Deleted Ticket Automations’ to recover any of your previously deleted automations.

Example Help Desk Workflows using ‘Ticket Created’ automations

Automatically assigning incoming tickets to specific technicians

Say you have a large client that you want to ensure is taken care of by one of your top technicians whenever they run into an issue. Whenever this client submits a new ticket, we want to ensure that our top technician Frances is assigned to their ticket.

As a first step, we’ll add a Customer Tag to the customer record for Artest Industries called ‘francis account’:

Now, we’re going to create a corresponding Real Time Automation (LINKME) rule that automatically looks for the ‘francis account’ tag on customers submitting tickets.

So, we’ll create a condition in the automation ‘Customer Tags’ > ‘Includes’ > ‘francis account’. Then, we’ll create an action in the automation rule that assigns tickets that match this condition to our technician Frances:

Now, when the example client Artest Industries submits a ticket, or for any of our other clients with that ‘francis account’ customer tag, these tickets will automatically be assigned to Francis moving forward without the need of manual assignment.

Note: While in this example we used the tag, ‘francis account’, this flow is completely flexible and you can use any tag naming convention you’d like so long as the customer tag name is referenced in the automation as it appears on your customer records.

Automatically assigning incoming tickets to specific ticket boards and generating custom alerts

Similar to the example above, say you wanted to flag your VIP clients to ensure any tickets they submit generate internal team alerts and are assigned to a dedicated ticket board for triaging incoming VIP issues. To get started, we can introduce a ‘vip’ tag on our largest clients using customer tags.

Now, with this tag associated with our VIP client, we can create an automation rule that looks for this customer tag when client’s submit tickets. In our automation actions, we’ll make sure the ticket gets tagged ‘vip queue’ and we’ll also generate an alert in our Microsoft Teams account to ensure our team is notified that a new VIP ticket has been submitted:

Lastly, we’ll want to ensure that we have a dedicated ticket view configured for our Vip Queue. The view looks for any ticket with the tag ‘vip queue’ associated with it:

Now, anytime our VIP customer submits a ticket, our team will automatically be notified in our Microsoft Teams account and the ticket will post in our dedicated VIP queue:

Managing your Real Time Automations after Team Plan downgrade

Should you choose to downgrade from the Team plan, you’ll be able to convert your Real Time Automations to Hourly so you can continue to use them in your help desk workflows.

At downgrade, your Real Time Automations will be automatically deactivated. From the automation page, you’ll see these highlighted in the ‘Ticket Created’ tab:

On the ‘Ticket Created’ table, you’ll be able to convert your automations to Hourly automatically to reactivate them, or optionally delete them if you find you no longer need them:

FAQs

Can I use OR logic in my automation conditions?

Not yet! But we’re looking into a solution here.

Currently, our conditions use AND logic.

Example:

With Conditions set to:

  • Ticket Tag > Includes > ‘tier 1’
  • Ticket Priority > Is > ‘0 Urgent’

This will return all tickets with the ticket tag ‘Tier 1’ of priority ‘0 Urgent’. It will not return true for tickets with just the ‘tier 1’ ticket tag or just the priority set to ‘0 Urgent’.

As a workaround using the example above, given we offer automation sort, you can achieve OR logic by creating a rule for just Ticket Tag > Includes > ‘tier 1’ with a specific set of settings, then an additional separate rule using the same actions, but with the condition Ticket Priority > Is > ‘0 Urgent’

Are there more Real Time Automation triggers coming?

Definitely! We’re excited to continue rolling out additional triggers as we see partners beginning to leverage Real Time Automation and get feedback on what additional triggers will help streamline your help desk workflows.