Sending email reminders to clients is a common requirement for almost every support team. Whether it’s to request more information about a support ticket, ask clients to perform a certain action to aid in solving a task, or something else, sending these email reminders is crucial—but doing so manually can end up taking a lot of time and manpower.

One solution for bypassing this problem is to set an automation that will reopen pending tickets a certain number of days after they are marked as pending. Although this is a workable solution, it doesn’t completely rid teams of manual work as a support agent will still need to reply manually, add a tag to the ticket, and even submit it as pending again. 

In this article, we propose a better solution: configuring Zendesk to automatically send email reminders and reference the last message sent to the customer. This way, agents won’t need to send reminders manually and support teams can save on wasted time and effort. Here, we’ll walk you through the entire configuration process for setting these automated reminders in Zendesk. 

An Example Scenario:

To illustrate, let’s suppose you work for an e-commerce business that sells tech gadgets. Your support team receives a notification—perhaps from your shipping provider or CRM—that the order cannot be fulfilled due to inaccurate shipping information. You reach out to your customer via Zendesk to alert them of the issue. 

Now, let’s also imagine that, according to your company policy, the order must be canceled and a refund issued if the customer does not respond within 6 days. To encourage a response from the customer, you set their ticket to reopen every 2 days so that an agent can send a reminder, add a tag, and submit the ticket as pending again. That adds up to a lot of wasted time and effort.

However, by configuring Zendesk to automatically send the customer an email reminder referencing the last message sent to them, your support agents won’t need to do it manually. The only thing they’ll need to do is tick a box on the ticket field enabling auto-reminders for that ticket—pretty easy stuff!

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The How-To:

Setting up automated email reminders in Zendesk is pretty simple. In fact, the entire configuration consists of only a ticket field, 3 automations, 3 triggers, and a view. 

Let’s go through the set-up process step by step.
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1. Create an “enable reminder” ticket field

This step ensures that when an agent ticks the “Enable reminder” checkbox, the tag email_reminder will be added to the ticket. This tag will be used in the email reminder automations and triggers we’re about to set up.

1. In the Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar. Then select Tickets > Fields.
2. Click Add field and select the checkbox field type.
3. Enter a name. For this example, we’ll use “Enable reminder.”
4. Add the tag email_reminder.
5. Add a ticket field to the forms.
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2. Create the first email reminder automation, which sends a reminder after 48 hours

This step creates an automation that will send an email reminder to the customer if they haven’t replied within 2 days. It will also add the tag email_reminder_1st to the ticket, which we’ll use in subsequent steps.

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1. In the Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar. Then select Business rules > Automations.
2. Click Add automation.
3. Give it a title. For this example, we’ll use “Send email reminder after 48h”.
4. Set the automation to meet all of the following conditions:
   Ticket: Status category Is > Pending
   Ticket: Hours since Status category is pending > (calendar) Is > 48h
   Ticket: Tags > Contains at least one of the following > email_reminder
   

5. Set the automation to perform these actions:
   Notifications: Email user > (requester)
   Email subject: “Friendly reminder” (or whatever you’d like the email subject to be)
   Email body: Feel free to customize the body text however you’d like, but here’s an example text:
   
   Hi there, just a friendly reminder that we’re waiting to hear back from you regarding our last email.
   {{ticket.latest_comment_formatted}}
   
   Ticket: Add tag email_reminder_1st
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3. Create the second email reminder automation, which sends a reminder after 96 hours

This step creates a second automation, which will send the customer another reminder email if they haven’t replied within 4 days. It also adds the tag email_reminder_2nd to the ticket, which we’ll use in subsequent steps.

Here’s a quick example of what the customer’s second email will look like, referencing the first:

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1. In the Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar. Then select Business rules > Automations.
2. Click Add automation.
3. Give it a title. For this example, we’ll use “Send 2nd email reminder after 96h”.
4. Set the automation to meet all of the following conditions:
   Ticket: Status category Is > Pending
   Ticket: Hours since Status category is pending > (calendar) Is > 96h
   Ticket: Tags > Contains at least one of the following > email_reminder
5. Set the automation to perform these actions:
   Notifications: Email user > (requester)
   Email subject: “Another friendly reminder” (or whatever you’d like the email subject to be)
   Email body: Again, customize the body text however you’d like. Here’s an example text:
   
   Hi again, just dropping back in to remind you that we haven’t heard back from you yet.
   {{ticket.latest_comment_formatted}}
   
   Ticket: Add tag email_reminder_2nd
   
   

4. Create an automation that opens the ticket after 144 hours‍

This step creates a third automation, which will reopen a ticket if the customer hasn’t replied within 6 days. It also adds the tag reminder_open to the ticket, which will be used in the next step to place the ticket in the appropriate view for further handling.

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1. In the Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar. Then select Business rules > Automations.
2. Click Add automation.
3. Give it a title. For this example, we’ll use “Open reminder ticket after 144h”.
4. Set the automation to meet all of the following conditions:
   Ticket: Status category Is > Pending
   Ticket: Hours since Status category is pending > (calendar) Is > 144h
   Ticket: Tags > Contains at least one of the following > email_reminder
   

5. Set the automation to perform these actions:
   Ticket: Status category > Open
   Ticket: Remove tag > email_reminder
   Ticket: Add tag > reminder_open
   

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5. Create three triggers that remove all tags when a customer replies‍

So far, we’ve created 3 automations: two to send email reminders and one to reopen the ticket. Now we’ll create 3 triggers that will remove a ticket from the email reminder automations when a customer replies.

Trigger 1:

This trigger moves the email_reminder tag if the customer replies within 48 hours (that is, before receiving the first email reminder). We remove the email_reminder tag so that the email reminder automation doesn’t run again.

1. In the Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar. Then select Business rules > Triggers.
2. Click Add trigger.
3. Give it a title. For this example, we’ll use “Remove tag email_reminder when opened within 48h”.
4. Set the automation to meet all of the following conditions:
   Ticket: Status category > Is > Open
   Ticket: Tags > Contains one of the following > email_reminder
   

5. Set the automation to perform these actions:
   Ticket: Remove tag > email_reminder
   

Trigger 2:

This trigger removes the email_reminder tag when the customer replies within 96 hours, but after 48 hours (that is, between receiving the first and second email reminders). 

1. In the Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar. Then select Business rules > Triggers.
2. Click Add trigger.
3. Give it a title. For this example, we’ll use “Remove tag email_reminder_1st when opened within 96h”.
4. Set the automation to meet all of the following conditions:
   Ticket: Status category > Is > OpenTicket: Tags > Contains one of the following > email_reminder_1st
   

5. Set the automation to perform these actions:
   Ticket: Remove tag > email_reminder

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Trigger 3:

This trigger removes the email_reminder tag when the customer replies within 144 hours, but after 96 hours (that is, between the second and third email reminders).

1. In the Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar. Then select Business rules > Triggers.
2. Click Add trigger.
3. Give it a title. For this example, we’ll use “Remove tag email_reminder_2nd when opened within 144h”.
4. Set the automation to meet all of the following conditions:
   Ticket: Status category > Is > Open
   Ticket: Tags > Contains one of the following > email_reminder_2nd
   

5. Set the automation to perform these actions:
   Ticket: Remove tag > email_reminder

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6. Create a view for follow-up tickets

In Step 4, we created an automation that will a) reopen a ticket if the customer hasn’t replied within 6 days and b) add a reminder_open tag to the ticket. That tag comes into play now.

Since these are tickets that never received a reply from the customer, the support team will need to handle them (according to our example). To make things easier for the agents, we’ll gather these tickets into a dedicated view.

Create a new view with these conditions:

1. In the Admin Center, click Views in the sidebar. Then click Add view.
2. You can name this view something like “Aut. reopened tickets”
3. Set the following condition in “Tickets must meet all of these conditions to appear in the views”:
   Tags > Contains at least one of the following > reminder_open
   

Summary

And there you have it! 

To recap, the schema of the entire process is as follows:

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By following these steps, you’ll be able to configure your Zendesk automations to save your support agents time and effort. You’ll also boost your ticket resolution rate—win-win!

Assets: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPlOmM-k=/?share_link_id=892152591200‍