The moment it happens

Turn contact form messages into Zendesk tickets

Messages from your contact form become tickets, without spam or a second ticket for the same question.

Runs: The moment it happens
Apps: Zendesk
AI: Not needed
Access: read+write

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: give me a link our contact form can send to. Skip obvious spam, skip it if the same email already has an open ticket with this subject, and otherwise create a Zendesk ticket.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

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First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

A contact form, a shared inbox and a chat widget all push messages toward support. An impatient customer submits the same complaint three times in ten minutes, and a bot posts crypto offers into the same form. Each one becomes a ticket if you connect the sources directly, so agents spend the first part of every shift deleting junk and merging copies, and sometimes reply twice to the same person.

As each message arrives, it is checked against spam rules, such as blocked phrases or sender domains. Then Zendesk is searched for an open ticket from the same sender with matching content. Only a message that passes both checks creates a ticket; a repeat is skipped or added to the existing thread instead of making a new one.

Teams with public forms and busy shared mailboxes get cleaner queues.

What you get out of it

Agents see only genuine requests
Mornings begin with real customer questions instead of a cleanup chore. Offers for fake watches and crypto never reach the queue, so agents start on work that needs a person and reply faster to the customers who matter.
One customer, one ticket
A nervous customer who presses submit three times creates one conversation, not three. Replies stay in one thread, and nobody has to merge copies by hand or wonder which version another agent already answered.
Accurate volume numbers
A quarter of form traffic can be junk, and that noise makes demand look higher than it is. Filtering before creation keeps volume reports honest, which matters when you argue for a new hire.
No double replies embarrassing the team
When two agents answer two copies of the same message, the customer gets conflicting replies and loses confidence. One ticket per request removes that risk and keeps your answers consistent.
Spam rules you control
Blocked phrases and sender domains live in one list that grows as new spam patterns appear. You decide what counts as noise, and the run history shows what was filtered, so a wrongly blocked message can be found.
Less drain on agent attention
Deleting junk and merging copies is dull work that wears people down. A queue that arrives already clean lets agents spend their patience on customers, and it reduces the fatigue that leads to slower replies later in the day.

How it works

What happens, step by step

When someone sends a message through your contact form, ClickRuntime picks it up straight away.
It checks the message against your spam rules and drops anything that matches.
It looks for an open Zendesk ticket from the same person on the same subject, so repeats do not create duplicates.
If there is none, a new Zendesk ticket is created with the subject, message and the sender as requester.

Before it runs live

Connect Zendesk
Paste your automation's link into the other app's webhook settings

What you get

RunsThe moment it happens

Turn contact form messages into Zendesk ticketsjust nowSucceeded

Zendesk · New ticket#4821 Can't download my invoice Requester: ap@acme.example

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.

Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

Act only on the items that match your own rules, and skip the rest
Add an AI step, for example to summarize, sort or draft a reply
Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
Combine it with other Zendesk steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.

create_tickets_from_incoming_messages_filtering_spam_and_duplicates.pyexample

import re
from clickruntime import on_event, http, credentials

ZD = "https://yourcompany.zendesk.com/api/v2"
AGENT_EMAIL = "you@yourcompany.com"

def zd(method, path, **kw):
    r = http.request(method, f"{ZD}{path}", auth=(f"{AGENT_EMAIL}/token", credentials.secret("ZENDESK_API_TOKEN")), **kw)
    r.raise_for_status()
    return r.json() if r.content else None

SPAM = re.compile(r"(crypto|casino|viagra|seo services|backlinks)", re.I)

@on_event
def handle(event):
    f = event.json or {}
    email, subject, message = f.get("email", ""), f.get("subject", "").strip(), f.get("message", "")
    if not email or SPAM.search(subject + " " + message) or message.count("http") > 3:
        return {"created": False, "reason": "spam"}
    query = f'type:ticket requester:{email} status<solved subject:"{subject}"'
    if zd("GET", "/search.json", params={"query": query})["count"]:
        return {"created": False, "reason": "duplicate"}
    t = zd("POST", "/tickets", json={"ticket": {"subject": subject or "Contact form", "comment": {"body": message},
                                                 "requester": {"email": email, "name": f.get("name", email)}}})["ticket"]
    return {"created": True, "ticket": t["id"]}

FAQ

Common questions

What counts as a duplicate?

By default it is an open ticket from the same sender email with a similar subject. You can tighten or loosen the match, for example by only checking tickets from the last 24 hours. Both the sender and the subject are compared.

Where can the messages come from?

Anything that can send a webhook when a message arrives: a website form, a chat tool, an email parser or a custom app. Each sends its message to the trigger link and is processed as it comes in.

Are blocked messages stored anywhere?

The run history in the ClickRuntime dashboard shows what came in and what was decided, so you can check that a legitimate message was not filtered out and adjust the rules if it was. Messages that match no spam rule are treated as real requests.

What permissions does it need?

read+write. Nothing else in your accounts is used.

Does it need AI?

No. It runs without AI, so it doesn't use your plan's AI allowance.

How many runs does it use?

One run for each event the app sends.

Can I change how it works?

Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

The moment it happens