On a schedule
Follow up on Zendesk tickets waiting on the customer
Each morning, customers whose tickets have been pending for a few days get a polite check-in email, and you get the list.
- Runs
- On a schedule
- Apps
- Gmail, Zendesk
- AI
- Not needed
- Access
- Zendesk read; gmail.send
Send this to your assistant
Create a ClickRuntime automation: every weekday at 9am, find Zendesk tickets that have been pending for more than 3 days. Send each customer a short, polite follow-up from my Gmail, and email me the list.
First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.
Why use it
Why teams use this automation
A support team asks a customer for a screenshot or an order number and sets the ticket to pending. Then nothing happens. The customer forgets, the agent moves on, and the ticket either closes automatically with the problem unsolved or sits open for weeks.
A friendly check-in after a few days brings many of those customers back, so problems actually get solved and the queue reflects real work.
What you get out of it
Problems get finished
A nudge brings back customers who meant to reply, so their issue is solved instead of quietly closed.
Agents do not have to remember
No one keeps a list of who to chase; the morning email shows who was contacted.
Each customer is chased once
Every ticket gets one follow-up, so nobody is pestered with repeat emails.
A cleaner queue
Pending tickets either move forward or can be closed with confidence, which makes the backlog numbers honest.
How it works
What happens, step by step
Every weekday at 9am, ClickRuntime searches Zendesk for tickets that have been pending for more than three days.
It skips any ticket it has already followed up on.
Each customer gets a short, polite check-in email from your Gmail, mentioning their ticket number.
You get one email listing the tickets that were chased.
Before it runs live
- Connect Google through your own Google app (a one-time, 10-minute setup), so it works with your own Gmail
- Connect Zendesk
What you get
Build your own
Need it to work differently?
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
- Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
- 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 Gmail and Zendesk steps into one automation
Under the hood
The code that runs this automation
import base64
from google.oauth2.credentials import Credentials
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from datetime import date, timedelta
from clickruntime import on_trigger, http, credentials, state, notify
ZD, AGENT = "https://yourcompany.zendesk.com/api/v2", "you@yourcompany.com"
def zd(method, path, **kw):
r = http.request(method, ZD + path, auth=(f"{AGENT}/token", credentials.secret("ZENDESK_API_TOKEN")), **kw)
return r.raise_for_status() or (r.json() if r.content else None)
def send_gmail(to, subject, text):
raw = base64.urlsafe_b64encode(f"To: {to}\r\nSubject: {subject}\r\nContent-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8\r\n\r\n{text}".encode()).decode()
build("gmail", "v1", credentials=Credentials(credentials.connection("google", "work")), cache_discovery=False).users().messages().send(userId="me", body={"raw": raw}).execute()
@on_trigger
def run(event):
cutoff = (date.today() - timedelta(days=3)).isoformat()
done = set(state.get("done") or [])
tickets = [t for t in zd("GET", "/search.json", params={"query": f"type:ticket status:pending updated<{cutoff}"})["results"] if t["id"] not in done]
if not tickets:
return {"chased": 0}
lines = []
for t in tickets:
user = zd("GET", f"/users/{t['requester_id']}")["user"]
send_gmail(user["email"], f"Re: {t['subject']} [#{t['id']}]",
f"Hi {user['name'].split()[0]},\n\nJust checking in on your request #{t['id']}. Could you reply to our last message "
"when you have a moment so we can finish sorting this out?\n\nThanks,\nThe support team")
lines.append(f"#{t['id']} {t['subject']} ({user['email']})")
done.add(t["id"])
notify.email_me(f"Followed up on {len(lines)} pending tickets", "\n".join(lines))
state.set("done", sorted(done)[-3000:])
return {"chased": len(lines)}FAQ
Common questions
Will customers get more than one follow-up?
Can I change how many days it waits?
Does the reply go back into Zendesk?
What permissions does it need?
Does it need AI?
How many runs does it use?
Can I change how it works?
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