Hello Folks!

If you’d like a reminder to this Coffee Chat - Please like this post and I will be sure to send out a Calendar invite!

That sounds really helpful! I'm excited to learn more about the Freshdesk workflow and ask some questions. Looking forward to chat

I’d love to join but this is out of hours UK time, so I can’t make it

Hey ​@RobCrossHM 

Totally understand! Please feel free to drop your questions here in advance so Aravind can address them live during the session. You can also follow up or continue the discussion right here on this thread afterwards. I’ll make sure to organise one EU friendly Coffee Chat in the coming months. 

My point/question is that for time based automations, we should have an option to specify non-business hours.

This automation is really helpful for us, but customers get reminder emails during a weekend when they’re closed, meaning the user experience is different, depending on what day of the week we replied.

What a great idea, here are my questions. 
 
What is the best practice to make sure your automations are working as intended in the long term, we can see 7 days worth of tickets, but what do we do if we want to go deeper? 

In Hourly Updates: 
What is the best way to have multiple triggers on the same ticket.  If we are waiting on customer and would like to send multiple emails as more time passes, eg send email, 3 days later send reminder, 5 days later send reminder, 7 days later send reminder. 

Why can we apply a message in the ticket with a time trigger, if we want the ticket to open and a message for the agent to take action what are your suggestions? 

Is there a suggestion to get around not being able to use Tags in the conditions of a Time Trigger? 

Thanks, can’t wait for the meeting! 

Sara

Please send me the invite. 

Sounds great. might not work for Australian time zone but hopefully its not too early in the morning. 

Hopefully i can get some help with workflows and custom objects where multiple items can be true, and making action for each true condition, not just the first condition...

Recently I came across a ticket which was resolved 2 years ago. We have an automation rule that it should be automatically closed after 14 days. This ticket did not close. How I check all the tickets which were resolved over 14 days ago and close them manually?

Search for all tickets that are still at resolved state and were resolved more than 14 days ago

There are over 30000 tickets which are resolved and not closed. only option is to close through automation and not using bulk update. Is there a way to do that?

This free app will let you bulk update tickets - I've never used it, but would recommend doing it on a small dataset first.  Also check that you haven’t got any notifications that might trigger when tickets move from resolved to closed

https://housemark.freshdesk.com/a/admin/marketplace/gallery?route=app&id=45061

Good luck

I think this would work too, but I genuinely don’t know what would happen with 30k tickets being updated by the automation in one hit.

 

Hi ​@Soverton 

I have a few hourly updates setup, and they’re really helpful.

First - 3days with no reply - send them an email and add a tag.

And again, after 5 days

Then after a week of no response, i move it to solved.

I didn’t realise you couldn’t use a tag in the condition fields - if you’ve got a good use case, create an Idea, and i’ll vote it up for you.

https://community.freshworks.com/ideas

I think this would work too, but I genuinely don’t know what would happen with 30k tickets being updated by the automation in one hit.

 

 

Thank you. That rule is in place but this may be tickets before that rule was applied. Hence not working. Thank you for your suggestion. I even tried bulk ticket updater but gives lots of error and is very slow. 

Happy to see the conversations already brewing!!! Keep it all coming folks :)

Here are some of the topics, Aravind wanted to touch upon. Resharing for everyone’s reference -

• What are some simple yet powerful automations every Freshdesk account should have to save time and reduce manual work?
• What are some advanced automation ideas — like using custom objects, API calls to handle complex ticket scenarios?
• What’s the most impactful automation or workflow you’ve built in Freshdesk that significantly improved efficiency or customer experience?
• How do I test or troubleshoot automations when they don’t work as expected?

​@Kamakshi V 

 

The Hourly trigger condition should also be enabled for “Contacts”, not just for “Tickets.”

Currently, the reminder/follow-up automation cannot be implemented in a multi-language setup due to action text localization limits.
We are sending these reminders to agents, who then need to manually remind customers or send follow-ups in their respective languages.

As a partial workaround, we could:

• Create multiple automation rules where a specific Requestor language is matched to send a localized reminder to the assigned agent, or

• Preferably, enable action text localization, which would allow us to automate reminders properly across all supported languages.

Hi,
I liked this post.  Should I be receiving an email?  Or will you post the link here? 

Thanks

Hello @haeyoonlee,

This is an on-thread Coffee Chat. Our Product Expert ​@aravind.sundararajan  will be joining in a few minutes right here on the forum to chat and answer your questions live.

My point/question is that for time based automations, we should have an option to specify non-business hours.

 

 

This automation is really helpful for us, but customers get reminder emails during a weekend when they’re closed, meaning the user experience is different, depending on what day of the week we replied.

 

​@RobCrossHM 

As you mentioned, this is one of the top requests from the community, and I completely agree. The product team is working on something exciting in this area, and you’ll start hearing more about it in the coming months.

In the meantime, with the tools currently available, we usually recommend adding a note or disclaimer to your emails that highlights your team’s operating hours — this helps set the right expectations and lets customers know that responses may be delayed outside business hours.
 

I seem to be unsure on how to join this meeting?  Is there a link that I am missing?   Are you just going to reply to our threads? 

Sara

I have flow which disables the user on Prem and on AAD. I need to add a powershell orchestration (or something that will work) to connect to exchange online and add an autoreply to the disabled account’s mailbox. How do I do that?

Great question, Sara. This is a use case that just about every Freshdesk user can relate to — thanks for bringing it up here! Let me break down your questions and address each aspect separately.

Multiple triggers on the same ticket:
At the moment, Freshdesk time triggers can’t be chained together (i.e., one trigger running after another). The best workaround is to create separate time triggers, each with its own time condition — for example, one after 3 days, another after 5 days, and another after 7 days.
To prevent overlap, you can include an additional condition (such as checking for a specific ticket status or custom field value) so that only the appropriate trigger runs at the right time.

Adding a message or reopening a ticket via time trigger:
Time triggers can send email notifications or update fields, but they currently can’t add private notes or internal messages.
If your goal is to reopen a ticket and notify the agent to take action, a good workaround would be to:

Change the ticket status back to “Open”  and

Send an email notification to the agent or the group 


Using tags in time trigger conditions:
At this time, tags can’t be used as conditions in time triggers. A practical alternative is to use custom fields, which can be referenced in automation conditions.

That said, support for using tags in time triggers is one of the most requested enhancements from the community, and our product team is aware of it — so keep an eye out for future updates!

I’d suggest exporting the list of tickets from Freshdesk using the export option on the list page. Make sure to review and adjust the filters to match the desired time range.

Once you have the ticket IDs along with their status (e.g., resolved), you can either use our APIs or leverage the Bulk Ticket Manager app from the Marketplace to update their status to closed in bulk.

I think this would work too, but I genuinely don’t know what would happen with 30k tickets being updated by the automation in one hit.

 

 

Thanks for contributing, RobCrossHM! Your suggestions have been fantastic, and we look forward to showcasing more power users like you in the community.

One thing to note is that Time Triggers/Hourly Updates typically run only on tickets created or updated within the last 30 days. In this case, automation might not be the best fit, but the app you suggested should work well.