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Hi! 

 

I’m a heavy Zendesk user and Zapier’s been a great tool for setting up connections between ZD and other systems.

 

However there’s some significant inconsistencies in behaviour for this integration that should be investigated by Zapier

 

  • First and most important, the ‘Tags’ field that appears on Update Ticket Action is dangerous and can result in data loss!
    Zendesk has three different Tag functions: Add Tags, Remove Tags and Set Tags(the spicy one)

    Add Tags does what it says on the tin, it adds the comma separated Tags to the ticket.
    Remove Tags does the same, but in reverse. It’ll surgically remove a specific tag (or tags) and leave the others untouched. This is currently unsupported in Zapier Actions for Zendesk.
    Set Tags is chaos in a bottle. It overwrites ALL tags on the ticket with the ones provided.

    The danger in Zapier’s integration is that it defaults to Set Tags behaviour, instead of Add Tags when using the Update Ticket action. This is dangerous because it deletes all other tags the ticket may have held, and doesn’t warn you in the Zap setup that it will do so! This has the effect of clearing custom ticket fields that may have been filled before the zap ran, and hiding tickets from showing to agents in certain ticket views. If a user is updating tickets via Zap, it’s not unreasonable to assume they don’t want to delete existing data on that ticket. 

    Please have Add Tags be the default functionality for Update Tickets!

    There’s also no ‘Remove Tags’ function in the Update Ticket action, which would be really great to have too.

    Workarounds with custom HTTP requests are possible, but they require an understanding of APIs and, unfortunately, you need to know that you have to use them. I found out the hard way after losing data on a few hundred tickets. It also adds to the cost of running the zap as it consumes at least one extra task.

 

  • Second, while the Create Ticket action supports setting the comment as HTML/Plaintext, the Update Ticket action does not, and only supports Plaintext. Please update this to support parity with the Create Action ticket!

Hey @Dan R ,

 

I. The first issue that you have reported can be solved easily with existing Zendesk actions on Zapier. 

II. Second issue can be solved easily by making custom API/Webhook calls. 

 

Consider hiring a Zapier Expert from here to build this.

@jayeshkumarbhatia 

Thanks for replying. I was able to work around the second issue with webhooks, but that incurs extra costs and complexity by needing to run extra tasks for an action that should be natively supported by Zapier. 

Can you elaborate on your claim that the existing Zendesk actions can solve this issue? It would be great to learn those steps and share with the community.

I wasn’t looking to hire anyone to build anything. Just looking for safety and consistency in the Zendesk Zapier actions, hopefully a PM at Zapier will see this and consider making improvements that will benefit all customers. 

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