Actions are automated tasks that you configure. They can be carried out by auto assist, which is part of agent copilot, and by action flows, which perform a pre-defined series of automated tasks.
Understanding actions for automated tasks
Auto assist suggests relevant actions and action flows to your agents to help them solve customer requests. When auto assist suggests an action, the agent can approve it and the system carries out the action automatically, saving the agent time. Similarly, when auto assist suggests an action flow, the agent can approve it and the system carries out all of the steps automatically.
Actions can be linked directly in procedures to ensure that auto assist performs the correct action for a user's request. Additionally, you can include actions you create as a step in action flows.
There are two types of actions: built-in actions for auto assist that require no configuration from you, and custom external actions that you configure based on an API.
Built-in actions for auto assist
Auto assist includes the following built-in actions:
- Mark a ticket as Solved.
- Leverage a Shopify integration to look up a Shopify order, cancel and refund an entire Shopify order, or refund selected items from a Shopify order. (See Workflow recipe: Canceling and refunding a Shopify order with auto assist.)
Built-in actions don't appear on the Actions page in Admin Center and can't be modified.
Custom external actions
Custom external actions allow you to update data outside of Zendesk using an API you define. These types of actions allow you to query and modify your own internal business systems or perform a third-party action. The more actions you configure, the more options are available to auto assist when it generates suggestions for agents.
Using Zendesk APIs with custom external actions
Because you can create custom external actions using any API, it's possible to create an external action that points to a Zendesk API. If you do this, however, there are some considerations to keep in mind:
- These API requests count against your overall Zendesk API rate limits. See Managing API usage in your Zendesk account.
- As part of action setup, you’ll create a connection to authorize the request, which uses a Zendesk API token or OAuth token. This connection might have greater access privileges than your agents and end users, so you’ll need to be cautious that you don’t accidentally expose information they shouldn’t see.
- In the future, you’ll need to migrate your Zendesk API actions to out-of-the-box Zendesk actions if and when equivalent actions become available.
- Be mindful of how changes made by these API requests may interact with other parts of your Zendesk configuration, such as triggers, automations, and apps.
About inputs for custom external actions
An input for a custom external action is the information that the action uses in order to run.
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Generated information, based on the conversation between the end
user and the agent
Auto assist uses generative AI to extract information from the conversation and passes it to an action or action flow as an input.
For example, say you have an input named "order_id" with the description “the customer’s order number, which is typically an integer of 9 or 10 digits”. If an agent asks, "Can I please have your order number?" and the end user replies, "Sure, it's 987654321", the action will pass this information to the "order_id" input.
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Ticket fields
Custom ticket fields, and certain standard ticket fields listed below, can be used as inputs. When using a ticket field as an input, enter a name and description that's detailed enough that auto assist understands which ticket field you're specifying.
For example, entering "email" as an input isn't clear enough. Instead, you may want to name an input "requester_email" with a description such as "the email address of the end user who requested help."
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Ticket ID
When using the ticket ID as an input, you must use the specific name zendesk_ticket_id and set the type as a number. Auto assist populates that input with the ID of the ticket.
When making use of the input in your API configuration, you can wrap the input placeholder in quotes to convert it to a string, or incorporate it into a larger string.
For example, you could have the following property in your API body:
"note":"Ticket number {{zendesk_ticket_id}} has been updated!"
Auto assist has access to read custom ticket fields and the standard ticket fields below:
- Assignee email
- Assignee name
- Brand
- Custom ticket fields
- Priority
- Requester email
- Requester name
- Status
- Subject
- Type