Ticket rules: what they can do, and testing before turning them on
Ready made rules you install with one click, the actions and conditions a ticket rule understands, how to test a rule against real tickets without it doing anything, and how turning a rule on or off leaves a trail.
Your service rules live in two places, and both are edited under Tickets, in the admin tabs. Automations react to an EVENT (the ticket was created, or something in it changed). Time rules react to TIME (no first reply in four business hours, resolved five days ago, SLA about to breach). They share the same actions, so anything you can do in one you can do in the other.
Start from a rule that already works
The Ready made rules block lists rules that make sense on day one: suggest knowledge articles when a ticket arrives, send your acknowledgement template, raise the priority when the customer sounds unhappy, escalate to the team lead when nobody replied, warn the team before a critical SLA breach, close tickets resolved five days ago.
Installing one creates a NORMAL rule. You can edit it, turn it off or delete it like any other. If your account does not have a value the rule uses (a status you renamed, for example), the rule says so and refuses to install, instead of installing something that would never fire.
What a rule can do
- Change status, priority or category, assign an agent or a group, escalate to the team lead, apply a macro, notify, send the satisfaction survey.
- Change fields: several fields at once, including the custom fields you created. Status, queue and the resolution stamp are NOT on this list, because each has its own action carrying extra rules that changing a field would skip.
- Create a task: a real activity linked to the ticket, with a due date, in the agenda and the reminders.
- Send the email template: uses the template you saved for that event, category, queue and language. With no template saved, nothing is sent.
- Call a webhook: one of the destinations you already registered under Channels, signed the same way as ticket events.
- Suggest knowledge articles: leaves an internal note with the articles that answer the ticket. The customer never sees the note.
- Open a service order: turns the ticket into field work. The order is linked to the ticket, so the rule can fire again without opening a second one.
- Request approval: while the approval is pending, resolving the ticket is refused everywhere, not only in the console.
What a rule can look at
Besides status, priority, category, queue and assignee, a rule can now look at the inbound channel, any ticket field (including the ones you created), the sentiment the AI already saved, the sentiment score, how much time is left on the SLA and how many times the ticket was reopened.
Two rules never change. A condition never runs a new AI analysis: it reads the analysis already saved, and with no analysis the condition simply does not hold. And an unknown fact never counts as true: a ticket with no applicable SLA never matches "less than 30 minutes left".
Scope a time rule
A time rule used to look at every ticket. Now it can be scoped: only the critical ones, only what arrived through a given channel, only the accounts on a plan. Warning the team thirty minutes before a breach makes sense for critical tickets and would be noise for all of them.
Test before turning it on
Every rule has Test this rule. You can run it against one ticket you pick, and see the verdict condition by condition, including when the reason is that we do not have that information for that ticket. You can also run it against the latest tickets and see how many it would act on: it is the check that avoids the rule that reassigns the whole queue in its first minute.
Testing changes nothing. It does not save, does not send, does not call the webhook and does not spend AI.
Turning a rule off leaves a trail
Turn on and Turn off act on the rule alone, without rewriting its conditions and actions. Installing, turning on, turning off, reordering and scoping are all written to the audit log, so "why did the escalation stop happening on Tuesday?" is a question with an answer.