How to notify every customer affected by an outage in Zendesk

To notify everyone affected by an outage from Zendesk, open Heralder, choose New campaign and pick Requesters of tickets as the audience. Search for the incident's tickets, such as tags:outage_0930 status<solved, and each requester gets one new ticket however many tickets they opened. Write the update, check the dry run, send a test ticket, then send. Customers' replies land on their own ticket.

Steps

1. Tag the incident's tickets. Make sure tickets about the outage share a tag, such as outage_0930, by macro or trigger.
2. Open Heralder from the left navigation bar (the megaphone icon) and choose New campaign.
3. Pick the audience. Under Who should get a ticket?, choose Requesters of tickets and enter a Zendesk ticket search.
4. Write the message. Name the campaign (internal), write the subject and message, and insert merge fields such as {{first_name|there}}. Add Language versions for locales such as de or pt-br if you support customers in other languages.
5. Set the ticket. Pick a status, group, form and extra tags such as outage_0930_notice. Pending works well: a reply moves the ticket back to Open.
6. Choose delivery. "Public reply, emailed by your account's triggers" for most accounts, "Public reply, emailed by the Heralder trigger", or Internal note only.
7. Choose who to skip: agents and admins, suspended users, the opt-out tag, email domains, and people contacted by Heralder in the last N days.
8. Review and send. Read the dry run, click Send a test ticket to an address that isn't your agent login, then send. For more than 50 tickets, type the number to confirm.

Three ways to build the audience

Each person gets one ticket even when they match several times. Duplicate emails and users without an email are listed as skipped, with the reason.

What the dry run checks

The dry run changes nothing. It shows how many tickets will be created, who is skipped and why, how the campaign splits into batches and how long it will take, which trigger will email the tickets, and the first tickets exactly as Zendesk will receive them. Problems that would stop the send appear under Fix before sending.

After the update goes out

• Find the tickets: search tags:heralder_<id>. Every campaign ticket also has the heralder tag.
• See who replied: when the tickets were created as Pending, On-hold or Solved, the campaign page counts per batch the tickets a customer's reply reopened.
• Send a follow-up: when the outage is fixed, start a new campaign with the same search. Leave Contacted by Heralder in the last N days off for it, so everyone hears the fix.
• Audit trail: each campaign has an internal log ticket tagged heralder_log with the template, settings and counts.

What it costs

Heralder is billed monthly by Zendesk after a 14-day free trial: Team $120 a month per Zendesk account (1,000 tickets per campaign, 5 senders), Professional $199 (5,000 and 10) and Enterprise $349 (15,000 and 20). Every feature is on every plan. See the Heralder documentation.