Zoho is introducing conditional branching in Zoho Desk through Automation Studio, letting businesses manage complex, multi-condition customer service workflows within a single automation rule, rather than building and maintaining several separate rules.
Conditional branching, also called branched logic, allows an automation rule to follow different paths depending on data, events, business rules, or the outcome of an earlier step. The system evaluates a condition, such as an amount being greater than 10,000, a country equalling India, or an approval status of rejected, and routes the ticket to the appropriate sequence of actions depending on whether that condition, or a combination of conditions, is met. This suits businesses that need multi-step workflows governed by stricter, logic-based rules.
Automation Studio lets you build and manage complex workflows by connecting multiple conditions and actions within a single rule. Rather than creating several standalone rules, one workflow can be triggered by an event and then move a ticket through subsequent steps, such as assigning it, updating its status, sending notifications, and scheduling follow-ups at specific intervals, all from a drag-and-drop builder.
A trigger defines the event that starts a workflow, such as a ticket being created, a task being created, a field being updated, a call being created, an account being created, or a comment being updated, depending on the module you select. Where the trigger is Field Updated, you also set the criteria for when the rule should fire, for example only when Ticket Status changes from Open to Escalated, rather than on every status update.
Criteria control the flow of a rule and determine when specific actions should run. For example, if the trigger is Ticket Created, the rule would fire on every ticket by default. Adding criteria, such as Priority equals High or Classification equals Problem, narrows this down so the rule only runs when the relevant condition is actually met.
Blocks define the conditional logic within a rule, and can be combined as needed:
Action chaining lets you use the output of one action as the input for the next. For example, if the first action generates a summary of a ticket conversation, the next action can take that generated summary and add it directly as a comment on the ticket.
Dot walking lets you access and use fields from related modules while building a rule, without needing a custom function or additional action. For example, while configuring a rule against a Ticket record, you can pull in contact details, such as an email address, directly, rather than fetching them from another module manually.
An e-commerce platform manages returns through a dedicated Returns and Refunds module. When a customer emails a return request, a ticket is created, and if the email's subject or description contains an Order ID, the ticket is automatically linked to the relevant record in the Returns and Refunds module. From there, each request can be categorised: the quality assurance team might approve the refund, reject it after inspection, or request more information from the customer. For approved requests, the organisation waits three days before closing the ticket, giving the customer time to raise any issues. This entire sequence, what happens after approval or rejection, is configured in Automation Studio, using dot walking to update the linked Ticket record when the Return Requests module changes, and action chaining to add a three-day delay once a ticket's status changes to Refund Processing.
Campaigns and onboarding materials can be tailored to a contact's subscription plan, business vertical, and number of user licences. Free and paid users can receive different communications, larger teams can receive onboarding resources and session reminders suited to their scale, and a prospect from a particular sector, such as financial services, can be sent relevant use cases and case studies. Because the workflow evaluates these attributes dynamically, a free user who upgrades to a paid plan will automatically start receiving paid-plan messaging going forward, with no manual intervention needed.
An e-commerce company can use Zia's Generate Content feature to summarise a customer's request, send an acknowledgement based on that summary, and automatically route the ticket to the appropriate support team based on the product involved, all within a single automated workflow.
An IT helpdesk team can identify unresolved tickets approaching their SLA due time and automatically escalate them, updating priority and notifying the appropriate team before the SLA is actually breached.