Events determine when an Automation Studio flow begins execution, based on something happening to a record, such as a ticket being created, a field being updated, or a comment being added.
A rule can be triggered by more than one event, such as ticket creation, a field update, or a comment update, allowing a single rule to share the same downstream logic across different scenarios. Criteria can be added to each event so the flow only runs under specific conditions, rather than every time the event occurs. For example, an event with the criteria Status is Open will only fire the flow when that condition is actually met.
The zPad support team receives a high volume of tickets daily, and manually sending an acknowledgement to each one takes time away from actually resolving issues. Instead, they configure a flow with the event Ticket Created, criteria of Product Name is zPad, and an action that sends an email reply along the lines of:
The Ticket Created event fires the acknowledgement immediately on submission, and the criteria keeps it targeted so it only applies to zPad tickets, not every ticket created.
A support team wants escalated tickets assigned to a manager immediately, whether the ticket is created directly with an Escalated status, or reaches that status later through a status change. This flow uses two events on the same rule: Ticket Created with the criteria Ticket Status is Escalated, and Field Updated with the criteria Ticket Status is changed from Open to Escalated. Both share the same action, Assign Ticket to the support manager. Using multiple events on one rule captures escalation however it happens, without needing two separate rules to cover both cases.