Mark as Spam Macro

Zendesk provides a great default functionality to mark tickets as spam, but it requires that agents have the ability to delete tickets in order to use it.  Many organizations may want to prevent their agents from deleting tickets for understandable reasons, but then how can they mark spam tickets as such? 

First off, you'll notice that if you create a Zendesk custom role, there is a permission under Edit ticket properties for Delete tickets.  This is required in order to use Zendesk's built in Mark as Spam functionality:

Without this ability, the agent won't see the Mark as Spam option in the ticket as seen below:

Solution:

For this simple use case, we have created a macro that can serve a similar purpose.  It is easy to set up and allows agents to easily dispose of spam tickets.  In the macro, we have added three actions:

• Add tags - mark_as_spam => this is used to power a trigger which will auto-close the ticket, and is also useful for reporting to help filter out spam tickets.
• Comment mode - Private => this is used to help us add a comment to the ticket for future reference.
• Comment/description - Mark as Spam => this is to keep an easy to view record indicating that the ticket was marked as spam.

Once the macro is created, a trigger is also needed to close the ticket.  This is because agents aren't able to manually mark tickets as closed, and instead we need to use business rules to do this.  The trigger is composed of the following parts:

Conditions:

• Ticket > is > Updated - not essential but we like to add a ticket updated condition as a good practice
• Tags > Contains at least one of the following > mark_as_spam

Actions:

• Status > Closed

Once you've set both of these up, you're ready to start using the macro. 

There are additional options for this workflow, such as auto-deleting the tickets, as well as the reports filtering to not count these tickets.  If any questions, please feel free to comment!