How to create a Zendesk workflow to prioritize tickets from important customers (2025)

If your Zendesk queue feels more like a chaotic lottery than an organized system, you’re definitely not alone. When ticket volumes spike and everything seems urgent, making sure your most important customers get the fast response they deserve can feel like an impossible task. We've seen teams resort to exporting tickets to spreadsheets just to get a clear view of what’s going on.

This guide will walk you through setting up a proper workflow right inside Zendesk to automatically flag and prioritize tickets from your key customers. We'll start with the manual setup using Zendesk's built-in tools, and then explore how you can use AI to build a smarter, more flexible system.

What you'll need to get started

Before we jump into the setup, let's make sure you have a few things lined up. This workflow uses some features that are only available on specific Zendesk plans, so it’s worth double-checking what you have access to.

• A specific Zendesk plan: You'll need the Zendesk Suite or Support plan, at the Professional or Enterprise level. Features like adding a user to multiple organizations or setting up Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are part of these tiers. The Suite Professional plan is a common starting point for this.

• Admin access: To build all this, you'll need to be an administrator in your Zendesk account. This gives you permission to mess with groups, organizations, triggers, and automations.

• A clear idea of who's important: You need to know who you consider an "important customer." Is it based on their subscription plan, how much they spend, or their strategic value? Get this definition locked down before you start.

How to build your Zendesk workflow: Step-by-step

Ready? Here’s how you can tweak your Zendesk setup to automatically flag and escalate tickets from your VIPs.

Step 1: Group important customers

First things first, Zendesk needs a way to know who your key customers are. The cleanest way to do this is with Organizations. You can create an organization called "VIP Customers," for instance, and add specific users or even entire company email domains to it. This becomes the foundation for all the rules we're about to build.

If your plan allows for it, you can add a single user to multiple organizations. This is super useful if a customer needs to belong to their own company's organization and your special VIP one.

How to create a VIP organization:

1. Head to Admin Center > People > Organizations.

2. Click Add organization and give it a clear name like "VIP Customers" or "Enterprise Accounts."

3. In the Domains field, you can add the email domains of your key customers (like "majorclient.com"). Zendesk will then automatically add any new user from that domain to this organization.

4. You can also just add individual users to the organization manually from their profile pages.

Step 2: Set up a dedicated group for VIP tickets

Let's be real, you probably have a few senior agents you trust most with your important accounts. It makes sense to create a dedicated group for them to handle all tickets from your key customers. This ensures that VIP requests are always handled by your A-team and makes routing tickets and sending notifications a lot simpler.

How to create a VIP agent group:

1. Go to Admin Center > People > Groups.

2. Click Add group and name it something like "VIP Support Team."

3. Add your chosen senior agents to this new group.

4. Once that's done, you can map this group directly to your "VIP Customers" organization. According to Zendesk's own guides, this will automatically assign any new ticket from a VIP to this group.

Step 3: Use triggers to set ticket priority

Alright, now for the fun part: making Zendesk do the work for you. A trigger is basically a rule that fires the moment a ticket is created or updated. We're going to set one up to check if a new ticket comes from someone in our "VIP Customers" organization and, if it does, immediately bump up its priority.

How to create a priority-setting trigger:

1. Go to Admin Center > Objects and rules > Business rules > Triggers.

2. Click Add trigger.

3. Under Meet ALL of the following conditions, you’ll set:

   • Ticket | Is | Created
   • Organization | Is | VIP Customers

4. Under Actions, you’ll set:

   • Priority | Is | High (or Urgent, your choice)
   • (Optional) Notify group | VIP Support Team

A screenshot showing the trigger conditions and actions page in Zendesk to automatically set ticket priority.

Step 4: Create a custom VIP queue view

Now that your VIP tickets are being assigned and prioritized, your team needs a clean way to see them. A custom view acts as a dedicated dashboard for your VIP support crew, showing them only the tickets they need to worry about.

The real pro move here is to sort the view not just by priority, but by the next Service Level Agreement (SLA) breach time. This tells agents exactly which ticket is closest to missing its response time, ensuring they always tackle the most time-sensitive issue first.

How to create a VIP ticket view:

1. Head to Admin Center > Workspaces > Agent tools > Views.

2. Click Add view and call it "VIP Ticket Queue."

3. Under Tickets must meet ALL of these conditions, set:

   • Status | Less than | Solved
   • Group | Is | VIP Support Team

4. Under Formatting Options, find the Order by dropdown and sort by Next SLA breach | Ascending.

Step 5: Use automations for escalations

So, what if a high-priority ticket falls through the cracks and just sits in the queue unassigned? That's where automations come in. Unlike triggers, which are instant, automations are time-based rules. You can create one that looks for unassigned VIP tickets that have been sitting for more than, say, two hours, and have it automatically ping a manager and bump the priority up to "Urgent."

How to create an escalation automation:

1. Go to Admin Center > Objects and rules > Business rules > Automations.

2. Click Add automation.

3. Under Meet ALL of the following conditions, set:

   • Ticket: Hours since created | Is greater than | 2
   • Ticket: Assignee | Is | "-" (meaning it's unassigned)
   • Ticket: Group | Is | VIP Support Team

4. Under Actions, set:

   • Ticket: Priority | Is | Urgent
   • Notifications: Email user | (Your Support Manager's email)

A screenshot of the automations setup page in Zendesk, illustrating how to create a time-based rule for ticket escalations.

The problem with a purely manual workflow

While this setup is a huge step up from chaos, it has its weaknesses. It's rigid. A customer might be a VIP, but their ticket could be a simple "how do I reset my password?" question that doesn't need an all-hands-on-deck response. On the flip side, a customer from a smaller company could have a system-down, business-critical issue that gets stuck in the low-priority queue.

Static rules based on organizations just can't pick up on that kind of context.

This system also requires a lot of manual upkeep. Every time you sign a new major client or a contract changes, someone has to go in and update the organizations and rules. It doesn't really adapt to the fluid nature of customer support, which is often the very problem that sends people looking for a solution in the first place. You can’t just reorder tickets on the fly when a truly urgent issue pops up from an unexpected source.

How to create a dynamic workflow with AI

And that's where you start to see the appeal of bringing in a little AI help. Instead of relying on these fixed rules, you can use an intelligent tool that understands the actual content and urgency of every ticket, no matter who sent it.

An AI support tool like eesel AI plugs right into your Zendesk and gives you a much more flexible way to manage your priorities.

• It understands the ticket's real meaning: eesel's AI Triage doesn't just check which organization a customer belongs to. It reads the ticket, analyzes the language and sentiment, and compares it to thousands of your past tickets to figure out what's really going on. It can then set the right priority, add tags, and route the ticket based on deep context, not just a simple rule.

• You're still in control: This isn't about letting a robot take over. You can configure the AI to handle prioritization for certain types of tickets while your team handles the rest. You can even set up custom actions, like having the AI check a customer's subscription level in your billing system before it decides on a priority.

• You can test it risk-free: Worried about unleashing AI on your live ticket queue? That's fair. eesel AI lets you run simulations on your past tickets to see exactly how it would have handled them. This way, you can get comfortable and fine-tune the setup before you flip the switch.

Think of it this way: a traditional Zendesk workflow is like a simple flowchart. If a ticket comes from a VIP, it goes down one path. If not, it goes down another. An AI-powered workflow is different. It looks at the content, tone, and history of every single ticket and then makes a smart decision about where it needs to go and who needs to see it. It's a far more responsive and intelligent system.

Tips and common mistakes to avoid

Whether you stick with the manual setup or bring in AI, here are a few things to watch out for:

• Don't let your triggers fight each other: A classic mistake is creating multiple triggers that try to change the same thing on a ticket (like priority). Zendesk runs them in a specific order, so one rule can easily cancel out another. Keep your logic clean.

• Start small, then expand: Don't try to build the perfect, all-encompassing workflow on day one. Start by automating the process for just one or two of your most important customer groups. Once you see it's working smoothly, you can roll it out further.

• Make sure your priorities mean something: If every other ticket is marked "Urgent," then the word loses its meaning. Your team should have a clear, shared understanding of what each priority level actually means and what the expected response time is.

Getting your queue under control

Building a structured Zendesk workflow to prioritize tickets from important customers is one of the best things you can do to scale your support operations. By using Zendesk's native tools, you can create a much more organized process and ensure your most valuable customers get the excellent support they expect.

But as your business grows, the cracks in a rigid, rules-based system will start to show. When you need a solution that can understand context and adapt on the fly, adding an AI layer to your helpdesk is the next logical step.

Ready to see what intelligent automation can do for your queue? Explore how eesel AI's Triage tool can bring smarter, automated prioritization to your Zendesk workflow.