Notify agent if requester email is bounced or rejected



Gepostet 30. Okt. 2014

So, I'm surprised I never thought of this until now, but it seems like an oversight to me. Maybe I'm missing something? Here's the scenario:

We have an environment where tickets are created using the API from a contact form on our site where the user enters their email address.

When an agent responds to the ticket, what if the email address the requester entered is wrong? If the message is rejected or bounced, the agent would never know! They would go on thinking this person is ignoring them and not have any sort of idea that the requester never got the message.

Can we add some way for Zendesk to notify the agent that the reply was not received? Would be pretty nifty.

Thanks!


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77 Kommentare

@... Thank you for your hint to Read Receipts. It tested your tool and it works well. Unfortunately we can not use it since it is not compatible with GDPR. In Europe we can not collect these data (read receipt) without an agreement of the user. Getting such an agreement is practically unworkable and it is not realistic that a user would allow us to collect such data. 

@... is there really no way to determine if an email-adress is wrong or an email is undeliverable? Microsoft Outlook for example informs when emails are not deliverable ... In my eyes you can not just ignore this very important topic! Best customer experience consists of sending and receiving information. I just remember > first comment was in October 2014.

5


Hello,

I totally agree with Kilian!

Five years without any improvment... It's a huge time in the "online world"....

 

 

Regards

Julian

1


I recently took matters into my own hands and built a bounce notification system myself using Zapier. This was actually quite easy (no technical knowledge needed) since we relay incoming email over the Gmail servers and Zapier has both Zendesk and Gmail integrations. (If you forward your email from another email service, you have to check if they have an integration with Zapier as well, like Microsoft Outlook.) It works like a charm for me and I hope it will help others as well. This is what my 'Zap' looks like:

When this happens...

1. New Email Matching Search in Gmail (from:MAILER-DAEMON@*zdsys.com).

Do this...

2. Text - Extract Email Address (from the email's body text from step 1).

3. Find a Ticket in Zendesk (using the extracted email address from step 2 and order_by:created sort:desc).

4. Update Ticket in Zendesk (using ticket id from step 3, setting status to 'open' and adding the email's body text from step 1 as comment).

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@Jonathan - This is all done through Zapier app integration with Zendesk? Also, Zapier is a monthly cost from what I see. Is that correct?

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@Amber Yes, this was all done through the Zapier app integration with Zendesk AND Gmail.

And yes, you'll need the monthly 20$ plan to get this to work. (But you might use Zapier for other automations as well - it's a nice service! #nospon)

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+1 for this. If you use basic email for support you have this functionnality, bu not with a tool like Zendesk !

4


+1 

We need this functionality.

Our agent are not informed when an answer is not delivererd. 

Thank you. 

 

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Agents must be informed when e-mails are hard bounced. Building a workaround process is a good idea for app developers though. 

3


Any update on this? These notifications as well as out of office replies can be seen as essential infomation for customer services teams. Any plans in the near future on Zendesk side for this?

1


Looks like this has been an ongoing issue for a while and one which will affect our company.

We are using Side Conversation emails in Support and have no idea when messages our not being delivered. For our agents, they will show that an email was sent, but that is all.

It sounds like there is functionality in the ZenDesk suite in the Sell product for this, but not Support?

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I was thinking about this the other day.. it seems to me maybe it's a spam risk to let us know?

If that's related, getting notifications for verified emails at least, would be a great start.

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Uou may want to try Read Receipts for Zendesk as a workaround as it will track email opens and you can take action based on unopened emails. It takes less than 30 seconds to install and activate. You can also can generate metrics about email performance by agent, group, tags, macros or triggers along with a few other features.

https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/read-receipts-for-zendesk/ 

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image avatar

Benjamin Kirsch

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi everyone, thanks so much for your feedback here. We’re definitely aware of the need for this and it will be addressed as part of the Email Status project. We are currently in the discovery phase of Email Status and it will focus on surfacing deliverability statuses of emails within the Agent Workspace UI. Thanks again for your feedback here and I’ll plan to check back in with a further update once we are closer to finishing our discovery work later this year.

0


It's incredibly important to do something about this. We're literally losing out on bookings of customers who submitted their email address with a typo. Just let mailer daemons come through. We can deal with them via the triggers. But not being informed at all, not even in the suspended folder is extremely damaging.

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Thanks all, please check our Product Manager Benjamin Hirsch's response on the first page of this thread: Official comment

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This would be an incredibly useful feature. Looking forward to learning more.

1


This would be a useful feature, we had a scenario where someone received a call and another agent went into the phone call ticket and selected public reply and sent an email however there was no email address under the end user profile so the public reply went no where and the agent had no idea. The person followed up a couple weeks later as they never received a reply and that was when we identified the public reply went nowhere.

2


Our business really depends on same-day ticket responses and we will require a solution to this issue as we have incurred losses due to agents not getting notified of bounced emails.

4


+1. I'd like also a webhook / API ability to be informed when this happens so our system can then text message the customer for their correct email. 

1


+1 (or more). 
We have quite some clients requesting this.

Current issues: 

  • Soft bounces
    Out-of-office replies are sent by client email providers saying when somebody is back in the office -> nobody will know that in Zendesk and has therefore no chance to approach alternative recipients.
  • Hard bounces
    if there is a typo/error in the email address nobody will know the email was not delivered. Even if the domain doesn't exist at all (due to DNS errors) there is no information about this. 

Suggested workarounds:

  • Read receipts -> do not work -> a lot of mail clients prevent this / so you won't have any confirmation here
  • Only work-around is to have the Inbox (i.e. in Outlook) and track if there are any types of bounces. Also thought about monitoring the inbox technically to add internal notes with bounces/bounce-reasons and Tag tickets.

 

It would be great to get a reply/update here.
Especially clients who move over from groupware inboxes think this is a step backward.

Is this feature planned? Is there a timeline?

Thanks a lot for a response.

Robert from Leafworks

4


7 years have passed. There is still no way to manage bounces. How come, Zendesk?

I would suggest to flag comments that were not delivered in some way.

2


Thanks Robert Cwicinski for bringing it to the point again!

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Hi again. 

We just tried the potential workaround - I think this could work like that. As a result we could have the following within the related tickets: 

  • Add Tag (i.e. "bounced")
  • Change status to "open"
  • Add internal note containing details

At least for scenarios where there's a running inbox in between this would work (Email -> Inbox -> Forwarding to ZD-support-address).
 
Best,
Robert.

0


image avatar

Benjamin Kirsch

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi everyone, I just wanted to touch base to say that we're planning to start work on this later in the year (this work is the next project up on the roadmap). We're not able to provide an estimate delivery date at present, but we'll update you again once we are further along. Thanks for your patience.

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If not mentioned earlier: We need email bounce status on Article/Section subscriptions as well, not only Tickets, to be able to delete users for GDPR compliance.

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Hi Benjamin,

I remain patient, but I have to note that an identical "we are working on this for later this year" was added to a different support chain, but it was dated in early 2021.

0


Hi,

Is there anything in development to fix this?

Regards

0


I mean, it's been 8 years. How can this still not be delivered? Every basic email provider offers this.

2


+1 from our side. This is an important feature and I have problems with system acceptance because of this. No information on not delivered invoices !!!

1


Adding another +1 here and it was March 2022 when it was noted this would be worked on in 2022. 

1


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