Erin the mentor

Hi Mike,

Each and every time I observe an agent using Zendesk, I die a bit inside when I see they have Zendesk up on one monitor and email up on another—all to make sure they see important Zendesk notifications come into their inbox. We definitely need to do better.

I've been doing some high-level thinking on the use cases that we most need to cover, and am hoping to get a project off the ground in the not-super-distant future. We are likely to start with some sort of in-product notification system that focuses (at first) on the really common events in Zendesk that agents need to know about - like being assigned to a ticket, a new comment coming in for their tickets, @mentions, etc, before getting into more customizable trigger-based notifications.

Would you be interested in talking with me more about your needs over a call? Just say the word, and I'll reach out via email to arrange.

Best,
Erin

Hi Pete,

Yep! We renamed it, but otherwise it's the play-only agents feature you've been using. :)

Best,
Erin

Hi all,

I wanted to let you know that we've just launched a feature called Guided mode that is designed to help prevent agents from cherry-picking tickets. It is not a round robin model, but I think you'll find it useful. Learn more about Guided mode on our announcement.

Best,
Erin

Hi Darron,

Whoops! We're actually fairly close to launching a feature that... we're still naming. Right now I call it "Play-only" agents, and it basically lets you designate certain custom roles as only being able to play through views. We've had it in beta for a few months now. If you'd like to jump on the bandwagon, feel free to sign up at goto.zendesk.com/playagentsbeta!

Best,
Erin

Hi all,

Quick update. While there's still no movement on this in terms of actual work, we are narrowing in on a proposed solution we think would work nicely for this problem. It would allow you to automatically notify certain individuals without forcing you to create different triggers (or automations) for each end-user that has special notification requirements.

There's still a lot of internal discussion that needs to happen before we start such a project, but I'll pop back here every once in awhile to keep you informed of any progress.

Best,
Erin

Thanks for the continued feedback, all. There's no ETA at this time, but we are looking at these use cases as we begin to plan for 2016.

@Mike: Thanks so much for taking the time to share your use case in detail. That certainly helps! We may very well just add a new option to add email addresses in triggers, but we like to understand a problem fully before jumping directly to a solution.

@Adam: Unfortunately I cannot give you an ETA right now. I will tell you that the engineering team(s) who would work on this type of feature already have a full slate of projects this quarter, so the earliest we would be looking to break ground on a solution is in the new year.

I'll keep you updated as I have more information. In the meantime, please keep the use cases and answers to my questions coming!

Best,
Erin

Hi all,

I know I posted here a couple months back, and then went radio silent on you. That was certainly not my intention, and I apologize for the lack of transparency.

I want to start off this post by summarizing the 4 main use cases we're seeing throughout this entire thread:

1. Certain organizations always want a person or group of people to be notified of tickets

2. Certain organizations always want a group of people to be notified of all tickets, but want certain individuals to be notified of a subset of tickets

3. Certain users always ask for a person or group of people to be cc'd on all of their tickets

4. Account managers or other semi-dedicated internal agents want to be notified of all tickets for a specific organization

We believe use case #1 on this list will be addressed by the planned feature (no, really) Deepa mentioned earlier, which is organization subscriptions. This seems like it's the largest use case, and it is on the roadmap.

Use cases #2 & #3 we do not have a solution for yet. I know the request here is to provide a way of adding these email addresses in directly to triggers & automations, but I'd like to think about the right solution here. We need to think about the manageability of these types of lists, possible implications on the volume of triggers, etc.

As for use case #4, this really fits quite nicely with our vision for Light Agents. These types of people (account managers, technical account managers, etc) typically do need access to view and participate in tickets. Aside from the fact that Light Agents are only available on the Enterprise plan, is there a way in which Light Agents don't meet the need here?

Let's focus in on use cases #2 and #3 in order to have a productive conversation and spend energy on the use cases that aren't already being addressed by a roadmap feature. It's clear that there is a real need here that's impacting both your agents' productivity and, in some cases, your credibility with your customers.

Some questions:

• How often do you find that organizations have multiple sets of people that need to be notified in different cases? (e.g. A, B, and C want to be notified of only High or Urgent tickets, and D only wants to be notified of Urgent tickets)
• How often do you find that individual users (not at an organizational level) expect to have automatic CC's?
• In all of these cases, how often do these lists of people change? Do agents need to easily change or add to these lists?

Thanks for your continued feedback and participation in these discussions. We really do want to understand the problems you're facing, and look forward to working with you all on this.

Best,
Erin

Hi Pete,

We have no plans to add an official round robin solution. That being said, I am currently working on a project to help prevent agents from cherry-picking tickets out of views. More to come in the next few months!

Best,
Erin

Hi all,

Apologies for all of the confusion here. Deepa was responding to a the comment from Shannon that included requests for end-users to be able to subscribe to an org again and for end-users to be able to add CC's to their own tickets via Help Center. There are a few other threads where these are discussed in more detail, if you're interested in a dedicated conversation on those pieces: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203421276-Add-possibility-for-customer-to-set-cc-when-opening-a-ticket-via-zendesk

The most popular thread for adding CC's via macros can be found here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203425396

And finally, as far as I know, this is the main thread for adding end-user CC's via triggers and automations. We'll try to be better about keeping a single conversation going here, but as you can imagine that can be challenging sometimes.

As for having a way to automatically add end-users as CC's to certain tickets, I have been aware of this thread and will be re-reviewing your use cases over the next couple of days.

Best,
Erin