Question
I receive customer emails but customers are not receiving our replies. I add public comments on tickets, but the end users do not receive the notifications we send. How can I solve this issue?
Answer
In Zendesk Support, emails are sent via triggers. If notification triggers are deactivated or misconfigured, ticket updates do not send an email to the customer. Follow the troubleshooting steps in this article to fix this issue.
- Active triggers
- Misconfigured conditions
- View events
- Contact support
Step 1: Check your triggers
Are the right triggers active?
In Zendesk Support, emails are sent through triggers. If triggers that send notifications are deactivated, ticket updates do not send an email to the customer.
By default, the triggers responsible for sending replies to end users are the Notify requester and CCs of comment update and Notify requester of new proactive ticket triggers. Both triggers must appear on the Active tab of the triggers page. If you need to reactivate a trigger, see Activating a trigger.
Step 2: Check the conditions of the triggers
Are the conditions of the trigger preventing the emails from being sent?
Triggers can be changed by different administrators. Open your version of the Notify requester and CCs of comment update or Notify requester of new proactive ticket triggers and make sure it matches the default conditions.
The trigger, Notify requester and CCs of comment update, should be set as follows:
-
Meet ALL of the following conditions
- Ticket | Is | Updated
- Comment | Is | Public
-
Actions
- Email user | (requester and CCs)
- Email user | (requester and CCs)
The trigger, Notify requester of new proactive ticket, should be set as follows:
-
Meet ALL of the following conditions
- Ticket | Is | Created
- Privacy | Is | Ticket has public comments
- Current user | Is | (agent)
-
Actions
- Email user | (requester and CCs)
- Email user | (requester and CCs)
For more information, see About the Support default triggers.
Step 3: Check the ticket events
Do you see an email notification in the events of your ticket?
To understand if a trigger sent an email notification in a ticket, view the events of that ticket. Locate the public comment that was not sent to the customer and look for the property Email notification.
Find below a video that shows you how to view the events of a ticket.
For more information, see How can I troubleshoot my triggers?
Step 4: Retrieve the ticket ID
What if the customer still says they didn't receive the notifications?
If the customer still claims they did not receive your notification, it is likely that the email was sent but caught in the customer's spam filter. In some cases, the user's webmaster might filter out certain types of emails and lead to rejection.
If that is the case, collect the example ticket's ID and contact Zendesk Customer Support for further help.
Additional resources
If you fixed the issue of emails not sent to customers, see How can I resend email notifications?
For further information about notifications and triggers, see the articles listed below.
20 Comments
Hi Zac,
Thanks for the article!
I have a couple of questions if you don't mind :) We have users that don't seems to be receiving out messages. The first instance is the following:
A user sends us a letter by post or to a different department. We create a ticket in Zendesk addressing their request, but the user never receives our email.
We have a "Notify requester of received request" trigger in place.
When testing out this email process this is what happens:
- ticket created by agent and sent to end user (different than current user)
- ticket body includes agent reply
- "Automatic Request received " email is triggered, sent out and received immediately to end user
- End user does not receive the agent reply
- agent sends second reply in the same ticket
- email is received by end user which includes both the original agent reply and the second reply - both with respective time stamps.
Would you have any insight as to why the first agent reply never makes it to the end user?
Thanks for your time!
Similar symptoms but requester was getting the public reply and it stopped sometime after January 13,2019
Hey Richard,
It's possible that another admin on the account disabled the Notify requester of comment update trigger under Admin>Business Rules>Triggers. Can you confirm that this trigger is enabled on your end?
Hi,
I have related issue and upon checking, the trigger Notify requester and CCs of comment update was deactivated.
But my question is, will this covers also the manually triggered reply by an agent but the customer did not get the email reply?
Other email notifications via trigger were working good since then.
Thank you.
Donald
Hello, Donald!
I am not entirely sure I understood exactly your issue but let me try to help you!
Are you referring to tickets created on behalf of your customers by agents? If that's so, the trigger that covers those situations is the Notify requester of new proactive ticket (check step 2 of the guide).
If the ticket already exists, all the subsequent notifications should be handled by Notify requester and CCs of comment update. If no messages are being sent to your customers, have you checked the events of a ticket with that issue?
Hi Ricardo
The ticket is already exist, and my question actually is that when an agent push a public reply manually from the Support it did not deliver successfully to the end-user.
Hello, Donald Cornel
I created a ticket for further troubleshooting. I will reply soon! Thanks
Appreciate it! Thanks Ricardo
Hello Matthew Bradbury. Thanks for your question. There are three default triggers that send messages to customers:
This should cover all the basic scenarios. What happens sometimes is that users change or deactivate triggers making them not send messages to their customers. And that is what this article is trying to cover.
Hello, my question is similar. We are getting reports of customers not receiving our emails but this is happening when we create NEW tickets, not responding to existing tickets. This seems to be intermittent but is happening more frequently than it used to. Any ideas what may cause this?
Hi Tasha,
Since there is often a different trigger in place to send messages when a new inquiry is opened, vs. a comment on an existing trigger, that is usually where we'd start with troubleshooting.
Are you able to review the ticket events on one of the examples and verify that the trigger fired on some of the tickets in question?
Thank you!
Thanks Zac, yes I can view the events and there don't appear to be any triggers:
Hi Tasha,
In that case then the issue doesn't seem related to email, and is actually related to the fact that there isn't a trigger in place that meets the conditions to fire when you create a new ticket. I would start by checking your inactive triggers to make sure there wasn't one that was deactivated that did this previously.
Otherwise, if you made a new trigger that had these conditions:
Ticket is Created
Status is less than closed
Current user is agent
(It might be needed to add other conditions per your workflow, but that's he basics you'd need)
Then for the actions you could email the end-user the ticket comments much like you would on your other customer facing tickets.
Please let us know if you have any further questions!
Hi Team,
Is there any reason why our clients would sporadically not be receiving public replies from agents? It's happened a couple of times where one response was received and then a follow up a day or so later is not, but the subsequent one is and so on. Have checked with a couple of clients and nothing is landing in junk/spam so it doesn't appear to be reputational/deliverability related. I'm a bit stumped tbh.
The triggers appear to be set up correctly (at least they work approx 90% of the time), and no changes have been made to the SPF DKIM records on our domain,
Triggers look like this:
Let me know if you need any more info!
Hey Charles,
The ticket hasn't been set to solved after it's been updated with a comment correct? That's the only condition that stands out in the trigger you've shown so I'm wondering if that's the issue. Also, you may want to check the events of the ticket to see if the trigger did indeed fire when the comment was posted.
Keep us posted!
Hey Brett,
Thanks for coming back to me.
Checked the events and the trigger did fire, looks like it sent to the intended primary recipient and the CCs. Also it was set as open at that point, so unfortunately not that we'd closed it.
Thanks!
Charlie
Hey Charles,
Does this happen for every ticket or only tickets with a specific user/org?
Hey Brett-
It seems to multiple different organizations, but it doesn't happen consistently. I did think that it might be something about the inbound mail settings for the recipient causing problems, but the fact that some are received and some aren't for the same person, within a limited timeframe, would indicate it's not a recipient policy. Not sure though,
It's also possible that we've just had a succession of busy clients missing responses...
But any other troubleshooting you can suggest would be useful and I can have a dig around
Hey Charles,
I'd say that if the ticket events show the trigger is firing and the email notification is sent, then most likely this is an issue on the recipients side. It may be best to have them contact their IT team and provide them with a timestamp of when the email notification was sent out from your Zendesk account. This can also be found in your ticket events.
I hope this helps!
OK great thanks Brett, we'll keep an eye on it from here.
Appreciate your help!
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