Sharing tickets with other Zendesk Support accounts

You can share tickets from your Zendesk Support with other accounts. And, those other accounts can share their tickets with your account. You establish sharing agreements with other accounts and specify the terms under which sharing can occur and how shared tickets are managed.

Ticket sharing allows you to assign tickets to affiliated accounts and their agents either provide information toward resolving the issue or solve the issue themselves. The ticket status and comments can stay synced between the tickets in each account.

Note: This article refers to manual ticket sharing. Automatic ticket sharing using business rules is available on Professional and Enterprise (see Using business rules to share tickets).

This article contains the following sections:

• Understanding how ticket sharing works
• Setting up a ticket sharing agreement
• Opting out of all sharing invites
• Deactivating a sharing agreement
• Referring to shared tickets in business rules
• Syncing custom fields with another account

Understanding how ticket sharing works

Here's how ticket sharing works:

• Any Zendesk Support account can invite another account to establish a sharing agreement.
• The initiating account (the sender) sets the terms of the sharing agreement, which the receiving account can accept or not.
• Sharing agreements are one way. Once the receiver accepts the agreement, the sender may share tickets with the receiver. For the receiver to share tickets with the sender, they must create and initiate a sharing relationship with the other account.
• If you only have receiving agreements, the sharing ticket field will not appear, and you cannot stop sharing received tickets.
• The sender can only share a ticket with one other account. However, the receiver can share the ticket with an account that they have a sharing agreement with.
• A shared ticket becomes a new ticket in the receiver's account with a separate ticket ID.
• The ticket status, custom fields, and comments can remain synced between the ticket versions in both accounts. The custom fields must be created in both accounts (see Syncing custom fields with another account below). CC recipients are not carried over from the original ticket to the shared ticket.
  Note: Any public or private comments added to a shared ticket will be visible to agents in both the original Zendesk account, and the Zendesk account the ticket is shared with. Any public comment to the shared ticket will also notify any users copied on the original ticket.
• All ticket statuses can match, except for On-hold. When a ticket is changed to On-hold in one account, it will be submitted as Open in the other.
• Call recordings (including Voicemail recordings) in a shared ticket, can only be accessed by signed-in agents of the Zendesk account that the original call is associated with. For example, Account A shares a call ticket with Account B, which includes the calls recording. The agents in Account B will not be able to listen to that recording in the shared ticket. If they are agents in both accounts they can listen to the recording by signing into Account A, locating the original ticket and listening to the file there. Transcriptions of voicemails remain visible, as lines of text within the shared ticket.
• Depending on the terms of the agreement, the receiver may directly communicate with the ticket requester and solve the ticket.
• Sharing tickets creates a dummy user in the receiving account for each user associated with the sending account ticket. The user is created even if there is a user in the receiving account with the same name and email address as the dummy profile. If an agent in the receiving account makes a comment on this shared ticket, a dummy end-user account is created in the sending account to represent this agent.

  Shared tickets do not pass on user information. Tickets are never linked to matching users in the receiving accounts, unless an agent of the receiving account manually adjusts the requester of the shared ticket when the user is created in the receiving account. This adjustment is not recommended as it can cause issues with the sharing agreement.

• Each account's business rules remain separate.
• A shared ticket cannot be merged with another ticket.
• An account can automatically refuse to accept all sharing agreement invites.
• Sharing agreements can be cancelled at any time by either the sender or the receiver.
• When you send email to another Zendesk instance, automatic emails notifications are suppressed, but email notifications generated by an agent action are sent. This can cause problems if you have a ticket sharing agreement with the other Zendesk. In that case, it's possible to create an endless loop of notifications if the email address for the user in the CC or Requester field is the support address of a Zendesk you have a sharing agreement with. For information about how to prevent endless loops, see About mail loops and Zendesk email.
• When tickets are shared between Support accounts, user fields and organization fields are not shared with the ticket.

Setting up a ticket sharing agreement

To set up ticket sharing an administrator creates a ticket sharing invite and defines the terms (permissions) of the sharing agreement.

Note: You cannot set up sharing agreements for multiple brands. You can only share tickets using your main brand's subdomain.

A sharing agreement grants another account permission to work on your tickets. You can grant one of the two following permissions:

• Make public & private comments, sync status
• Make private comments, do not sync status

The first option allows the receiver to communicate directly with the requester and to change the ticket status (for example, setting it to Solved). These ticket updates are also reflected in the sender's version of the ticket.

Note: Although the receiver may be allowed to make public comments and directly interact with the requester, email notifications will link back to the account where the request was originally submitted.

The second option (private comments only and no status syncing) limits the other account to providing you with information needed to resolve the support request. For example, imagine a company that builds something that includes components from other companies. Each affiliated company (business partner) can set up a Zendesk Support and a sharing agreement to provide more details on issues related to the components they supply. In this scenario, the sender controls the ticket from initial request through to resolution, gathering information as needed from the affiliated account.

To create a ticket sharing invite

1. Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Tickets.
2. Select the Ticket sharing tab.
3. Select add sharing invite.
4. In the window that appears, select another Zendesk Support account, Atlassian JIRA, or third-party system.
5. Enter the URL for the account you're sharing tickets with. Depending on the option you selected in the previous step, you'll see one of the following fields:
   • Zendesk Support account: Partner Zendesk domain field
   • Atlassian JIRA: JIRA server URL field
   • Third-party systems: Sharing URL field
6. Select an option from the Comment status and permissions field:

   

   • Make public & private comments, sync status
   • Make private comments, do not sync status
7. Select an option from the Tag synchronization field:

   

   • No, do not share tags between me and the receiver
   • Yes, share tags between me and the receiver
     Note: As noted on the dialog box, enabling tag synchronising may add more tags.
8. (Applies only if sharing with another Zendesk Support account) Select the custom fields syncing setting. You have two options:
   • No, do not sync custom fields between me and the receiver
   • Yes, sync custom fields between me and the receiver
9. Click Send Invite.

The receiver is notified of the invite on their Ticket Sharing page, as shown here:

The receiver can view the terms of the sharing invite and either accept, decide later, or decline the agreement.

When accepted, both accounts can immediately share tickets.

If you decline an agreement, the sender is free to try again at another time. If you don't want to establish sharing agreements with any other accounts, you can set your account to automatically decline invites (see Opting out of all sharing invites). You can also deactivate sharing agreements at any time (see Deactivating a sharing agreement).

All of your sharing agreements (accepted, pending, and rejected) are displayed on the Ticket Sharing page.

Opting out of all sharing invites

If you decide to not share tickets with any other account, you can choose to opt out of all sharing invites.

To opt out of sharing invites

1. Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Tickets.
2. Select the Ticket sharing tab.
3. In the section Opt out of sharing, select the Decline all sharing agreement invites.
4. Click Save Tab.

With this option set, you will never be informed of a sharing invite.

Deactivating a sharing agreement

Sharing agreements can be deactivated by either the sender or the receiver at any time. Deactivated agreements can't be reactivated, but both accounts are free to invite the other to accept a new sharing agreement.

To deactivate a sharing agreement

1. Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Tickets.
2. Select the Ticket sharing tab.
3. Locate the agreement you want to deactivate and then select View.
4. Click Deactivate Agreement.

Your agreement partner will be informed of the deactivation via email and this will also be reflected on their Ticket Sharing page. Deactivating an agreement means that no new tickets can be shared and that tickets that have already been shared will no longer be synced.

Referring to shared tickets in business rules

Tickets that have been created in your Zendesk Support via ticket sharing can be referenced as conditions in automations, triggers, and views. The condition Update via also includes Ticket sharing as a value.

You can create a view of the tickets generated from ticket sharing, as in this example:

This will show you all the tickets that were shared to you. If you want to create a view of the all tickets you shared to another account, you can add a tag to the tickets and create business rules from that.

You can create automations or triggers that include the ticket sharing conditions. Again, using Update via is Ticket sharing as a condition you can create a trigger to escalate the shared ticket to a specific support group, to add tags, and so on.

Additionally, you can filter the view to show only inbound or outbound tickets if you have set up receiving agreements in your account.

• For inbound tickets, add a clause: Ticket sharing: Received from > (instance name of who you are sharing tickets with).
• For outbound tickets, add a clause: Ticket sharing: Sent to > (instance name of who you are sharing tickets with).

Note: In some cases, when a trigger in the receiving account sends notification for the new, shared ticket, if the ticket has multiple comments, the notification might include only a few comments and not all of the comments that are actually in the ticket.

Syncing custom fields with another Zendesk Support account

As described in Setting up a ticket sharing agreement, you can select to sync custom fields with another Zendesk Support. To make this work, each account must create the custom fields separately. For example, if you want to sync a custom field called "Camera model" it must exist in both accounts and must have the same title and data type.

The custom field title is not case sensitive so the sync will be successful even if one custom field is called "Camera model" and the other is called "Camera Model".

What is important to keep in mind is the data types used in each custom field; they must be compatible. The simplest way to ensure this of course is to use the same data type for each. In our example, both versions of "Camera model" are drop-down lists.

Note: It's possible to sync data between different kinds of custom fields if they both support the same type of data. For example, it's possible to sync a drop-down list with a text field since both contain a text string. This is not recommended but is mentioned here so that you're aware of the compatibility.

Other syncing rules include:

• If an incompatibility between custom fields does exist, the ticket will sync but the incompatible custom fields will fail (no data will be transfered).
• If you're using a ticket field that has tags associated with its corresponding values (for example, drop-down fields), the tags must be the same across both instances. If you have matching ticket field names and values, but the tags differ, the sync between ticket fields will fail.
• If a ticket is shared between two accounts, only the account where changes to the field value are made will see a record of that change in the ticket events/audits. The other account will see the altered field value, but will not see any details about the change, such as who made it or when it was made.