
Email is one way that end-users can submit tickets to Zendesk Support and have conversations with agents to resolve their issues.
Here's how the email workflow works:
- When an end-user sends an email to your support address, it creates a ticket.
- If an agent updates the ticket in Zendesk Support, a notification email is sent to the person who sent the original email.
- If the person replies to the notification email, the reply creates a comment in the ticket.
- The conversation between user and agent continues until the issue is resolved.
You have many options for controlling how your end-users interact with Zendesk Support using email. This article gives an overview of some of the options and provides links to more information.
- Using other email addresses for creating tickets
- Changing the sender information in your replies
- Understanding how incoming emails are matched to tickets
- Adding signatures to your replies
- Changing the design of your emails
- Managing your automated emails
- Blocking incoming emails
- Managing user accounts created by email requests
- Assigning email requesters to organizations
Using other email addresses for creating tickets
One support address is created for you by defualt when you create your Zendesk Support account. This system support address is support@myaccount.zendesk.com. However, you can provide your users with alternative email addresses for submitting tickets by adding other support addresses.
This section gives an overview of the options for providing other email addresses:
Using variations of your Zendesk email address for support requests
While a support address was created for you as support@myaccount.zendesk.com, you can create variations of that address to give your users alternative email addresses for submitting tickets. That is, the 'support' part of your Zendesk address can be anything. For example:
By using different email addresses for different situations, you can manage and track your tickets based on the email address at which the support request was received. For example, if your end-users send email to sales@myaccount.zendesk.com, you can create a trigger to route tickets received at that address directly to the Sales team. You can also track, via views and reports, tickets received at those different addresses.
You can have an unlimited number of email addresses within your Zendesk domain. You need to add each Zendesk email address you want to use as a support address in your Zendesk. For more information, see Adding support addresses for users to submit tickets.
Using your own external email address for support requests
Accepting support requests via external email addresses is also supported. If you already have, or want to have, an email domain other than myaccount.zendesk.com, you can forward email received at those addresses to your Zendesk domain. For example, you can receive support requests at support@mycompany.com instead of support@mycompany.zendesk.com.
To make this work, you must forward email from your external email addresses to equivalent email addresses in your Zendesk account. For example, email received at help@mycompany.com is forwarded to help@myaccount.zendesk.com.
You can also forward all of your external support email addresses to just one of your Zendesk account domain email addresses, if you don't want or need to manage incoming email using the separate addresses.
In addition to setting up forwarding, you need to add any external email addresses as support addresses in Zendesk and, optionally, you can edit or create an SPF record to verify that Zendesk can send email on behalf of your email server.
Accepting wildcard email addresses for support requests
You can enable the wildcard emails option if you want to enable end-users to send email to any variation of your Zendesk Support address, regardless of whether you've added it as a known support address. This option can be used as an alternative to, or in addition to, support addresses.
For example, you don't need to explicitly declare any of these email variations in your Zendesk.
This also means that variations are also supported. For example, if an end-user misspelled your support email address (for example, biling@myaccount.zendesk.com, the email is also accepted and a ticket created.
Wildcard email addresses use your default support address as the Reply From address. So any email sent to a variation of your Zendesk Support email address that is not a known support address, will use your default support address as the Reply From.
To enable wildcard email addresses
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Channels > Email.
- Click Enable for Accept wildcard emails.
Importing email from your Gmail inbox
You can connect your Zendesk to your Gmail inbox and automatically convert email from Gmail to Zendesk Support tickets. When enabled, your Zendesk checks for new emails in your Gmail inbox every five minutes.
Also, when you use this feature, your Gmail address is automatically added as a support address in your Zendesk. You do not need to manually add it.
For more information, see Enabling automatic ticket creation for your Gmail inbox.
Changing the sender information in your replies
You can provide your users with as many email addresses for submitting tickets as you need (see Adding support addresses for users to submit tickets). Emails received at any of your support addresses become tickets. And the sender information in your replies will match the address the email was sent to.
The sender information for your email replies consists of three parts: the friendly name, the username, and the domain.
The friendly name is the name of your support address, if any. The username, the word before the @ character, comes from the support address the email was sent to. The domain consists of a combination of subdomains: your account name and Zendesk or your external email domain.
There are three types of email addresses that are used in the exchange of email messages between end-users and your Zendesk.
Email address | Description |
---|---|
Sent To | This is the email address that support requests are sent to (for example, support@myaccount.zendesk.com). |
Reply From | This is the sender information that end-users see as the From address in the replies they receive from your Zendesk. |
Reply To | This is the sender information that end-users see when they reply back to the
email they received from your Zendesk. Replies back from the end-user include the
ticket number, as in this example: Support address name <support+id#@myaccount.zendesk.com>
Note: The ticket ID is not included if you are using your own email domain.
|
When you enable personalized agent replies or agent display names for outgoing email notifications, they affect the sender information that end-users see as the From address in the replies they receive from your Zendesk (the Reply From email address). They also affect the sender information that end-users see when they reply back to the email they received from your Zendesk (the Reply To email addresses).
Personalized email replies
Enabling personalized email replies adds the agent's name to the Reply From address. See Enabling personalized email replies.
Reply From address | Reply To address |
---|---|
Claire Grenier (Support address name) <support@myaccount.zendesk.com> | Support address name <support+id#@myaccount.zendesk.com> |
Claire Grenier (Support address name) <support@mycompany.com> | Support address name <support@mycompany.com> |
Agent display names
In the Professional and Enterprise versions of Zendesk, agents can create display names that are used in all communications with end-users. When personalized email replies is enabled, the agent's display name overrides their real name. See Adding an agent alias.
Reply From Address | Reply To address |
---|---|
Senhora Claire (Support address name) <support@myaccount.zendesk.com> | Support address name <support+id#@myaccount.zendesk.com> |
Senhora Claire (Support address name) <support@mycompany.com> | Support address name <support@mycompany.com> |
Understanding how incoming emails are matched to tickets
The reply email includes ticket references in the following places:
- Email header includes a reference to the ticket
- Email body includes a hidden reference to the ticket
-
Reply To email address includes the ticket ID, if you are using an address in
your Zendesk domain. For example:
MondoCam Support <support+id1910@mondocam.zendesk.com>
If you're using an external domain for email, the ticket ID is not included in the Reply To email address.
Adding signatures to your replies
Each agent's signature can be added to ticket comments and outgoing email notifications. This is set as the default on the Agents settings page. A placeholder is used to insert the signature that agents add to their own profiles. An agent's signature can include any text, such as their name, the name of their support group, contact information, and so on.
You can also create a signature template for your Zendesk if, you example, you want all agent signatures to include a standard wording and format for the company address.
For more information, see Adding an agent signature.
Changing the design of your emails
All of your email communication is sent using a template that you can customize. The template is in both HTML and plain text. You can customize the template to match your branding. You can also make some minor modifications to the wording.
This example shows that a header graphic has been added to the HTML template and the colors have been changed.
Customizing your email templates is described in Customizing your email templates.
Managing your automated emails
You can create business rules -- triggers and automations -- that automatically send out notification emails when certain conditions are met. The system also generates email.
Changing email generated by business rules
- Notify requester of received request
- Notify requester of comment update
Caution: Don't delete these rules unless you understand how Zendesk works. The email workflow in Zendesk depends on them.
Email notifications are usually generated at each stage in the workflow, such as updating the ticket, solving the ticket, and so on. Your business rules will contain many email notifications.
You can change the content of the emails, or create more rules. For more information, see the following articles:
Changing the system-generated registration and welcome email
If you require your end-users to register before submitting support requests, they get a system-generated email welcoming them and asking them to register. Administrators can change the text of the message on the Customers settings page.
If you don't require your end-users to register and log in to your Help Center, they won't receive the message. See Enabling anyone to submit tickets in Zendesk Support.
If end-users register via the Sign Up link in Help Center, they will still receive a welcome email.
For more information on updating the welcome and email verification emails, see Customizing end-user account emails.
Blocking incoming emails
Zendesk suspends or rejects certain email by default. You can also control who can use email to create tickets.
Suspended and rejected email
Zendesk uses a spam filter to prevent your Zendesk from getting cluttered with bogus tickets. Spam email is caught and may be held in the suspended tickets queue or completely rejected if there's a high probability that the email is spam.
Email may also be suspended if it doesn't meet certain acceptance criteria. The suspended tickets queue is a system-generated view that appears in your list of views. You can review the emails and accept them as legitimate tickets or reject them as spam.
For more information, see Understanding and managing suspended tickets and spam for more details.
Controlling who can use email to create tickets
If you want to prevent certain users from creating tickets with email, add their email domains or email addresses to a blacklist. Their emails are either suspended or completely rejected. If you want to allow exceptions to your blacklist, add them to a whitelist. This configuration is known as a restricted Zendesk. For more information, see Using the whitelist and blacklist to control access to your Zendesk.
You can also set up a closed Zendesk where only the users that you add to your Zendesk account can submit support requests. For more information, see Permitting only added users to submit tickets.
Managing user accounts created by email requests
When somebody submits a request for the first time, and you have an open Zendesk, an account is created for the user and the email address is added to the account. If the same user submits another request using a different email address, a new account is created. If this happens, you can merge the new account into the old account. For more information, see the following topics:.
A user can list more than one email address in their account. One is the primary address and is used for all email notifications. The other addresses are useful if the user sends support requests from any of one of them (either inadvertently or on purpose). The requests can be matched to the user's account.
Assigning email requesters to organizations
When somebody uses email to make a support request for the first time or otherwise registers with your Zendesk, the user can be added automatically to an organization based on their email domain. This is referred to as user mapping and an administrator can set this up by editing an organization's settings.
For more information, see Automatically adding users to organizations based on their email domain.
45 Comments
I wonder if a ticket can be automatically assigned to an agent by email content?
Is it possible that a customer email updates a existing ticket instead of creating a new one?
if it is possible, where I can find the document helping for set the rule up?
Hi Lingbai,
If you're on the Zendesk Enterprise plan, you should take a look at Skills-based Routing, as this makes it easier for your agents to find tickets that match their skillset.
If you're not on Enterprise, you could still create triggers that assign tickets to particular a particular agent / group based on the content of a customer query. For example, the trigger below would assign an ticket containing the words "Password Reset" to group "02 - Support Engineering", within my Zendesk instance.
Hope this helps!
Dave J
Thanks for jumping in, Dave!
Thanks Dave. But my question should be if there is a place holder which will invoke a search to match email content to criteria listed in a file or DB.
Hi Lingbai,
If I've understood you correctly, you want to maintain an external database, outside of Zendesk, that tracks which of your agents are best suited for particular types of query. You then want this DB to be referenced by Zendesk, when a ticket is created, to determine which agent is best suited for the job?
To the best of my knowledge, there's no native Zendesk solution for this, but it's theoretically possible to build this yourself using the Zendesk API. You could setup a Zendesk trigger, that fires when a ticket is created, sending a message to your external service, including the content of the customer query. Your external service could then query it's own DB, decide which agent/group is best suited to the job, and assign the ticket accordingly using the Zendesk API.
Hope this makes sense and inspires you 🙂
Dave J
Hi Dave,
You are right. My wish is Zendesk has API which allows me to customized. Could you suggest where I be able to find the document of Zendesk API?
I do have my own DB for customer service. One of my worry is if Zendesk API will poss security risk. Do you have any suggestion?
Thanks,
Lingbai
@Lingbal
Have a look at https://developer.zendesk.com
P.
When am replying to a ticket, it's sending the auto message which says "we will get back to you the soonest" which done by a trigger "Notify requester of comment update",,, but i want to reply with a free text, any idea how???
Hi Mohamad
I think that you might want to set things up a bit different.
What is usually done is that upon receipt of a (new) customer request, you send out a message that more or less confirms "we've got your request" - that's the one you cite with "we will get back to you soonest". This is completely automatic and should give the customer this fuzzy warm feeling that somebody is going to take care. After this, you can answer the request with free text in your next interaction with the customer.
We're using the following trigger setup for notifications:
The "////...////" entries are triggers which do nothing, but simply organize the trigger list for better structure.
As you see, we have one trigger for the receipt of a new ticket, then others that notify the requester of public updates (sent to your customer and your (light) agents being the requester) or private updates (sent to your (light) agents only being the requester - internal tickets).
Finally, we also notify the requester when the ticket is solved. After that, an automation will close the ticket once it has been solved and not re-opened (i.e. replied to) by the requester for more than 10 business days.
For the assignees, things are similar, however, there's one more thing to take into account: Side conversations. For updates in these, we added yet another trigger, so the assignee gets notified of such updates which would require manual checking if the notification would not be available.
One more hint: In all mails sent by triggers, we religiously add the full name of the trigger which sent the mail at the bottom of the mail. This makes debugging things a lot easier:
The "Notify Requester of receipt of a new ticket" trigger's mail body is this here:
Your request (#{{ticket.id}}) has been received and is currently under review by our support team.
To add additional comments, reply to this e-mail.
Thank you.
{{ticket.comments_formatted}}
-- Sent by: Notify Requester of receipt of a new ticket --
The bold part is what I have been talking about.
Yours truly
Peter
Thanks Peter for your reply!
Actually the trigger is there, but when am replying with a free text like: "your order contains x,y,z with amount "$$" is being shipped" for example,, but when am writing this as a public comment and submitting as open, customer receive the email notification which is in the trigger "Notify requester of comment update" which says "we will get back to you the soonest".
I want customers to receive the free text which am writing not to send the email trigger notification.
Mohamed
You need to alter the triggers mail body. Look at my example above, it will do what you want.
Hi, is there a way for me, to forward the original email request from the user, from Zendesk through a trigger, to an internal email ID. Please help.
Senthil Kumar Chinnaswamy
Why would you do this, what is the reason for this forwarding?
I guess that you want to know what arrived at Zendesk - an archive of inbound messages. If that's what you really want to achieve, you have to proceed a bit differently.
One way to do this is to make your "support entry" mail address (support@yourdomain.com) not a forwarding entry, but a mailing list. One entry is the actual Zendesk account, another might be your inbound archive.
We do that to be able to find problems in case of mail system problems.
If you want to capture what Zendesk sends out to your support users (everything, both customers and agents, in all brands), then use the setting in admin, settings, Tickets, e-Mail Archiving to define the receiving mailbox, i.e. the outbound archive.
Yours truly
Peter
Thank you, for the helpful suggestions, Peter.
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