Once a ticket is closed, it cannot be altered or reopened. However, any response to a closed ticket from any channel will automatically create a follow-up ticket. This creates a new ticket that references the closed ticket and pulls data from the original ticket into the new ticket.
About follow-up tickets
When a follow-up ticket is created, it includes most field values and properties from the original ticket, with a few exceptions.
The following are not pulled from the original ticket:
- Comments
- Priority
- Type
- Assignee or Group
The channel for follow-up tickets is Closed Ticket (for business rules and ticket events), or Web (for reporting). See Explore recipe: Filtering for follow-up tickets for more information on including follow-up tickets in your Explore reports.
When someone replies to a side conversation that belongs to a closed or archived ticket, a follow-up ticket is automatically created (see Understanding follow-up tickets for side conversations).
Follow-up tickets don't inherit skills. Instead, skills are applied to the follow-up ticket based on your routing rules when the follow-up ticket is created (see Understanding how skills are applied to follow-up tickets).
To create a follow-up for a closed ticket
- Locate the closed ticket that you want to create a follow-up for. You can do this by locating the requester first and then selecting one of their closed tickets, by searching for the ticket number, or by creating a view for closed tickets and locating the ticket there.
- When you view a closed ticket, you'll see the option to create a follow-up ticket.
- Click Create follow-up.
A new ticket is created with the same data as the original ticket, excluding the Priority and Type fields.
Note: Follow-up tickets will include the original requester and CCs even if it is the CC'd user who responded to the closed ticket. - Update the ticket data as needed and then click Submit to save the new ticket. The requester will receive an email notification for the new ticket. If you haven't modified the default triggers of your account, this notification is created by the Notify requester of received request trigger.
The new ticket is marked as a follow-up, as shown here:
77 Comments
Can I create a follow-up ticket via trigger/automation?
Hey Mindaugus!
You can't create them with Triggers or Automations, but you might be able to rig something up via API. What kind of workflow are you trying to set up?
After the case is solved in one department we need to create a case into another group. Notify email target wont copy ticket fields, so we are using already API call in trigger that it's not suggested also. So just looking for a better solution.
HELLO,i want to know
Through the TICKET of the solved state generated by the chat, create a follow up on the ticket. Is the new ticket still solved state? Not open state?
Hi @Linda,
The only time a follow up ticket is available as an option is when the original ticket is in Closed status (not Solved). Since that is the case, the original ticket stays in Closed status. And for the new Follow Up ticket, that will be in New or Open status based on how your have your Triggers set up. If your triggers route Tickets via Channel: Closed on a certain path, it could be in New or Open depending on the triggers' outputs.
Sorry if that sounds like I'm not understanding your question. I'd like to help! Can you please elaborate if the above didn't help?
Zendesk, can the follow up be disabled? We have people in our org who love to reply to any ticket within their inbox and start talking about issues which have nothing to do with the original, its annoying as heck and very confusing, I need to them to stop using this, how do I disable? thanks
Gareth, I think only way to disable close the tickets.
Hi Gareth!
I'm afraid there isn't a way to disable the Follow-up ticket functionality. You could potentially add a trigger that force-closes the follow-up and sends a notification to the user telling them to submit a new email to your support address. However, I'd be concerned about customers being unhappy that they have to duplicate their effort, or that customers wouldn't realize they needed to re-submit their request and getting upset when they don't get a response. So if you decide to go that route, proceed with caution.
Hey Jessie,
I have a question regarding when I wish to create a follow-up with the ticket requester.
When I do so, the ticket requester (customer) receives only the trigger for 'thank you for reaching out to us....' and not my actual email. What am I doing wrong?
(New to Zendesk since May 2018).
Hi Rebecca! Welcome to the Community, and to Zendesk!
Would you be able to post a screen shot of how you have that trigger set up? That'll help me figure out what might be going on here.
Zendesk, this article indicates the channel on follow up tickets is "closed ticket". We are not seeing this in our data for follow up tickets. I had thought it may be inheriting the channel from the original ticket, but after some spot checking that doesn't seem to be the case. Can you please clarify how channel is set on follow up tickets?
i notice when i create a follow up on a closed ticket, it does not include the original ticket in the body of the new ticket. Is that a setting i need to turn on? Some of the follow ups are with non-agents so they need to see the original body for reference.
Hi Hotan!
The original description and comments from the close ticket won't be inserted into the follow-up ticket, but there is a link to the original ticket right at the top of the new ticket so your agents can easily review the previous conversation.
I'm not sure what you mean by the follow-ups being with non-agents. Can you go into more detail about your workflow?
my agents are following up on an old ticket.
For this example is our Accounts Receivable team.
We send invoices to our clients and it cc's our Zendesk ticketing system from our accounting system as support of invoice delivery. These tickets are closed because the invoice was sent out. My collectors are following up for non-payment and want to show the invoices in the original ticket for support of delivery and follow up.
Hi Hotan!
I'm not sure what your timeframe is for following up on unpaid invoices, but I think the easiest way to get around this would be to leave the original tickets open, rather than closing them right away. You can set up an automation to close them after a certain amount of inactivity. Do you think you could make that work?
i understand that Zendesk cannot reopen a ticket from closed...but with the follow up option...can the new ticket include the original body of the first ticket in the body of the new ticket?
End users will not be able to link to the original ticket if they are not Zendesk users and have no idea what the follow up is on.
Hey Hotan, great question.
Unfortunately that is not an expected behavior of Follow Up Tickets. As per the above documentation Comments are not pulled from the original ticket. You mentioned that this is a problem because "End-users will not be able to link to the original ticket if they are not Zendesk users". If I understand correctly, this sounds as though you are creating follow ups from within Zendesk.
This is a valid workflow, however what I would recommend would be to reserve follow up tickets to be initiated by the customer. If they respond to a ticket that they have opened originally then they will have the necessary context. If you find yourself creating follow up tickets commonly, I would recommend looking into utilizing the On Hold Ticket Status.
This status will allow you to reserve tickets for long term solutions, rather than combatting our automatic closure of tickets.
Thanks!
Is there a way to notify the assignee of the original ticket when a follow up ticket is created?
Hi Community!
I have send follow-ups several times to customers, but recently noticed i never receive an answer.
Now i have tested sending follow-ups to several mails that i have acces to (and previusly used to test triggers etc) and i cannot get it to work. How do i set it up so clicking the follow-up actually creates an email that enters the requesters mail inbox - in short: How do i get the follow- to work?
Thanks in advance,
Sebastian
Hello Korak and Sebastian,
Thanks to the both of you for for reaching out!
Korak: We do not have a way of notifying the assignee of the original ticket when creating a followup. The agent who is doing the creation event would receive an update if you had a "notify assignee of assignment" trigger (or some equivalent) configured, but the original agent does not receive an update.
The closest thing I can think of is setting the original assignee as a CC'ed party so they receive a CC notification.
Sebastian: This sounds like you may want to reach out to support@zendesk.com to create a ticket, as issues with message deliverability can result from quite a few things. That being said, clicking the followup button will only open up a new ticket; from there, you still need to ensure that the requester field has a valid email address to send messages to. Once you've drafted a comment, you can then submit the update and confirm in the "events" of the ticket that a trigger notification fired successfully.
If either of you have any followups, reach out and we'll be happy to help!
Hi,
Is it possible to tag follow up tickets with a custom tag? We need to do this to ensure that follow up tickets with a particular ticket source are excluded from a custom view we've built.
Thanks!
Lisa
When a CC replies to a closed ticket, a new ticket gets created with the original submitted as the requestor. Is it possible to automatically make it so that the CC (the one that replied to a closed ticket) is the requestor?
Our system is designed to only allow approved users submit tickets. CC's are not approved, but can workaround this process by replying to old tickets.
I have not been able to find a way in a trigger to identify the person that created the new ticket.
@ Lisa you should be able to create a trigger that will tag these follow-up tickets and exclude them from your view. Here's a sample trigger below:
@ Brad there would be no way for Zendesk to automatically set the CC's user as the requester of the follow-up ticket unfortunately. This would need to be manually adjusted by the agent working the ticket. See Changing the ticket requester for additional information.
Hope this helps!
Thank you for the fast response. That is unfortunate because that means we would have to review every `follow_up` and not just the ones if the CC is not a permitted user.
But I appreciate your response.
Amazing! Thanks @Brett :)
Happy to help Brad and Lisa :)
Hello Brett,
This is a great feature, however, we have a custom integration to sync survey response data into the Zendesk Ticket.
As a result, the 'follow up' tickets also inherit the survey response results from the original ticket.
Is there a solution around this because it artificially inflates the agent's scores.
Thanks,
Peng
Hi Peng,
If you're using a custom Insights report to show survey responses then what you could do is tag your follow-up tickets (this can be done through a trigger) and then exclude any tickets that contain that tag from your reports.
Here's a sample of that that trigger can look like below:
Hope this helps!
I have encountered a situation where a user being CC of a closed ticket, responds to a notification email of this closed ticket, which triggers the creation of a follow-up ticket. Many information of the original ticket is used to create the follow-up ticket, such as the list of CCs, so the people concerned by the first ticket are aware of the foolow-up. However, the organisation is not the same, it looks like the organisation of the follow-up ticket is that of the original requester.
Is there a way to know and to configure what fields are re-used to create the follow-up ticket?
Regards
Hey Thibault,
It may be possible to use triggers to automatically set these fields when a follow-up ticket is created. However, there's no straightforward way to tell the product which fields should carry over into the follow-up ticket.
If you decide to go the trigger route, you'll want to use the Channel> is > Closed Ticket and *Ticket > is > Created * conditions.
I hope this points you in the right direction!
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