Making your email notifications simpler and more meaningful

This article covers some suggestions, as well as a few recent improvements, that should result in a smoother experience for you and your customers.

People can be very particular about their email, and they mostly want its functionality to be clear and unobtrusive. It's that key word "functionality" that can sometimes represent an ongoing issue. Whenever a new feature is introduced, it changes the dynamic of the user experience; sometimes for the better, sometimes for the more crowded .

Changes that simplify email notifications

Two things were recently removed, in an effort to reduce clutter:

• Ticket #IDs were removed from the subject line of outbound email notifications to end-users.
• The encoded [xxxx-xxxx] string in the subject line of an agent's email notification was removed.

These items were replaced with more reliable and less obtrusive ways of accomplishing the same goals.

Of course, you can still use those two features if you choose to. They are both placeholders that can be added to your triggers. End-users might like to see the {{ticket.id}}, as this reflects the ticket number, which end-users would be familiar with. Agents were previously seeing the {{ticket.encoded_id}}, [xxxx-xxxx], which is a proprietary code that appears as an alpha-numeric string.

Ability to customize subject line for CC notifications

You can now customize the subject line of CC email notifications .

Previously, all CC notifications were sent out like this:

[{{ticket.account}}] Update: {{ticket.title}}

In simpler terms, it would look something like this:

Subject: [Your Account] Update: The subject of the ticket

Now, you can edit that field to reflect any number of properties that you want (though by default it reflects the previously used values). Also, Dynamic Content (Professional and Enterprise only) can be used for your customers abroad.

This new ability is particularly useful with reflecting the organization that a user belongs to: {{ticket.organization.name}}:

Navigation to tickets from your Gmail inbox

Next up, there's a neat little trick that makes it possible to navigate to a ticket directly from your Gmail inbox, without having to open the ticket first.

Companies that rely on tracking issues or items, companies like Amazon and UPS, have been using a little code to create a link-box within the list view of emails.

Now, your customers and your agents can just click the box and go directly to the ticket.

This still requires authentication, of course, but for those who keep themselves signed in, this can be a helpful time--and wrist--saver. You can click straight from your Gmail inbox into the self-same ticket in Zendesk Support. One less click for every ticket!

Recommendations for outbound email notifications

Lastly, here are some recommendations for how to avoid crowding your outbound email notifications, while also providing relevant information.

Placeholders are a flexible and powerful attribute. The temptation to use, and perhaps overuse, can run high. As a rule of thumb, you should provide only the information that matters, and in a capacity which the placeholder is guaranteed to populate the data.

For example, you might not want to add a {{ticket.group.name}} placeholder to your "Notify requester of received request" trigger because there is a good likelihood that the ticket has not yet been assigned to a group. That same placeholder might be more useful in the "Notify requester of comment update."

Also, you should make sure that the information you provide to your customers is useful to them. It is easy to overwhelm the recipient with information that might not help them, but will distract them. For your agents, the opposite might be true--more ticket detail can help them make better decisions.

I prefer to add a single sentence with a placeholder, where it is less likely to crowd the eyes, yet still provides relevant information. In the example below, I have added a sentence clarifying which group the ticket has been assigned to, so the customer knows that their ticket is in the right hands.

Which results in this for the customer:

You could even include an estimated SLA projection in the email. For example:

When a ticket has been assigned to a (this) Group we typically respond within 12-24 hours. You can expect to hear from us!

Less might be more in design... but more is always more in Service , Support , and Sales .