Question
What are my options for forwarding a ticket to a non-Support user?
Answer
Option 1: Setup an email target (Team, Professional, and Enterprise)
- Create an email target via Admin icon (
) > Settings > Extensions > Targets. - Select add target.
- Select email target. Complete the setup.
- Create a trigger to notify the target with ticket information.
Option 2: Change the requester
- In a ticket, next to the ticket requester's name, below the ticket title, click Change.
- Edit the requester field to be the non-Support user you want to share the ticket with.
- Add a public comment and click Submit.
Warning: Changing the requester of a ticket will change the ownership of that ticket. This means the new requester will become the owner of the ticket and unless the original requester is CC'd in the ticket, this may cause confusion with your customers.
Option 3: CC the individual
- In a ticket, add the non-Support user's email address to the CC field.
- Reply to the requester as normal.
- The CCed individual will receive updates via email.
Important: Once the user is added as a CC contact, that user will become part of the conversation and will receive all public notifications made in the ticket.
Option 4: Create a PDF of the ticket
- Open the ticket you want to print.
- Click the Ticket options menu in the upper right, select Print ticket.
- Most computers have the option to Print to PDF; select this.
- A PDF will be created of the ticket; attach the PDF to an email to forward the ticket.
Option 5: Side conversations (Professional + add-on or Enterprise + add-on)
- Start a side conversation. You can start the conversation from an individual ticket comment or from the upper-left portion of the ticket.
- Click the comments icon (
) at the bottom of the message. - Select the comments you want to include.
- Click Add.
Note: If you are looking for a way to download the attachments of a ticket please see How can I download all attachments in a ticket?
55 Comments
Hi, this is very helpful, thank you! I have a question on Option 2. Maybe I am missing the obvious here but what is the easiest way to switch back to the original requester once the reply from the outside source has been received? Do I have to copy the original email address into the internal note field?
Hey guys, as an agent, I couldn't find the CC field in the Ticket. Check below :(
Hi Marcio!
The Admins in your Zendesk can choose whether or not to allow CCs on tickets. Based on your screenshot, it looks like the "Enable CCs on tickets" functionality has been turned off. If that's something you need, your Admins can re-enable it!
Option 2 and 3 will cause all kind of communication ending up at the wrong places. I wouldn't advise using those.
I think forwarding a ticket to an external address should be native functionality.
I agree with Sebastiaan. We have been doing option 3, CC'ing in the correct non-zendesk department. It has been inefficient, grows the number of people on the thread, and makes it unable to include a message that our customer does not see.
Forwarding is a standard email feature and needs to be available.
Agreeing with Sebastiaan and Elyssa here.
Also agree - we need a way to send requests to non-support users in our organization that the user does not see.
Hey Joshua and Tatiana - does the notify external target functionality not work for your use case?
Hi, Nicole - thanks for asking. No it doesn't because it needs to be on-demand. Can a trigger work that way that as soon as an email target is added, it sends the notification?
Good question, Joshua. I'm not sure, but I'll see what I can find out for you.
Okay, so Triggers are event based, meaning that they can fire based on whatever activity you set. Try these on for size and see if either of them fit your needs:
How to email ticket info Automatically to Non-Agents
Notifying External Email Addresses
my issue with this is as follows:
Forwarding to the new NON-Zendesk email is simple, but it does not contain the original content of the original email.
In other words, if we get an email, in ZD, from somebody saying I am trying to reach Dave in Accounting regarding the invoice... the content of the email is not there
??
Hey Steven! Welcome to the Community!
Which method are you using to send these tickets to users outside of Zendesk?
Jessie, that would imply that there is more than one way to do this command.
They only way I know of is my changing the original email address to a new address or
replying to the original contact and cc'ing the new non-zendesk user. Either way does not work.
Hi Steven,
So, just to clarify, you're CC'ing Dave in Accounting on the ticket. Dave is receiving an email notification that he's CC'd on the ticket, but the notification email doesn't include the original ticket comment? What does the notification contain?
I need some additional detail here to understand what's going wrong.
Hi there Jessie,
"Dave in Accounting" will get an email with the information that I typed in, but not the email content from the originator
Cannot make it any simpler than that !
Thanks for clarifying, Steven!
What's most likely happening here is that the CC notification is set up with the wrong content placeholder, so it's displaying only the most recent comment, not the entire comment thread.
Luckily, this is very easy to fix! Go to your Admin icon, and then go to Settings > Tickets. Scroll down to the CC section, and make sure that the CC email text section contains {{ticket.comments_formatted}}. That will take care of it!
ohhhh, so close to a resolution there Jessie. Except as you can see from this screen shot...
and here is a screenshot sent from ZD to my email and it has no email thread....
Hey Steve,
Well, you've stumped me. Without being able to see the settings in your account I'm afraid there isn't much more I can do to help you here in the Community. I'm going to go ahead and get a ticket opened up so one of our Support Advocates can dig into this for you!
I miss the old days of customer service where you could pick up the phone and talk.....
Thanks for opening the help desk ticket for me
Hey Steven -
As an Enterprise customer, your account Admin should have the phone number to call support, if you'd prefer.
Yes, that was the answer I was expecting from you.
Hey folks, all good comments here. There are a couple of solutions:
(1) Tedious but will work. Open another ticket with the 3rd party as a requester, use Linked Tickets app to link the two. when 3rd party replies, you close them both. can even merge if needed. Not that great because you have to open a separate ticket..
(2) We have an integration (as in app) to 3rd party software. That integration allows messaging back and forth. This would be the ideal..i have to look through options with Zapier perhaps.
Now for Eckhard's question above - you can probably capture the original requester in a separate custom field and then have a second field, a checkbox, which will fire a trigger to switch the requester to the one in this custom field. Or you can use a tag instead of a checkbox. Didn't try but makes sense..
Let me know guys if you like those ideas, try it and it works or if you think of another solution.
BTW here is an app in Zendesk marketplace, it is called Forwarder and it does exactly this, it forwards the ticket to 3rd party, and allows 3rd party to reply to the ticket and the reply will be posted as a private comment: https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/forwarder/?source=app_directory $5.99/user/mo
Thanks for the response GM
Not really looking to add additional cost by purchasing a 3rd party app to transfer emails. I was hoping that Zdesk would offer a simple "one and done" solution, but that does not appear to be the case. Oh well, onwards and upwards.
Hey Steven!
You are welcome.
Actually simply forwarding email is fairly straightforward, there are multiple ways to do that. I have implemented a BCC feature at no additional cost using a custom field, a list of targets and a list of triggers for each. The BCCed person gets an email with ticket content.
But the discussion here is communicating back and forth between the ticket and the 3rd party without the original requester seeing it. That is a serious feature.
Best,
G
As a new Zendesk user, I'm disappointed to find out that forwarding isn't native functionality. I've been using Freshdesk in the past and it allows forwarding. Replies are kept private. See documentation. Please add this behavior to Zendesk.
I too would like to see this added.
As a work around I found this solution. Takes a little while to setup but seems to work.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/210554367/comments/115004878868
I definitely would like to see a simple forwarding function added. The above are work-around's. Not true solutions to the problem of lacking functionality.
Luckily we don't have a huge volume of emails that require forwarding. I'd imagine this is a nightmare for other companies who use ZenDesk and forward often.
Hi Darren!
Tickets can only be assigned to Agents, and a ticket must be assigned to someone before it can be solved.
Can you tell me more about your workflow? That will help me figure out how to make it work.
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