Issue Symptoms
I am not sure if my Support account is emailing my customers updates to their tickets. How do I confirm if Support is sending email notifications to customers?
Resolution Steps
This article outlines some troubleshooting steps to check if your messages are delivered to your customers.
- Make sure your triggers are activated.
- The default triggers whose titles begin with Notify requester of... are triggers that send communication to your end users. These triggers need to be active to reach end users. For more information, see the article: Customers are not receiving emails.
- If you've customized your triggers, check that any that are intended to send notifications to end users have conditions that are actually met in your tickets. Ensure that your triggers contain the correct placeholders to pull in ticket data.
- Check a recent ticket.
- View the events of the ticket.
- Look for a recent update from one of your agents. Email notifications are represented in the audit trail by the heading Email notification, followed by an ID number. Click the ID next to a notification to view the email notification.
- If the Email notification event does not exist in the event log, an email notification was not sent.
It may be a good idea to have your end users check their spam or junk folders for email notifications as well. If you find that an end user is still not receiving email notifications after checking these steps, contact Zendesk customer support with an example ticket ID.
14 Comments
Is there a more 'customer friendly' way to prove that we have sent it?
Customer will not understand if I show him trigger body with curly brackets of ticket public comment variable.
I would be looking for an equivalent of seeing the original email (inbound) in ticket events.
Hi Sebastian!
Rather than showing them the trigger itself, you might consider showing them a screenshot of the ticket events that prove the trigger fired.
Hi,
Ticket events have multiple information, including settings tags etc. You probably know that better than I do.
Still, I would like to ask what's the other way to say "We sent it" and prove it in customer friendly way.
If not for customers, than what in case company is audited for disputes - how we can prove that trigger used for the notification actually sent out a message (different story about delivering it as customer can have e. g. full mailbox)?
I'd love if any comment that triggered an email event included a small icon on the upper right corner of that comment. There's already precedent for notifications being put in this corner, this would be a handy visual cue for agents to know that we sent a message.
Not all agents understand the Event logs, especially on more complex cases, but I think they'd all understand if there was an icon for outbound email.
Just my 0.02
Hey Sebastian!
I'm thinking just a small screen cap with an arrow or a box or something that shows the name of the trigger that fired...I'm honestly spitballing here because I've never had anybody ask for visual proof that a notification email was sent. Is this something that you run into a lot?
Hey Dan!
That's a really good piece of feedback. And I agree that the Events log can get to be a lot. Whenever I look at ours here at Zendesk my head explodes a little. 😁 I don't know that it would necessarily prove anything to an end user, but it would be useful for agents.
Hey Jessie,
They'd certainly spend less time asking their ZD admin if an email was sent to a customer :)
In the case Sebastian is describing, I think the problem is that if the customer can't understand why/how/when an email was sent by seeing a trigger, then they don't have faith it was sent.
If we could show a concerned end user a screenshot of their comment, with a little outbound icon on it, that's a lot more relatable for them and they may have an easier time accepting that the problem lies somewhere on their side, usually in their mail server or mail client.
Agents then don't have to bother their admins for help reading event logs, which makes both agents AND admins happy. It'd be a win for everyone!
I know the drill though - I'll make some time soon to write this request in the Product Feedback section of the Community;)
Thanks for replying!
You betcha! You always have really good feedback for us.
You make a good point on the usefulness for end-users, so good job convincing me. :)
I found this: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203663156-Archiving-email-notifications-Enterprise-
Will try this out as we have Enterprise. But in principal, It's exactly how Dan described it - so big thanks for putting that in more elaborated and better way!
I see this thread is over two years old but I'd be interested to hear if anyone found a decent solution to providing proof to a customer that an email was sent with timestamp. We would rather not include the ticket events. It is possible to open the actual ticket notification from the events, but it only shows the placeholders and not the actual email sent to the customer. Any input would be appreciated.
David Wa
If you are on a Enterprise plan, you can enable the email archiving options, it would auto-BCC an email address that you control for outbound messages, you could rely on that perhaps?
More info about the feature here
Lightspeed POS Inc
Thank you for your input and possible solution. We will try this out. The only downside I see is that it's only possible to BCC a single email address and we send out about 50,000 tickets per month.
I set up a new brand in zendesk and forgot to add the outbound trigger to it. Is there any way to automatically resend any emails sent in that brand before the trigger was applied to it?
Hello Terry Page,
We would not be able to resend any updates in such cases, where we have updated a ticket but the outbound trigger did not exist to send those emails.
However, you may use a notification advising any end-users that if they have an existing ticket updates were not sent in a certain timespan, and you may invite them to contact you, or ignore that email.
You may use Automations for that.
About automations and how they work
Creating and managing automations for time based events
You may create an automation that looks for a certain brand and email that have been created in a certain time span, for example:
Hope that helps!
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