Overview
Agent Forwarding allows agents to automatically create tickets from forwarded emails with the original sender as the ticket requester. In order for agent forwarding to work correctly, the following four criteria must be met.
- Enable email forwarding must be selected under Admin icon (
) > Settings > Agents.
- The user forwarding emails into Zendesk must be an agent or administrator.
- The email subject must include fw or fwd (or the foreign language equivalent).
- In the body of the email, the From and the email address of the requester must be on the same line.
Common Issues
The most common issue with Agent Forwarding occurs when Zendesk sets the agent who forwarded the email as the ticket requester instead of the customer. This happens when the From line in the body of the message only displays the customer's name and not the customer's email address. Usually the culprit is Microsoft Outlook which strips this email address from the body of the message. This may occur with additional email clients as well.
As you can see in the below image, Katie's email address was stripped from the From line. As a result, the agent Bonnie will become the ticket requester of this forwarded email instead of the end-user Katie.
Resolution
One workaround to resolve the issue is to use the #requester Mail API command to correctly set the ticket requester. Simply add this command at the very top of the forwarded message followed by the customer's email address. This will set the ticket requester in Zendesk as the customer rather than as the forwarding agent.
8 Comments
Hi,
I'm trying to set this up but it's not working. I have enabled agent forwarding and I followed the steps here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203663316-Passing-an-email-to-your-support-address?page=2#comments
It says to put #requester then the email address and remove the "fwd:" from the subject line and remove the forwarding part in the body of the email. I did that (and also tried leaving those things in) and it's still showing as coming from the forwarding email address. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Thanks!
@...,
I've had the same issue -- Usually it's because I need it to be formatted like *exactly*
The VERY first line in the body of the email:
#requester [one space] requester@theiremail.com
The only other thing I can think of is to check your Events in the ticket and see if there are any misbehaving Triggers.
PS. I keep the Fwd in...
Thanks, Heather. I just tried it again. First line, one space. Still no luck. I checked the events and I see two triggers fired - one to set it to normal priority and one to send an auto-reply email to the requester... not sure what I'm doing wrong. Oh well, I will just make them manually. Thanks!
is it possible to identify tickets created via agent forwarding? so it could effect triggers & automations?
i thought perhaps if the agent added a tag via the mail api as one solution (though this requires the agents remembering to do this!) – but i was curious if it's somehow already identifiable via ZD built-in functionality.
possible use cases:
Hello Rachel M
(I really like your strawberry profile picture!)
I was able to find a creative solution that I hope works for you!
When an agent forwards a customer's email (using agent forwarding) the "submitter" and "requester" attributes are different for that ticket. You can see this by looking at the ticket through the api:
So, you could create a trigger with these conditions to tag any tickets created this way:
With these conditions, any ticket created by an agent, where the requester is set as someone else (the customer) will be affected. Just have the action be to add a tag. Then once that tag is on all the agent forwarded tickets, you can use it for reporting, to affect other triggers (to exclude these tickets or include them only etc.).
I hope that helps!
hi Elissa!
thanks so much for looking into this – i finally was able to test this out, and i'm having issues.
(but to be clear, the agent forwarding is working as it should in general – aka it makes the orignal email's sender as the requester of the ticket)
After 13 different tests that kept skipping the trigger, i make a very simple one with only these conditions –
– and i used a "notify target" to capture the current user and requester values.
the result:
yet the api shows
it looks like ZD doesn't consider "the submitter" = "current user", but it knows the submitter is a different person (me, the agent).
open to any thoughts!!
ok! i made a work around using the mail api – ultimately, i'd really much rather have a workflow that doesn't require the agent to remember to add the mail api conditions. too much room for human error.
the trigger........
meet ALL
meet ANY
action
so if an agent is forwarding an email, and they need to add either of these to the email:
then i can target or exclude the email-fwd-by-agent tagged tickets.
Thanks for coming back to share your work-around, Rachel! Sorry that it's not a smoother workflow, but glad to hear you got something in place.
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