Troubleshooting agent forwarding

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.

1. Enable email forwarding must be selected under Admin icon () > Settings > Agents.
2. The user forwarding emails into Zendesk must be an agent or administrator.
3. The email subject must include fw or fwd (or the foreign language equivalent).
4. 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.

Note: It may be possible to stop the removal of the original sender's email address from the body of the message if your administrator allows it. Please reach out to your company's email administrator for more information.