Zendesk has updated the CCs experience. For accounts created before May 2019, this article describes how to migrate to the new CCs experience.

For a complete list of documentation about CCs and followers, see CC and followers resources.
About migrating to CCs and followers
Previously, the behavior for CCs you included on a Zendesk ticket varied depending on whether the person you copied was an internal user (someone within your company) or an external user (a customer or other person outside your organization). It also depended on whether your reply to a ticket was an internal note or a public comment. This caused confusion.
Zendesk tickets have changed to include both followers and CCs. See the following illustration.

When you migrate, Zendesk tickets change to include both followers and CCs. You have better options to manage public and private comments within conversation threads. For example:
- Both agents and end users can add and remove CCs just like in email.
- Agents who are followers can receive updates on the ticket without exposing their identity to end users. Agents who are added as CCs will have their email addresses exposed.
- Followers receive notifications when ticket updates occur, and they can view and create internal notes.
For a complete list of documentation about CCs and followers, see CC and followers resources.
Using the migration wizard
To help you migrate your account for CCs and followers, Zendesk Support provides a migration wizard to help you update your account. When you migrate, you can use the wizard to:
- Automatically update business rules (triggers, automations, and macros) in your account.
- Receive guidance on how to manually update business rules, including a downloadable list of the affected rules you need to change.
In most cases, Zendesk recommends using the wizard to automatically update business rules. If you are not sure which method to use, you can choose the manual method and review the list of rules you need to change. Then, if you decide the automatic method will work for you, you can restart the wizard to automatically make the updates.
To run the migration wizard:
- In
the sidebar, click the Admin icon (
), then select Settings > Tickets.
If the CCs and Followers feature is available on your account, you’ll see a highlighted section.
- In the New CCs and Followers Experience section, click Set up CCs and Followers. A page appears with an introduction to CCs and followers.
- Take a moment to read the description, then click Next to continue. A business rules page appears with information on how your business rules will be impacted.
- Click Download to review a list of affected rules for
your account.
Use this list to make sure all the rules on your account are included. Contact Zendesk if you have any questions about the rules listed.
Important: Zendesk recommends you keep a backup of the affected rules list in a safe location. It can be useful if you ever need to rollback your account and remove CCs and followers. If you Automatically change your account, account admins will receive an email with a link to the affected rules list. - Review the list of recommended changes to your account. The
wizard includes a summary
of
account rules
that
should
be
updated.
Some of the changes happen automatically as soon as you
enable CCs and followers (any Add CC action changes
to Add follower) while other changes require you to
run the migration wizard, or make the changes
manually.
- Select how you want to make changes to your account.
If you are not sure which method to use, choose Manually change.
- To manually change the affected rules, select Manually change, then click Next.
- To automatically change the affected rules,
select Automatically change, then click
Next.
Changes made automatically by the migration script will match the changes described in the “Recommended changes” section of the wizard.
An activation page appears with a list of items to enable.
- Select the items you want to enable for your account:
- Enable followers: All tickets in your account will include a Followers field for agents, light agents, and admins.
-
Enable CCs: All tickets in your
account will include a CC field for Public
comments.
- Enable light agents to become CCs on tickets: When CCs are enabled, you can also enable light agents to be added as CCs or followers on tickets, not just as followers. If this setting is not selected, light agents can only be added as followers.
- Automatically make an agent CC a follower: When an agent is added as a CC on a ticket, they will be added automatically as a follower.
You can modify these settings later if desired.
- Acknowledge your changes, then click Save and Activate.
- For Automatic updates, the migration wizard will enable the items you selected for your account. It will also update your triggers and automations. Automatic updates may take several minutes. When the changes are complete, you’ll receive an email with a link to a file that describes the changes.
- For Manual updates, your account will be upgraded to include the settings you choose to activate, but you’ll need to manually update your triggers, automations, and macros. See Manually updating business rules for more information.
After migration
After migration, if the new CCs experience is enabled, you should see a new Followers field in your tickets (beneath the Assignee field) and a new CC field in the Public reply area.
When an existing ticket is updated, legacy CCs on the ticket are automatically split into followers (for agents and light agents) and new CCs (for users who aren't agents).
- In the sidebar, click the Admin icon (
), then select Settings > Tickets.
- Navigate to the new CCs section. The name has changed From CCs to CCs and Followers.
- Choose the settings that make sense for your workflow.
For example:
- The Only agents can add CCs setting has been replaced. Use the new Enable CCs setting instead to enable (or disable) CCs for all types of users.
- There's a new Requester section in Admin > Settings > Tickets, that includes an Agent can change the requester setting. Previously, enabling CCs on tickets automatically allowed agents to change the requester. Now, you can enable or disable this setting independently from CCs.
Additional settings are available, including a CC blocklist to prevent the email addresses and domains you specify from being added as CC. For more information, see Configuring CCs and followers permissions.
- If you have email templates, check to make sure the placeholders work as expected.
29 Comments
How might this effect light agents?
Our network of stores have 700+. Their comments remain internal/private by default, yes? Regardless of whether being CC'd, or a follower?
Hi Conza,
Light agent replies should always show up as an internal note regardless of whether or not they're CC'd to the ticket.
Let me know if you have any other questions :)
A few questions:
Thanks!
@brett excellent questions!
+1 Brett's questions!
Also, it would be great to choose if by mentioning @someone, the default action would be adding them as a Follower, instead of adding them as Cc.
Alternatively, keeping @ for Cc but have something else for Follower (eg. !someone)
I want to make sure. Is the migration action "agent" based or instance based?
If I perform that migration does it affect the other agents in my instance?
I am assuming the answer is yes but I'd rather be careful.
Thanks.
Hi Michael. Migration impacts your entire Support instance. All agents will see the new CCs and Followers settings, trigger changes, etc.
Can someone explain the reason and benefits of this new functionality? So far the only benefit I see if that agent followers are not shown as CC's on the emails.
But the rules for reply/reply all and public/private comments are way more complicated than what they currently are.
Right now if we want to keep a reply private and we are replying via email we simply use the #note syntax. That's all.
Hi @Jarett - The reason/benefit of this feature is to create transparency and a real email experience with CCs. In old CC experience people could not see who was on the ticket so when communicating it was not clear who was going to be reading your message. In this new feature, CCs are transparent just like email. Thanks
Something we noticed that seems like it might be an oversight - at the top of emails sent to Followers, there is not a link to view the ticket like there used to be when we CC'd agents.
Follower: You are a follower on this request (123456).
CC: You are registered as a CC on this support request (https://support.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/123456).
I can't think of any reason why the link would have intentionally been removed, and this change makes it hard to click through to view the ticket which is what our agents always do (we never reply to emails to comment on a thread)
Can someone please confirm?
I have enabled and am testing the cc and followers feature in my sandbox (well just the cc’s, we do not have a need for the followers). I have adjusted triggers and business rules where need and all is working fine.
My question, however, we have triggers, to notify groups of new tickets. In the email notifications, the cc’s on the ticket are not displayed in the cc line of the email. Is there anything I can enable to get this populated? I do have the text in the body indicating the cc’s on the ticket but I am looking for the cc’s in the cc line, incase people reply or forward the notification.
Hey Lori,
I reached out to our team internally and they informed me this notification is being sent out to a number of users within a group, the CC'd users should actually show up under the To field instead. The functionality is a little bit different you're not just notifying a single user but a group of users.
Hope this clears up any confusion!
Thanks but I have an another question on workflow - previously agents that were cc'd before enabling the feature were notified when an internal note was added to the ticket and now they are not after enabling the cc feature. Additionally the @mention is not working either (we have rich content enabled).
In reviewing tickets created prior to the enablement there is an event as follows - how can replicate this workflow now. I can create a trigger to notifiy the group of internal notes but that would mean the group would receive a notificaiton for "every" internal note and not just the agents it is meant for.
Yes we need this indeed:
Also, it would be great to choose if by mentioning @someone, the default action would be adding them as a Follower, instead of adding them as Cc.
Our team uses the @mentions to involve light agents in a ticket. And we want the light agents to be added as Follower not CC.
I'd have to agree -- Let us choose at our account level, what default action would be taken by using the @mention - adding as a CC or adding as a follower.
However, this update does not include updates to automation or triggers that can include end users in the CC.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203422496-Add-end-user-as-CC-via-Trigger-or-Automation
Does Zendesk have an update plan on this?
I have just activated this on our zendesk and it seems if you add a agent as a follower they will only get a email and no notifications show on Zendesk? does anyone know of how to set up a view of all all tickets> less then solved> follower is (current user)?
Hey Aaron,
I did some testing on my end and it doesn't look like there's a condition that will show current tickets an agent is following within a view. We recently published an article that addresses this question here: How can I view tickets I follow?
There are a couple of options mentioned in the link I provided so I do hope this helps!
Just to clarify, will enabling "Enable CCs" allow all agents, light agents, and end-users to add CC's to a ticket?
I read the info here https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203690846-Using-CCs-followers-and-mentions but I just want to double check if that "To CC a user from ticket notifications" section only applies if a full agent adds the email CCs? Is it possible to to make any CCs to an email notification be automatically added as a CC to the ticket?
One issue we have found with this feature is notifications and CSAT. If we update the request solved notification to be sent to the requester and CC recipients it allows for any of the users to provide their feedback through the CSAT link. Instead of capturing each person's unique response, the CSAT gets overwritten. This would skew the CSAT results. Are there any plans to either be able to send a separate notification just to CC recipients or be able to only allow the requester to submit CSAT or capture each individual's CSAT response?
Hey Reshma,
The expected behavior is that each ticket can have a single CSAT rating attached to it. You'll either want to configure your Solved Request trigger to only send out to the requester of the ticket, or set up a separate trigger that sends out CSAT rating to the requester of the ticket and not the CC'd users.
Nothing on the roadmap currently to only notify CC'd users but I'll be sure to pass this use-case along to our product managers.
If you need help setting up a separate trigger let me know as I'd be happy to assist further :)
We reverted back as there were too many instances of clients hitting reply instead of reply all and their comments would come through as internal notes on the ticket if they weren't the requester.
This causes all sorts of issues where others on the ticket assume comments haven't been added and also can't see a full trail of ticket comments in the support portal.
Kind of a stupid feature when we can't control how end users use their email. Should be possible to disable.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360034737494-New-CC-Experience-and-Internal-Notes-from-End-Users
The article mentions that legacy CCs on existing ticket are automatically moved to followers if agent or light agent. My question is what happens to legacy CCs if followers is not enabled during the migration?
Hello Scott,
It looks like the Community hasn't been able to address this question yet. I'm going to go ahead and add this to our Community Round-Up this month so we can have more attention brought to your ask.
Best regards.
Hi, since we switched over to Followers and CCs, we're not sure the CC blacklist is working.
We have a few email addresses that regularly result in new tickets being created, that we merge in to existing ones, where we do not want the original requester address to remain as a CC. The CC blacklist used to manage this for us, but now doesn't appear to do so.
Do you know if this should still work, and if so, any reason why it might not be?
Thanks!
Hello Chris Malarky,
It sounds like your setting for your CC blacklist might not be set up correctly, resulting in these misses. I would recommend looking over the following article that breaks down setting up CC blacklist and ensure all your settings are implemented successfully.
Best regards.
Hi Devan,
Thanks for your reply, but it's not the Customer Whitelist, it's the "CCs and followers blacklist" (Settings -> Tickets -> Enable CCs -> CCs and followers blacklist):
"List of email addresses or domains that cannot be added as a CC or follower. Separate multiple values with a space (for example: somedomain.com joe@otherdomain.com)."
Until we enabled Followers and CCs, this worked just fine - merging a ticket from an address on the blacklist meant the address was removed from ticket. Now this isn't the case.
Our list is just email addresses, space-separated.
Hello Chris Malarky,
Sounds like you might be experiencing some odd behavior. I've gone ahead and opened up a ticket on your behalf so our Advocacy team can look deeper into this for you.
Best regards.
Hi Devan - Community Manager , thank you!
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