Business rules such as triggers, automations, and macros affect email notifications to CCs and followers in several ways. For example, your default triggers send email notifications to requesters and CCs (see Customizing default email notifications to CCs and followers). You can also create business rules to do these things:
- Add followers to tickets automatically using triggers, automations, and macros.
- Use triggers and automations to send email notifications to both CCs and followers.
- Use triggers and automations to customize the text in email notifications to CCs.
You cannot configure views for CCs and followers. However, you can view all of the tickets that you are copied on or following from your user profile (see Viewing your user profile in Zendesk Support).
This article includes these sections:
- Adding followers to tickets automatically using business rules
- Sending email notifications to requesters and CCs automatically using business rules
For more information about email notifications for CCs and followers, see Customizing the text in email notifications to followers and Understanding when email replies become public or private comments.
For a complete list of documentation about CCs and followers, see CC and followers resources.
Adding followers to tickets automatically using business rules
You can add followers to tickets automatically using business rules (triggers, automations, and macros). This is done by adding action statements to the business rules.
These are actions you can use that are related to followers:
- In triggers, use the Add follower action.
- In automations, uee the Ticket: Add follower action.
- In macros, use the Add follower action.
When an agent is added as a follower to a ticket by means of these actions, the follower does not receive an email notification saying they were added. Followers only receive email notifications when comments are added to tickets they are following.
To add followers to tickets automatically using business rules
-
Create or update
triggers to include the Add follower
action.
-
Create or update
automations to include the Ticket: Add
follower action.
-
Create or update
macros to include the Add follower
action.
Sending email notifications to requesters and CCs automatically using business rules
You can send email notifications to requesters and CCs automatically using business rules (triggers, automations, and macros). This is done by adding action statements to the business rules.
These are actions you can use:
- In triggers, use the Email user + (requester and CCs) and Answer Bot + (requester and CCs) actions.
- In automations, use the Notifications: Email user + (requester and CCs) action.
Remember that two default triggers use these actions, but you can create others (see Customizing default email notifications to CCs and followers).
Placeholders are allowed in these actions (and in the Comment/description action in macros). This includes the ticket.cc_names placeholder, which returns the names of all the CCs on the ticket. For more information about placeholders, see Using placeholders and Zendesk Support placeholder reference.
The Comment/description action in macros can be used by agents to add comments to tickets, and those comments can include placeholders about CCs and followers, but macros themselves don’t cause email notifications to be sent to users. However, keep in mind that you may have other business rules that cause email notifications to be sent to users when a comment is added to the ticket.
To send email notifications to requesters and CCs automatically using business rules
-
Create or update
triggers to include the Email user +
(requester and CCs) action.
Enter an email subject and body text in the fields provided. Placeholders are allowed.
-
Create or update
triggers to include the Answer Bot +
(requester and CCs) action.
Enter an email subject and body text in the fields provided. Placeholders are allowed.
-
Create or update
automations to include the Notifications:
Email user + (requester and CCs) action.
Enter an email subject and body text in the fields provided. Placeholders are allowed.
13 Comments
Hi Michael—sorry about that. This is a mistake. The article that you are looking for is located at https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021312374. I've corrected the link. Thanks for pointing this out!
Hi there Jason Harlowe,
At the moment there is no native settings with triggers or automation in order to achieve such functionality. However, I hope the workaround suggested on this feedback will help! Kindly check out Remove Follower and/or CC for ticket update per trigger/automation action
I would recommend upvoting and cross-posting your use case in this feedback to help provide visibility to our Support Product Managers as well.
Thank you! :)
We have been using the followers feature and it is working well for us. We did have one question around the business rules with followers.
Has anyone come up with a way to remove followers from a ticket using triggers or automations?
Use case would be an agent moves roles or changes focus and no longer needs to be a follower on certain tickets. They no longer want to get all the notifications. A second piece to that is to help prevent others from adding certain followers to tickets.
Thanks in advance!
Is it possible to only send followers updates on certain comments? Or, a way to remove followers and then re-add them based on triggers?
If I wanted to make all follower comments private, by default, would there be a trigger I should set up or automation?
I was trying to follow this page and when I clicked on the link shown in the screensnap below, I got told that I don't have permissions to read it in 'google docs'.
Why isn't that file hosted by zendesk?
Hi Devan
After checking the process flow we avoided CC using tags on the tickets and creating a view.
Unfortunately light agent cannot have personal views and we are thinking to buy an app to manage all the necessary views
thanks and regards
Is it possible to avoid notification on followers?
We would like to use a view to manage the ticket for followers. we do not need a notification
The main limitation is that there is no condition to test if a follower is present on a case :(
Thus you cannot do a rule like: if X not follower AND/OR others conditions then add X as follower.
The only solution to implement this is to add another tag and thus have a rule like : if tags doesn't contain X_is_follower AND/OR others conditions then add X as follower and tag X_is_follower.
It's really painful because it adds a lot of noise in our tags for nothing.
Do I miss something ?
Hello Sonia Radaelli,
Regarding your ask, if you are looking to avoid e-mail notifications and are an agent, then why would you want to add them as a CC or follower? You should be able to track the tickets via the view, is this not working for you on your end?
Best regards.
Hi Chris,
I did some digging around on my end and according to this article you shouldn't need to set up a separate trigger: Best practices for using email clients with CCs and followers
Particularly the part I've copied below:
Email notifications for followers.
Followers receive notifications through their email client whenever the ticket is updated, but their names don’t appear in the email address. You cannot add a follower from an email client; followers must be included directly from the ticket. Followers see both public replies and internal notes in their email notifications. Any email response by a follower is recorded in the ticket as an internal note.
Hope this helps!
Hello Arnaud,
You have not missed anything. What you are describing is not capable in the base Zendesk Support as you described above. I would recommend reaching out to our Product Feedback forums and suggesting this change so our devs can consider implementing it in a potential future update. I've gone ahead and linked this below.
Support Product Feedback
Best Regards
EXCELLENT! Thanks!
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