Best practices for using email clients with CCs and followers

Fastpath: Admin Center > Objects and rules > Tickets > Settings

Note: This article describes an updated CCs and followers experience. If your account was created before May 2019 you might need to migrate to this updated experience.

With CCs and followers, you have several options available when you use email clients to update and manage ticket information. This article describes how ticket settings and email notifications work together and includes some best practices for admins and agents using email clients.

Sections in this article include:

• Best practices for administrators
• Best practices for agents
• Best practices for end users

For a complete list of documentation about CCs and followers, see CCs and followers resources.

Best practices for administrators

When you’re administering CCs and followers, keep in mind the following:

• Make sure your notifications are up-to-date.

  Double-check your triggers and automations to make sure email client notifications are working as expected. Actions for triggers and automations include a choice between Email user - (requester) and Email user - (requester and CCs), depending on who you want to include.

• Use CCs and followers settings to customize your experience.

  You have several options to control how email clients behave with tickets. For example, you can enable or disable CCs in email clients, and you can specify email addresses that can never be copied as a CC or follower. Make sure you are familiar with all the choices and pick the settings that work best for you and your company. See Configuring CCs and followers permissions for details.

• Train your agents.

  Encourage your agents to add other agents as followers in the ticket, not as CCs. If an agent uses the email client to CC another agent, the agent’s email is exposed to customers. This is not ideal and opens the opportunity for customers to contact agents directly resulting in missed activity within Support and potentially a poor customer experience.

Best practices for agents

When you’re working with CCs and followers in email clients, keep in mind the following:

• 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. Generally, any email response by a follower is recorded in the ticket as an internal note. However, one exception to this is explained in Understanding when email replies become public or private comments.

• Email notifications for CCs.

  By default, CCs receive notifications in their email client whenever a public comment is added to the ticket and their names appear in the email address. Also, when CCs are enabled, agents (but not light agents) and end users can add CCs as part of an email notification.

• Use Reply (instead of Reply all) for private comments.

  When you reply to an email notification, use Reply (instead of Reply all) if you want to keep the reply private (an internal note) on the ticket. For more information, see Understanding when email replies become public or private comments.

• Be protective of confidential information.

  Followers don’t show in the email address, so your email conversation may appear more private than is actually the case. Convert public comments from customers that you don't want to expose outside your organization into internal notes.

• Pay attention to replies from a third party.

  If a third party replies to a ticket, a warning appears in the ticket interface. You may need to manually update the ticket to include comments from this person and add this person as a CC from the ticket interface. For more information, see Third party replies to ticket notifications.

Best practices for end users

• Be protective of confidential information.

  Make sure you are aware that:

  • All conversations you send by email are stored in a ticket. Any agent with access to the ticket can see the full thread within the ticket.
  • You may not see the names of everyone who is included in the conversation.
  • Removing a CC from the recipients of an email will only remove them from the conversation in Support if the sender is the requester or CC and the requester is present on the email (as the sender or recipient). An end user who is not already participating in the ticket as requester or CC will not be able to remove CCs via email.
  • You can add additional CCs to the email thread. When you add additional CCs, all public responses since the ticket was created are included in the CC.
• Avoid forwarding if possible.

  If you forward the ticket to a third party and the third party replies, you may end up with part of a conversation that isn’t recorded in the ticket, unless the agent who owns the ticket manually adds the reply and includes this person as a CC on the ticket.