Best practices for using email clients with CCs and followers

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Quick Look: Admin Center > Objects and rules > Tickets > Settings

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. It includes some best practices for admins and agents who use email clients.

Sections in this article include:

• Best practices for admins
• 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 admins

When you’re managing 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 work 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 activate or deactivate CCs in email clients. You can also specify email addresses that can never be copied as a CC or follower. Get familiar with all the choices and pick the settings that work best for your Zendesk account. See Configuring settings and permissions for CCs and followers..

• 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, which results 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, there is one exception. See 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 are included in the email address. Agents and end users can add CCs as part of an email notification, but light agents cannot.

• 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. 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 it actually is. Convert public comments from customers into internal notes if you don't want to expose the comment outside your organization.

• 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. See Third party replies to ticket notifications.

Best practices for end users

When end users are working with CCs and followers in email clients, keep in mind the following:

• Be protective of confidential information.
  • 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 only removes 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 a requester or CC cannot 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.

• Use Reply all (instead of Reply) to preserve ticket CCs.

  When you are the ticket requester, reply to an email notification using Reply all (instead of Reply) if you want to preserve all the original CC'd end users on the ticket. Replying to an email notification using Reply will remove all CC'd end users from the ticket.

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

  When you are a CC'd end user on a ticket, reply to an email notification using Reply (instead of Reply all) if you want to keep the reply private (an internal note) on the ticket.