In Zendesk, you can’t stop requests from being sent by email. However, you can use a workaround to close email tickets and direct customers to your help center.
Follow the workflow in this article to create a trigger to close email tickets and send an automated response that redirects customers to your help center. This article explains how to modify default settings to facilitate this workflow. This change impacts only customer emails. Agents can still use their email and the agent interface to communicate.
This workflow includes the steps below:
Option 1: Set up auto-replies
Video guide
Watch the video below for a visual guide on how to accomplish this workflow.
Step 1: Create a trigger
Create a trigger that closes out the ticket, tags it, and sends back an automated response to direct the user to your help center.
To create the trigger
- Create a new trigger
- Under Meet ALL of the following conditions, add the below conditions:
- Object > Ticket > Ticket | Is | Created
- Object > Ticket > Channel | Is | Email
- In Actions, add:
-
Other > Notify by > User email | Object > Ticket > (requester)
Email subject | Add the subject of the notification
Email body | Rich text | Add the notification message
Thanks for your email.
Please make sure to contact us through our help center. -
Object > Ticket > Add tags |
email_ticket
- Object > Ticket > Status category | Closed
-
Other > Notify by > User email | Object > Ticket > (requester)
- Click Create trigger
Now, when a customer sends an email, Support responds with an automated email asking the user to create a ticket in your help center. The trigger closes the ticket automatically and applies a tag. This tag lets you track email tickets in your reports.
Step 2: Deactivate default triggers and ticket CCs
- Deactivate the default triggers that send out emails to your customers and ticket CCs to prevent users from responding through email
- Deactivate CCs on tickets
Option 2: Use the blocklist feature
You can reject emails from a particular email domain. Instead of creating triggers, use your blocklist and add the domains you want to reject, with this format: reject:domain.com
. Add multiple entries separated with a space.
Otherwise, you can reject all emails, aside from those coming from your company domain:
- Add your company email domain to the Allowlist of your account, for example
mycompany.com
- In the Blocklist, add a wildcard * sign
9 comments
Jill Godsey
We use a macro that has "Do not reply" as the brand. When a customer tries to reply, our trigger recognizes the brand and marks the ticket closed. HOWEVER, if the customer replies 2..3...4 or more times, those replies show up as New tickets. How can I make the trigger stronger so it stops all Do not reply emails from creating tickets?
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Justin Federico
@...
Are you trying to prevent follow-up tickets to the original ticket or are the subsequent replies creating a brand new request?
The tag added by the email blocking trigger would be inherited by any follow-up ticket being created. I have another trigger that closes any ticket containing that tag. Any reply to a blocked email will automatically be closed by this trigger. The follow-ups do not get through regardless of the number of attempts.
Also, when I create the second trigger which blocks the follow-up ticket I do not include a "Channel" condition.
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Jill Godsey
Here is my trigger: Brand is No Reply, Ticket is Updated, Status Closed.
From Zendesk, I originated an email to my personal email address. From my email account, I replied to the message six times. The first response showed in Zendesk as closed, but the next five were marked New.
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Justin Federico
Is the "No Reply" brand present on the New tickets? In the ticket events, is there any difference between the first reply and the other 5 replies?
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Jill Godsey
I re-ran the test (I had deleted the first round of tickets) and got this result. The second and third reply don't have the same group/brand.
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Justin Federico
@...
You might try having both the "Ticket is Updated" and "Ticket is Created" under the "Any" conditions. This blocks all the replies for me.
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Justin Federico
Is there a way to prevent the blocked tickets from showing up in the users' activities?
The user can see the blocked ticket in their activities and is given the option to create a follow-up ticket. In our configuration, this leads to the follow-up ticket being blocked as well.
Edit: This can be done by creating a "dummy" brand and assigning the tickets to that brand in the triggers.
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Gulzar Shikalgar
Is there a way to block all incoming email channel tickets. We don't even want to create a ticket in Zendesk.
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Christine Diego
You cannot disable the email channel but a workaround to auto-close those tickets created via email channel is discussed in this article. Another option that you can use is the blocklist feature discussed in the same article.
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