Question
I want to prevent my new customers from receiving welcome email notifications. Can I disable the welcome email notification for customers?
Answer
You cannot disable welcome email notifications when your help center is enabled, and the account creation is initiated by the customer. You can only disable the welcome notification when the end-user profile is created by an admin or an agent. If your help center is not enabled, end-user welcome notifications are deactivated.
If don't want one particular client to receive the welcome email, follow these steps:
- Disable the notification for agent or admin created users
- Add the customer to Zendesk
- Revert the change in the first step
For more information about the welcome email notification, see the article: Customizing the user welcome email.
Note: The welcome email notification is sent based on if your Support instance is open, closed, or restricted. For example, if your instance is open, and users are not required to register, a welcome email will not be sent. More details can be found in the article: Enabling anyone to submit tickets.
38 Comments
Hi Team,
This is ridiculous that the welcome email cannot be disabled for clients that user single sign on in another platform to manage help center access. We unknowingly were sending emails to new users to set up a new user via authentication we didn't manage.
This article is a little confusing. I was able to disable these welcome emails by going to Settings > Customers and then unchecking "ask users to register".
I am not sure why this is enabled by default. End users (customers) were receiving the following message:
"You have been invited to join Zendesk Support for {{company name}}. Zendesk Support is your workspace to support and communicate with customers."
Hope this is helpful to someone!
Hi Zendesk team!
I would agree here with Jimmy. Upon migration of our users, we sent out a number of these emails unknowingly. Enabling the ability for SSO and bypassing a confusing welcome email would be a far better customer experience. The customer portal is a great feature but getting the customer in is a very messy process.
Similar issues here.
I've been running a Help Center for nearly 2 years now and only today found out that if I try to initiate contact with someone who's not already on our Zendesk system, instead of my message, the recipient just gets that wretched "Please click the link below to create a password and sign-in."
I don't even know how many times we've unwittingly sent this to someone who was actually looking for help! And I know it's happened before!
Sometimes an issue gets logged on our production site, and then our agents go collect the user email address and try send an email to the reporting user and resolve the issue in a Zendesk ticket. Now take a moment to digest that less than 1% of our user base has a profile on our Zendesk suite. This explains our absurdly low response rate for issues from those channels!
We are not interested in having users sign up for accounts on our Zendesk platform.
We have no desire for comments from our users in our support articles.
We absolutely do not need our users faffing around with a profile just to receive support emails.
And we certainly don't need to confuse the hell out of our users by asking them to create a second account in addition to the one they set up on our production site. (Which also has happened! I ended up in the theme code for our Guide to rip out the buttons that invite users to create an account.)
We only want to use Zendesk as
This forced feature is seriously pants and I'm strongly considering moving away from Zendesk as there seems to be no way around this.
Update 3 days later
Upon reviewing this "feature" we have found out that our process to honour an individual's privacy right to erasure has been invalidated because of this. The process is currently
That last one was supposed to be the user following the instructions to delete their own account, but instead it's a GDPR violation.
This is really stupid. I tripped over this because had users visiting one of our help centers that was activated but gated to make it easier for us to review it across my company but I have it gated so you have to sign in. I thought gating it would prevent anyone outside of my company from actually viewing anything since they don't have Zendesk accounts. It's one thing to give customers this option but it's completely unacceptable that this is forced on us, especially considering the amount of money we spend on Zendesk.
It's not even just the fact that our users were apparently accessing things we didn't want them to view, it's the fact that the emails are branded from Zendesk which can be confusing too.
I'll tell you, I was a huge Zendesk fan years ago and I still prefer it to the competition but you guys have made some really odd choices in recent years. I know you guys will do nothing about this since there's just 4 of us here in the comments but this is really absurd and should be addressed. I guarantee you there are many others who don't even realize this is happening.
Thanks for the feedback all.
I wanted to let you all know that we're looking into this. I'll circle back with an update when I have one.
Adding to the comments above. We currently have a large number of unverified users, because they've ignored the spam-looking email coming from Zendesk.
We have been told to 'just' make an API call for all users and change the is_verified:false to true.
This is not only time consuming but also prone to error when we have thousands of users in this case. How easy would it be to 'just' implement a setting to allow us to choose not to have to verify users if we wish to do so?
Like highlighted by Adrian V above:
It's not more complex than that, and yet we've had to spend hours sourcing articles and workarounds to address such a simple use case.
I'm really hoping there's some traction on this because just 28 minutes ago my team received another prompt asking us to reach out to a user who's having trouble with a specific resource on our product site.
The desired use case here is
But I just checked and this end user has never submitted a ticket before, so now I'm left to decide if we should
My support team is unable to perform the very task that we had hoped Zendesk would enable them to do and now I'm forced to ask IT to give us access to a new email inbox so we can conduct this transaction outside of Zendesk.
Huge plus to all of the above. We had no idea we were auto-sending these emails. I deleted the copy within the Zendesk settings and now my suspicion is that the customer gets a blank-bodied message. I haven't been able to reproduce it.
Please keep me updated on changes to this.
Hopefully the last update from me before this is either fixed or I have our support center services relocated to another provider.
If anyone else is struggling to reach out to their users because of the above, we found a hilarious and awful work around.
We have two user groups. First is 20-30k external, public, users. They reach out to us for help with live streaming or app issues. Second is our 260 staff members at our campuses. We just began utilizing SSO with Azure/O365 and are only interested in our staff logging into the portal to check on tickets. Our public users should never be prompted to create an account. Their interaction with us is completed across an email chain. We had someone open a ticket yesterday on their Apple TV streaming issue and they received a welcome email. They hit the link and got an SSO error because their Comcast email address isn't in my tenant. Well of course it isn't, so now we are trying to figure out if we turn off SSO or just change the welcome message to something like "DON'T CLICK ON THIS LINK UNLESS YOU ARE ON STAFF"
If we move our documentation somewhere else I assume we could turn off the Help Center. Can staff still see their tickets if we turn off Help Center?
We also use SSO and being unable to disable these very confusing prompts is causing all kinds of havoc for our end users and the IT team. We must be able to turn this feature off, please!
Hi all,
Firstly, thank you for your patience.
Though I can't commit to a date yet, I do have good news. We are going to add a setting that allows admins to stop these welcome emails from being sent. I'll circle back here to announce when we know when this will be released.
Looking forward to an update here. We want to make communication with our customers as clear as possible, and unfortunately the welcome email does confuse things for new users who simply want a response to their question, rather than to sign up for a zendesk account.
We can second this! Thank you.
2023 and this is still the Help Center behavior with no option to stop welcome emails. In my case I had to disable the Help Center entirely.
We had to move our public-facing support to FreshDesk and kept our staff support in Zendesk since they could log in via the SSO. So frustrating.
That's great news Brett Elliott! Looking forward to a release date when you have it :)
DITTO- ALL THIS FROM Adrian V. We second this!!!
"We are not interested in having users sign up for accounts on our Zendesk platform.
We have no desire for comments from our users in our support articles.
And we certainly don't need to confuse the hell out of our users by asking them to create a second account in addition to the one they set up on our production site.
We only want to use Zendesk as
We are also strongly considering moving away from Zendesk as there seems to be no way around this.
TheAnalyst PRO Support Team, from my understanding, you can turn off your Guide instance or move to another solution. Faced with the same choice, we selected FreshService. You can turn off all emails in their suite and build your email workflows. Zendesk won't give you a discount on your current licensing and will slowly respond to your emails if you ask for relief. This has also opened our eyes to many other issues with the Zendesk suite that FreshService doesn't have. We were pleasantly surprised by their pricing too...
This issue caused an unnecessary disruption for our customers. Hoping this comment will help folks down the line.
Brett Elliott Following this thread after encountering similar issues to the ones people are mentioning, we don't want to confuse customers by asking them to unneccessarily create a profile. About 6 months ago you posted an update that Zendesk is working on allowing admins to disable this welcome email. Has that been implemented yet?
Hi Nicole,
I've moved on from the team who owns this issue. Let me introduce you to the wonderful James Hanley who will be able to provide an update on this change.
James Hanley What is the update on this? Like many others, we are considering leaving Zendesk as a result of the endless delays on this issue and the security issues around the inability to filter attachments by type or extension. We hope to hear something soon. Thank you.
Hello folks, firstly my apologies that you're struggling with this, You have my assurances that we will get to the bottom of it.
I'm currently investigating what is happening, the welcome emails have been around for a long time in Zendesk, but this thread is relatively new. We need to understand if this is as its always been, if something has changed, and if so was it intentional or accidental.
I will provide an update to this thread by the end of the week, even if the update is that we're still investigating.
Thanks,
James
James Hanley, thanks, but I am surprised you think this problem is new. I have seen people asking about this since 2019. Additionally, I have discussed with several folks over there that this is a known challenge, and we keep getting told you are "addressing" it. Even Brett said they were addressing it by finally allowing us to turn them off, so this must have made the development cycles and roadmap months ago.
We do external support for 20-30k people using our mobile app and internal support for 280 staff members. The staff accesses the Help Center for KB and their tickets, but the public does not need to. We don't want them to have access to the site; our interaction with them is completed via email. For us, it all started when we turned on SSO for our internal staff. A few days later someone reached out and asked why they couldn't create an account. I asked for some extra info, and they sent me an email I had never seen before and an SSO error they got from trying to create an account. I dove in a bit further and found an email that we couldn't turn off and had limited ability to change the message. When I reached out, ZD told me the only way to keep that from happening was to turn off the Help Center, or log in as an admin, and enter every possible user of our app as a customer before they reached out, or stop using ZD. Since anyone can technically download our app and our staff needed access to tickets and KB we decided to start moving away from ZD. The problem is ZD is holding us hostage and won't even give us a reduction on our monthly bill until you guys "get to the bottom of it"
Thanks @... this information is really helpful. I have a few followup questions, so I'm going to create a ticket on your behalf so that we can continue the conversation going.
If anybody else following this thread is also able to provide this level of information, I will link the tickets together, and it will greatly help accelerate getting to the bottom of the problem here.
Thanks,
James
Thank you James Hanley. Please feel free to include me in the discussion.
Hello folks,
I wanted to provide an update to this thread before the week is out.
We have created an engineering task for one of our teams to investigate if we're sending welcome emails to user accounts when SSO is activated. It is our position that we shouldn't be sending these emails, so if we can find an erroneous line of code causing this, we will make a code change.
To help, we need more occurrences of when this is occurring, what the setup is of your account, and what combination of auth and access settings you have. For anyone following this thread, if you would like to help get to the bottom of this, please leave a comment, and I will raise a ticket for your account and be in touch via email.
Thanks,
James
Happy to help with that data collection.
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