The updated CCs and followers experience makes the behavior for when and how CCs are included on a Zendesk ticket more consistent and expected. This article describes how to migrate to the updated CCs and followers experience.
You can easily check to see if you need to update your account or if it's already
using the current experience. In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Settings. If you see Set up CCs and Followers, follow the instructions in
this article to update your account. If this setting is already enabled,
you'll see CCs and Followers and you don't need to update your
account.
About migrating to CCs and followers
Previously, the behavior for CCs you included on a Zendesk ticket varied depending on whether the person you copied was an internal user (someone within your company) or an external user (a customer or other person outside your organization). It also depended on whether your reply to a ticket was an internal note or a public comment. This caused confusion.
Zendesk tickets have changed to include both followers and CCs. See the following illustration.
![](https://zen-marketing-documentation.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/en/cc_admin_onboarding_old_new.png)
When you migrate, Zendesk tickets change to include both followers and CCs. You have better options to manage public and private comments within conversation threads. For example:
- Both agents and end users can add and remove CCs just like in email.
- Agents who are followers can receive updates on the ticket without exposing their identity to end users. Agents who are added as CCs will have their email addresses exposed.
- Followers receive notifications when ticket updates occur, and they can view and create internal notes.
For a complete list of documentation about CCs and followers, see CC and followers resources.
Using the migration wizard
To help you migrate your account for CCs and followers, Zendesk Support provides a migration wizard to help you update your account. When you migrate, you can use the wizard to:
- Automatically update business rules (triggers, automations, and macros) in your account.
- Receive guidance on how to manually update business rules, including a downloadable list of the affected rules you need to change.
In most cases, Zendesk recommends using the wizard to automatically update business rules. If you are not sure which method to use, you can choose the manual method and review the list of rules you need to change. Then, if you decide the automatic method will work for you, you can restart the wizard to automatically make the updates.
To run the migration wizard:
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Settings.
- Scroll down to the CCs section.
If the CCs and Followers feature is available on your account, you’ll see a highlighted section.
- In the Enhanced CCs and Followers Experience box, click Set up CCs and Followers. A page appears with an introduction to CCs and followers.
- Take a moment to read the description, then click Next to continue. A business rules page appears with information on how your business rules will be impacted.
- Click Download to review a list of affected rules for
your account.
Use this list to make sure all the rules on your account are included. Contact Zendesk if you have any questions about the rules listed.
Important: Zendesk recommends you keep a backup of the affected rules list in a safe location. It can be useful if you ever need to rollback your account and remove CCs and followers. If you Automatically change your account, account admins will receive an email with a link to the affected rules list. - Review the list of recommended changes to your account. Some
changes happen automatically when you enable CCs and
followers (any Add CC action changes to Add
follower). Other changes require you to run the
migration wizard or make the changes manually.
The wizard displays the following summary of account rules that should be updated.
For each trigger and automation that includes action Email user - (requester):
- Change action to Notify by: User Email > (requester and CCs).
- Remove condition Requester > Is not > (current user) if it exists.
- Under Meet ALL of the following conditions, add condition Ticket: Comment > Is > Public.
- Select how you want to make changes to your account.
If you are not sure which method to use, choose Manually change.
- To manually change the affected rules, select Manually change, then click Next.
- To automatically change the affected rules,
select Automatically change, then click
Next.
Changes made automatically by the migration script will match the changes described in the “Recommended changes” section of the wizard.
An activation page appears with a list of items to enable.
- Select the items you want to enable for your account:
- Enable followers: All tickets in your account will include a Followers field for agents, light agents, and admins.
-
Enable CCs: All tickets in your
account will include a CC field for Public
comments.
- Enable light agents to become CCs on tickets: When CCs are enabled, you can also enable light agents to be added as CCs or followers on tickets, not just as followers. If this setting is not selected, light agents can only be added as followers.
- Automatically make an agent CC a follower: When an agent is added as a CC on a ticket, they will be added automatically as a follower.
You can modify these settings later if desired.
- Acknowledge your changes, then click Save and Activate.
- For Automatic updates, the migration wizard will enable the items you selected for your account. It will also update your triggers and automations. Automatic updates may take several minutes. When the changes are complete, you’ll receive an email with a link to a file that describes the changes.
- For Manual updates, your account will be upgraded to include the settings you choose to activate, but you’ll need to manually update your triggers, automations, and macros. See Manually updating business rules for more information.
After migration
After migration, if the new CCs experience is enabled, you should see a new Followers field in your tickets (beneath the Assignee field) and a new CC field in the Public reply area.
When an existing ticket is updated, legacy CCs on the ticket are automatically split into followers (for agents and light agents) and new CCs (for users who aren't agents).
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Settings.
- Navigate to the new CCs section. The name has changed From CCs to CCs and Followers.
- Choose the settings that make sense for your workflow.
For example:
- The Only agents can add CCs setting has been replaced. Use the new Enable CCs setting instead to enable (or disable) CCs for all types of users.
- There's a new Requester section in Admin > Settings > Tickets, that includes an Agent can change the requester setting. Previously, enabling CCs on tickets automatically allowed agents to change the requester. Now, you can enable or disable this setting independently from CCs.
Additional settings are available, including a CC blocklist to prevent the email addresses and domains you specify from being added as CC. For more information, see Configuring CCs and followers permissions.
- If you have email templates, check to make sure the placeholders work as expected.
14 comments
Dana B
Hi Everyone, We are looking to migrate to cc's within the next few days. After reading the concerns some of you have noted, can you please let me know your lesson's learned, best practices, etc that you have from the migration? We are not looking to add followers as I believe that may cause more confusion - risks outweigh the benefits.
Please advise.
Thank you!
0
Chris Malarky
Hi @..., I can tell you that the CC Blacklist bug we found when we made the switch has been fixed.
I'm still not sure I would make the switch again, given the choice - we still seem to end up with agents in the CC list, even when they are already following (I *think* that happens when customers re-add their account reps on CC as they think they are missing - not sure there's much we can do about that though).
0
Dana B
Thanks, @.... What I see as the only possible benefit is that the agents will see exactly who they are cc'ing on the email. Is that correct in my assumption? Are there any other benefits? What are the negatives?
I would appreciate any feedback.
Thank you!
0
CJ Johnson
Yikes!![](/hc/user_images/bLXacxRP4h1u_r0AaH-uew.png)
Doesn't this suggestion:
Literally end up breaking all those notifications, because of this issue? https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056731174
Why would this be the recommended change when it would cause all those triggers to stop sending email notifications in a bunch of contexts?
0
Mike Nicholls
Hi there.
Any ideas and best practice for multi branding and CCs?
Ideally i would like to have the ability only available for one brand and not show the options of edit/adding of requester and CCs.
Thanks for any advice.
0
DJ Buenavista Jr.
Thank you for reaching out to Zendesk Support.
In regards to your concern, the following setting is universal. Once enabled, it will be applied to all brands in the account. Unfortunately, at the moment it cannot be set to only a specific brand.
You can only add specific users to the CCs and followers blocklist to prevent them from becoming CC's. You can check our article, Getting started with CC and followers for admins for more information and best practices on how to utilize CC.
Thank you and have a wonderful day ahead!
Kind regards,
0
Sydney Neubauer
There is also one missing aspect to the migration wizard - it added in extra conditions to the triggers (comment is public). This actually broke a lot of our triggers (600) that we needed to go back and manually update.
It would be good to know if there is a way to exclude certain updates from the migration wizard as either way, we still needed to update 600 triggers
1
DJ Buenavista Jr.
Thank you for reaching out to Zendesk Support.
In regards to this one, there's an option to use the migration wizard manually. This will give you the option to review the list of business rules you wanted to change or implement. It was also recommended to backup your business rules when using the automatic method in case you need to roll back.
The following added extra condition is due to the addition of the Followers field and a new CC field in the Public reply area.
Thank you and have a wonderful day ahead!
Kind regards,
0
Stewart Armbrecht
We have not migrated to this feature. Is there any documentation that would explain the legacy functionality around CCs? Specifically, when the system decides to send an email and to whom? We are seeing that some CCs are not getting emails and do not know why. Understanding this is important for us to understand what impact the migration will have. Thanks!
0
Dane
The old behavior is included on About migrating to CCs and followers while the new one is discussed in About CCs, @mentions, and followers.
0
Robert Matthews
Is there a date where the migration to CC's and Followers must be done by? Will the legacy CC functionality be unsupported at some point?
0
Hiedi Kysther
Hi Robert Matthews,
If your account is created before May 2019, you can migrate to CC's and Followers anytime. You can still use your Legacy CC feature however there may be some features that are not available to you. For example, with Legacy CC you can only CC 20 end-users while CCs and Followers will allow you to CC 48 end-users. You can also check here for more information: Using CCs, followers, and @mentions.
Regards,
Hiedi Kysther
0
Ben Fulton
This migration broke emails to CCs on shared tickets for us, and I can't find any mention of shared ticket behavior in these docs. Is this a known issue, and do you know if there is a workaround?
This appears to be the situation:
So we appear to be left in a situation where it's not possible to notify CCs on a shared ticket on instance X. Since there is no rule in email notifications in triggers for "CCs only", there's no way to build a trigger that will send to CCs and not the requester. Is there a solution that we are missing?
Note that in this case, we have upgraded instance X to the new CC/Follower experience, but not Y. I assume that does not matter, since notification of the CCs for copy A would only happen on instance X. Is there any special handling of shared tickets that requires both instances to be upgraded to the same CC/Follower experience?
0
Christine
I see that you already raised a ticket with us related to this matter. Kindly check your email for updates.
Thank you!
0