Configuring CC and follower permissions

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.

When you enable CCs, you are allowing internal user (your agents and admins) and external users (your customers or end users) to copy other users when replying to ticket notifications by email. You are also allowing internal users to copy users from the ticket interface.

When you enable followers, you are allowing internal users to "follow" tickets. This means that the follower receives email notifications about updates to the ticket, but their names and email addresses do not appear in email notifications to other people on the ticket. They remain invisible to external end users.

To use CCs and followers, at a bare minimum, you must select the check boxes that enable CCs and followers. However, after that, it's up to you decide how to customize CCs and followers based on your unique situation. You may need to use all of the options described in this article, or only some.

This article includes these sections:

• Setting permissions for CCs and followers
• Changing the default comment privacy for end user CCs
• Comments by users not explicitly added to the ticket will be flagged
• Using placeholders with CCs and followers
• Changing the requester

Related articles:

• Using CCs, @mentions, and followers
• CC and followers resources

Setting permissions for CCs and followers

Once you complete initial setup for CCs and followers, described here, you may not be completely done configuring your account for CCs and followers. You may need to complete some additional tasks to further customize CCs and followers. Be sure to review Getting started with CCs and followers for admins, which includes a complete checklist of all of the tasks you may need to perform in order to customize CCs and followers based on your needs

To set permissions for CCs and followers

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Settings.
2. In the CCs and followers section, select the Enable followers and Enable CCs check boxes.
3. Configure the settings you want to use for CCs and followers and then click Save tab.

Setting	Description
Enable followers	Allows agents to add followers to tickets from the ticket interface. Adds the Followers field to the ticket interface.
Follower email subject Follower email template Revert to default	Type the text that you want to include in the subject line and body of email notifications to followers. Placeholders are allowed (see Using placeholders). You can use Revert to default to replace text in Follower email template (but not in Follower email subject) with default text. All of these option are only available when Enable followers is selected. For more information about the follower email template, see Customizing default email notifications to CCs and followers.
Enable CCs	Allows agents and end users to add other users as CCs on tickets. Adds the CC line to the ticket interface.
CCs and followers blocklist	You can prevent specific users from becoming CCs and followers by entering their email address or domain name into a blocklist. Use spaces to separate the addresses. This option is only available when Enable CCs is selected. The CCs and followers blocklist prevents addresses from being added as a CC, but it does not prevent them from being ticket requesters. Users on the CC blocklist can still submit their own tickets with other addresses CC'd. To completely block an address, use the account blocklist.
Enable light agents to become CCs on tickets	Enables ticket requesters, agents, and existing CCs to add light agents and contributors as either CCs or followers on tickets. When enabled, light agents and contributors can be copied on tickets from the ticket interface and from ticket notifications. However, light agents and contributors are not allowed to add or remove themselves from the CC list—this must be done by another agent who isn't a light agent or contributor. Regardless of whether this setting is enabled or disabled, when followers are enabled, light agents can be added as followers, and they can add or remove followers from tickets.
Enable CCs for end users on Help Center	Allows signed-in end users to copy (CC) users in these places: Ticket email replies Help Center on new support requests using the ticket form Help Center in existing requests in My Activities If this option is enabled, but the Anybody can submit tickets option is disabled, non-registered users who are added as CCs, will not be copied on the ticket and they will not receive an email notification about the ticket.  Note: This feature is not available on trial accounts.
Automatically make an agent CC a follower	When an agent is CCed on a ticket via email or the ticket interface, they are also automatically added as a follower. Note: If the agent is CCed from a ticket form in your Help Center or via the API instead, then they are not also added as a follower.

Changing the default comment privacy for end user CCs

By default, if an end user CC replies to a ticket notification from email using Reply (instead of Reply all), the reply becomes a private comment on the ticket. However, if the Make email comments from CCed end users public (not recommended) option is enabled, the behavior changes and the reply becomes a public comment instead. (The requester must be included in the reply; otherwise, the comment will be flagged as a potential risk.)

We don’t recommend using the Make email comments from CCed end users public (not recommended) option because a requester might see content that wasn’t meant for them. For more information about email replies, see Understanding when email replies become public or private comments.

To change the default comment privacy for end user CCs

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Settings.
2. In the Comments section, select Make email comments from CCed end users public (not recommended).
   Note: This setting is only available if CCs is enabled.
3. Scroll down and click Save tab.

For information about other ways you can change the default privacy of ticket comments, see Changing the default privacy of ticket comments.

Comments by users not explicitly added to the ticket will be flagged

If an unknown user, who was not added to the ticket by the requester or an agent as a CC, updates an existing ticket, the comment is flagged and added to the comment stream as a private note. Most likely the email was forwarded by the requester to an unknown user or to an unverified email account (such as a secondary email address), and then replied to.

The flag brings attention to the potential risk, without affecting the workflow of your end-users and agents. The flag appears as a warning icon beside the first comment in the ticket. The ticket is not flagged in any ticket views. You can hover over the warning flag to get more information.

To handle a flagged comment

• If you are comfortable with the comment, ignore the warning flag and handle the ticket as you normally would. You cannot remove the flag.
• To allow the new user to comment publicly on the ticket, an agent, the requester, or a CC on the ticket must add the user as a CC. The Make email comments from CCed end users public (not recommended) option must also be enabled. See Changing the default comment privacy for end user CCs for why we don't recommend enabling this option.
• If you are not comfortable with the comment, you can raise a concern with your manager or consider temporarily suspending the user.

  Depending on the nature of the comment, you might want to raise a concern about the ticket with your manager. Also, you can consider temporarily suspending the user, to prevent them from submitting more tickets, until you can investigate and feel comfortable enough to reinstate the user (see Suspending a user).

Note: If you continue to see flagged comments by the same user, and you think that person might be trying to gain unauthorized access to Zendesk Support, please contact the Zendesk Support Team.

Using placeholders with CCs and followers

If you want to list the names and email addresses of CCs and followers in ticket notifications, you can do so by adding these placeholders to your business rules (triggers, automations, and macros):

• ticket.cc_names—Returns the name of CCs on the ticket.
• ticket.follower_names—Returns the name of followers on the ticket.
• email_cc_names—Returns the names of CCs on the ticket.

If you are using the new CCs and follower experience and you are adding or updating your placeholders, we recommend using the email_cc_names placeholder instead of tickets.cc_names. They do the same thing, but email_cc_names is newer.

For more information about CC and follower placeholders and where exactly you can use them, see Creating business rules for CCs and followers and Customizing default email notifications to CCs and followers.

Changing the requester

If allowed by the administrator, agents can change the requester on a ticket. Otherwise, they cannot.

To allow agents to change the requester

1. In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Settings.
2. Scroll down the Requester section.
3. Select the Agents can change requester check box.
   Note: This option only appears if you are using the new CCs and followers experience. f you aren't using the new experience, select the Tickets > CCs > Enable CCs on tickets setting instead.
4. Scroll down and click Save tab.