Question

My agents want to forward personal emails they receive from customers to create tickets. How do I set up this workflow?

Answer

Agent forwarding allows agents to automatically create tickets from forwarded emails with the original sender as the ticket requester. To ensure agent forwarding works correctly, fulfill these four criteria:

  • Turn on Enable email forwarding on the Agents settings page
  • The user who forwards emails into Zendesk must be an agent or admin
  • The email subject must include fw, fwd, or the foreign language equivalent
  • In the body of the email, the From: text and the email address of the requester must be on the same line
Note: Comments from the agent become private comments on the new ticket. Agent comments don't support attachments and inline images. This option applies only to ticket creation from forwarded emails.

The most common issue with agent forwarding occurs when Zendesk sets the agent who forwards the email as the ticket requester instead of the customer. This occurs when the From: line in the body of the email displays only the customer's name and not the customer's email address. A common cause for this problem is Microsoft Outlook, which strips this email address from the body of the message. This problem can occur with other email clients as well.

Note: Agent forwarding is for agents who forward end-user requests, not requests from other agents.

In the example image below, the From: line lacks the end user Katie's email address. As a result, the agent Bonnie becomes the ticket requester of this forwarded email instead of the end user Katie.

Example of email stripped of email address.png

To resolve this issue, use the #requester Mail API command to set the ticket requester correctly. Add this text command at the top of the forwarded message, followed by the customer's email address. This command sets the ticket requester in Zendesk as the customer instead of the agent.

example_requester_api_command.png

Note: An email admin can configure settings to prevent the removal of the original sender's email address from the message body.
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