Question
I need to forward tickets to a new external email outside of Zendesk. How can I forward tickets to an external mailbox? How do I forward emails from Zendesk to an external third party who is not a user on my Zendesk account?
Answer
There are multiple ways to send a message to a user who does not currently have a profile within Zendesk. The solution you choose will depend on your use case. The tabs below are ordered by increasing complexity.
CCs
Side conversations
PDFs
Change requester
Webhooks
CC the user
This is a simple solution.
CCing someone will add them to the ticket conversation. This does not forward a ticket the same way an email is forwarded but is an effective way of notifying external users about a ticket. Once CC'd, they will be able to see all public comments and replies in the ticket thread.
To CC someone on a ticket
- In a ticket, add the email address of the external user to the CC field. For steps on adding CCs to tickets, see the article: Adding CCs.
- Reply to the requester as normal.
- The CCed individual receives the updates by email.
Use side conversations
This is a simple solution.
Side conversations allow you to email external users from the ticket. This conversation is kept separate from the main ticket thread so any information you want to share from the ticket will need to be manually added to the side conversation. This can be useful if you need to have an extended conversation about a ticket with an external user and need to be able to easily reference it.
For steps on creating a side conversation, see the article: Creating side conversations.
Create a PDF of the ticket
This is a simple solution.
This process is more manual but is a good option for the occasional scenario where you need to notify external users about a ticket but want to do so completely outside of Zendesk.
To create a PDF of a ticket
- Open the ticket and click the ticket options menu in the upper right, select Print ticket.
- Select the option Print to PDF.
- Your account will create a PDF of the ticket. Attach the PDF to an email to forward the ticket.
Change the requester
This is a simple solution.
Changing the requester will replace the current requester on the ticket with someone new. The new requester would then receive all the ticket details when you next update the ticket with a comment. Changing the requester of a ticket changes the ownership of that ticket. This means the new requester becomes the ticket owner, and unless the original requester is CC'd in the ticket, they will not receive ticket updates.
To change the requester on the ticket, see the article: Updating ticket requesters.
Set up a webhook
This is a complex solution.
Webhooks are used by developers to send HTTP requests to a URL. Using webhooks, you can send ticket information from Zendesk to another system such as Slack or Asana. This option is best if you need to notify external users frequently and at scale.
Once your developer has created a webhook, they can use a trigger to send ticket information to the webhook using the action Notify webhook
8 Comments
This is probably the biggest oversight by Zendesk. Not being able to forward emails to coworkers that do not work in the Zendesk platform is very time consuming.
For example I have to snip the Zendesk customers inquiry and forward it to other coworkers that are still utilizing outlook in their day-to-day operations from my Outlook account.
The suggestions above are kind of worthless. Not one of my coworkers outside of Zendesk want to receive Zendesk survey's because I have changed them to the requester, or put them in a CC status. They do not want to see any of the other Triggers that have been put in place in Zendesk either.
Common Zendesk. Do better!!
Hi Josh, are email side conversations something that could work for your use case? Using side conversations in tickets
Granted, there are some limitations to that feature (as explained in the above article), but at least you wouldn't have to leave Zendesk in order to send the email (or make your recipient the Requester or a CC).
Isn’t side conversations a paid for addon though?
HI Darren,
Side Conversations are available in the Suite Professional and above plans, and as a Legacy Add-on for Support plans:
Since forwarding tickets to an external email address might share personal information (in the sense of data privacy, e.g. mentioned in GDPR) in an insecure manner, we are careful how to share ticket information beyond Zendesk.
Being able to forward the data from one or multiple Zendesk tickets to an external email address would IMHO increase the risk of sharing personal information in an insecure manner.
Currently, we either export the ticket as a PDF (or use the API to export multiple tickets as JSON) or create a new light agent account, so a non-agent can leave an internal note in the ticket(s). Because for us, even the Side Conversation is a risk, since you can embed the ticket content in the email message created and on top of that it will reveal the name of the end-user.
I have our company's employees in Zendesk as end-users and we have each users manager in a user field for the user. I would like to know how can i CC, or email their manager. I wanted to use a target, but i can't put {{ticket.requester.manager_email}} there. Any workaround?
Does a thread exist about this someone in terms of feature request?
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