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.
Set up a webhook
- Create a webhook.
- Create a trigger to notify the webhook with the ticket information. Under Actions add Notify webhook and select your webhook.
Change the requester
- To change the requester on the ticket, see the article: Updating ticket requesters.
Warning: Changing the requester of a ticket changes the ownership of that ticket. This means the new requester becomes the owner of the ticket and unless the original requester is CC'd in the ticket, this may cause confusion with your customers.
CC the individual
- 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.
Important: Once you add a user as a CC contact, that user will become part of the conversation and will receive all public notifications made in the ticket.
Create a PDF of the ticket
- Open the ticket you want to print. 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.
Side conversations
- Create a side conversation with the external email. For steps on creating a side conversation, see the article: Creating side conversations.
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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