Once a ticket is closed, it cannot be altered or reopened. However, any response to a closed ticket from any channel will automatically create a follow-up ticket. This creates a new ticket that references the closed ticket and pulls data from the original ticket into the new ticket.
About follow-up tickets
When a follow-up ticket is created, it includes most field values and properties from the original ticket, with a few exceptions.
The following are not pulled from the original ticket:
- Comments
- Priority
- Type
- Assignee or Group
The channel for follow-up tickets is Closed Ticket (for business rules and ticket events), or Web (for reporting). See Explore recipe: Filtering for follow-up tickets for more information on including follow-up tickets in your Explore reports.
When someone replies to a side conversation that belongs to a closed or archived ticket, a follow-up ticket is automatically created (see Understanding follow-up tickets for side conversations).
Follow-up tickets don't inherit skills. Instead, skills are applied to the follow-up ticket based on your routing rules when the follow-up ticket is created (see Understanding how skills are applied to follow-up tickets).
To create a follow-up for a closed ticket
- Locate the closed ticket that you want to create a follow-up for. You can do this by locating the requester first and then selecting one of their closed tickets, by searching for the ticket number, or by creating a view for closed tickets and locating the ticket there.
- When you view a closed ticket, you'll see the option to create a follow-up ticket.
- Click Create follow-up.
A new ticket is created with the same data as the original ticket, excluding the Priority and Type fields.
Note: Follow-up tickets created on or after April 12, 2022 are now populated with only the CCs included on the email that initiated the follow-up ticket. This more accurately reflects the intention of the user who sent the email. Any follow-up tickets created prior to this date will include all CCs from the original ticket. - Update the ticket data as needed and then click Submit to save the new ticket. The requester will receive an email notification for the new ticket. If you haven't modified the standard triggers of your account, this notification is created by the Notify requester of received request trigger.
The new ticket is marked as a follow-up, as shown here:
33 Comments
When an end-user emails us with a ticket, that we solve and closes, if they reply back as a follow-up, a new follow-up ticket is created (they have one email thread) and we see in the follow-up ticket the entire email thread. If an Agent however manually creates the follow-up ticket, when they post their first public reply back to the Agent none of the original ticket exchange carries forward to the end-user, it is a new email entirely to them.
Is there anyway to change this?
Hi Joshua,
It sounds like what you described – the previous thread being included in the follow-up ticket created when the end-user replies to a closed ticket – depends on the email client and the behavior of the end-user. There is an option on the end-user's side, as with most email clients, to append the existing thread when you compose a new email. This is mostly likely why the new ticket created contains the thread from the previous conversation.
But, by default, there's no option to have the original thread be included in the new ticket when it's the agent who created the follow-up. The email notification that gets sent to the end-user will appear to be an entirely new ticket. There are no placeholders that could render the comment data from the closed ticket when creating a follow-up. I'm afraid the only workaround is to manually paste/add the old comments to the new one; or, to indicate in follow-up message which original ticket number/id this was a follow-up to. You may also build a separate notification trigger that will fire only for follow-up tickets (just use the condition Channel > Closed ticket in the trigger).
Thanks Joshua!
Hi,
In one of my groups at my organisation we frequently find cases where we need to follow up after tickets are put in the closed state.
On our agent side this is fine, we have a reference to the old ticket
On our customer side we need to have the ability to refer to what has been said before in this conversation, in our environment these tickets have a very long lifetime, we get a booking for one of our hotels 1 or even 2 year a head of time and at certain times we need to go back to that conversation again and again. Having the ability to have the full context of the conversation would make the communication easier.
I understand now that this is poorly supported in Zendesk, and that by it self is a disappointment for us as a new Zendesk customer.
As we are trying to work around this issue, we surely must be able to resend/export or grab the conversation history somehow, I mean surely in typical support cases you may come a cross difficult cases where the customer denies that he has said certain things, how do you proof to him that you have something on record, if the ticket is already closed?
Best regards
Oskar
Hi Oskar,
We just started exploring this a bit more. If we create a side conversation 'email' from the closed ticket, we can then grab all the public/internal replies we want to communicate back to the requester, with our new message. I created a trigger where Channel is Closed, Side Conversation is Created, Replied To, Re-Opened, and the action is Status is Open, which forces a follow-up ticket; however, the follow-up ticket is a side conversation. It's very awkward but we just started trying to find better ways. We do not like the suggestion to copy and past images into the new ticket and lose the follow-up link of the ticket.
We are still exploring this as I can imagine a complicated follow-up in the way I just presented can get quite difficult to manage.
Thought I would share...
-JB
Hi Joshua,
Thanks for sharing.
Ideally it should just be an option to create a follow-up ticket with all comments from the closed ticket. And for that matter this one way functionality of Closed tickets unable to be re-opened smells like technical dept. I sure hope that Zendesk can address this.
Currently I'm looking to buy yet another app from the Zendesk Marketplace to fix something that should definitely be a built in feature. This extra cost is starting to add up :)
Oh and the app I'm looking at is called Clone (https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/clone/)
Regards
Oskar
Hi everybody,
I am looking for a way to automate the adjustment of the Ticket Form based on keywords found in the body e-mail. The issue is that oftentimes when a user/customer follows up our conversation (usually on an old ticket), the ticket form on the incoming ticket will automatically set to "General Inquiries" which will, in turn, trigger certain information on Tags, Issue, and Priority.
The ticket form on the follow-up ticket is different than the one that appeared on the original/initial ticket. What I need here is to keep the ticket form the same as it was. Let's say, if it was "Account Issue" then it should also be "Account Issue" on the follow-up ticket and not "General Inquiries" because both forms trigger a different set of information, most importantly, different priorities.
Is there a way to keep the ticket form the same or to adjust the ticket form automatically according to the keyword found in the body e-mail so that we can attend to tickets based on issue categorization (ticket form) and priority?
Thank you.
Hey Fakhri,
Perhaps you could use a combination of a couple of triggers for this - one to add a tag based on the form used on the ticket (Condition: Form is Account Issue; Action: Add tag account_issue_form), and another to set the form based on that tag (Condition: Tag is account_issue_form; Action: Form is Account Issue). Tickets created as follow-ups from closed tickets carry the existing tags over, so I think this could work.
Good luck :)
Lisa
Hi Lisa,
thank you for the suggestion! I would definitely give it a try and see how it pans out.
Regards,
Fakhri
How do follow-up tickets work for messaging?
Hi Chad,
The Messaging tickets work the same as normal tickets. If the requester replies on a Messaging ticket that is in closed status, it'll create a follow-up ticket as described in this article.
Regards,
Adrian
If two tickets have been merged, will a follow up be created for both of the originals?
Hello Joshua, thanks for your question!
I was able to test this myself and I can confirm that there will not be any duplicate tickets created. If two tickets are merged and a follow-up is created, it will still be linked to just one of the tickets, specifically the one that has the original email thread that was replied to after the ticket was closed. This will NOT create two tickets instead of just one.
I hope this was helpful!
Hi, I just wanted to check back in with you guys and see if anything has changed, I would love to be able to resume conversations in closed tickets.
Having the whole message history still in the communication thread is very important in many of our cases.
There are basically two way for this to make sens
Best regards
Oskar
Hello. How can I enable the possibility for a user to create follow-up tickets, on tickets which are created by another user in their organisation?
Currently the end of the ticket just says:
For the user's own tickets, the text is:
I think this is the "t (translation) helper", with the key "status" which is doing this?
https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/help_center/help-center-templates/helpers/#t-translation-helper
From requests_page.hbs
<th>{{#link 'requests' sort_by='updated_at'}}{{t 'last_activity'}}{{/link}}</th><th>
{{t 'status'}}
</th>
Out of curiosity, do you have the organization sharing settings set to allow organization members to add comments to each others' tickets/
Dave, yes both on organisation and user level.
Hi Niclas,
I was able to do some research into the possibilities of creating follow ups from other users' tickets in your organization. It looks like the only way to create a follow up from someone else's ticket at this time is to be CC'd on the original ticket and then reply to that ticket's email thread.
How are triggers rules implemented on Follow Up tickets because the information like
can not be inherited by follow up tickets which are created by users replying emails?
What can we do to automatically trigger such tickets into correct groups?
The best work flow on such tickets will start from the point when the original ticket is still open. You will have to tag these tickets based on group, organization or anything you prefer. Once this ticket has been closed and a followup was created, it will also inherit those tags that you can then utilize to route it back to the group or assignee that original handled the ticket. Please check the simple query I created. I hope this helps!
Is there a way to remove the tags so that the follow up ticket doesn't retain all of the tags of the previous ticket? Its often the case that the customer responded to the same thread but with a different issue.
It's possible to create a trigger that uses the Set Tags option to remove all previous tag values and replace them with one or more new values. Be very careful about when to use Set Tags, because outside of this use case, erasing all of a ticket's previous tags can wreak havoc on your tickets (usually you'd want to use Add Tags to append one or more tags to the existing tag list, but this could be an exception): How can I reset drop-down field values for follow-up tickets?
Hi,
Is there a way to automatically change the follow-up ticket requester to the user who performed the action, not the original requester of the closed ticket? We need this condition to create a follow-up ticket from a closed side conversation ticket (for internal purposes and not involve end-users). Thanks.
Hello,
I'm creating a trigger that I want to fire when an email follow-up ticket is created, but I don't want it to fire when the follow-up ticket is created by an agent in the Support agent interface. What condition indicates that the ticket is being created in the support agent interface?
Note: we cannot use "Current User IS Agent" because we do want the trigger to fire when the ticket being created by an agent via their email (outside of the support agent interface).
Thank you!
Allow us to reopen / edit closed tickets please. Please I'm begging.
If I create a follow-up ticket from a closed ticket via the Instagram DMs channel, the follow-up ticket is no longer in that channel and is automatically sent as a public reply (email). There is no option to change the channel and I have to write to the customer via the instagram app instead.
Hello ,
Can we automatically set follow-up ticket's assignee as original ticket's solver?
Thank you,
By default, you can not assign a follow-up ticket to the assignee of the ticket at the moment they closed. As a workaround, create a workflow through the use of triggers and tags for each agent to achieve this goal.
For more information, please see this article: How can the follow-up tickets retain the ticket assignee?
I hope this helps. Thank you!
QQ: once the Assigned Agent is offboarded, what happens if someone replies to any closed tickets? Will the follow up be assigned to another Agent or will it come in to the group without an assignee?
The ticket Assignee or Group is not pulled up from the original ticket when a follow-up ticket is created from a closed ticket. Closed tickets will follow your workflow on how a new ticket will get assigned to an agent or group.
Hope this helps.
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