You can share tickets from your Support account with other accounts by establishing sharing agreements. You can specify the terms under which sharing can occur and how shared tickets are managed. The other accounts you establish sharing agreements with can also share their tickets with you if they establish sharing agreements with your account.
Ticket sharing allows you to assign tickets to affiliated accounts. Those accounts' agents can either provide information toward resolving the issue or solve the issue themselves. The ticket status and comments stay synced between the tickets in each account.
Once you've activated a sharing agreement with another account you can begin sharing tickets.
This article contains the following sections:
Understanding how ticket sharing works
- Any Support account can invite another account to establish a sharing agreement.
- The initiating account (the sender) sets the terms of the sharing agreement, which the receiving account can accept or not.
- Sharing agreements are one way. Once the receiver accepts the agreement, the sender may share tickets with the receiver. For the receiver to share tickets with the sender, they must create and initiate a sharing agreement with the other account.
- If you only have receiving agreements, the sharing ticket field will not appear and you cannot stop sharing received tickets.
- The sender can only share a ticket with one other account. However, the receiver can share the ticket with an account that they have a sharing agreement with.
- A shared ticket becomes a new ticket in the receiver's account with a separate ticket ID.
- The ticket status, custom fields, and comments can
remain synced between the ticket versions in both
accounts. The custom fields must be created in both
accounts (see Syncing custom fields
with another account below). CC recipients
are not carried over from the original ticket to the
shared ticket.Note: Any public or private comments added to a shared ticket will be visible to agents in both the original Support account, and the Support account the ticket is shared with. Any public comment to the shared ticket will also notify any users copied on the original ticket.
- All ticket statuses can match, except for On-hold. When a ticket is changed to On-hold in one account, it will be submitted as Open in the other. See Understanding how custom ticket statuses map if you've activated custom ticket statuses.
- Tickets in the Closed status can't be shared.
- Call recordings (including Voicemail recordings) in a shared ticket can only be accessed by signed-in agents of the Support account that the original call is associated with. For example, Account A shares a call ticket with Account B, which includes the calls recording. The agents in Account B will not be able to listen to that recording in the shared ticket. If they are agents in both accounts they can listen to the recording by signing into Account A, locating the original ticket and listening to the file there. Transcriptions of voicemails remain visible, as lines of text within the shared ticket.
- Depending on the terms of the agreement, the receiver may directly communicate with the ticket requester and solve the ticket.
- Sharing tickets creates a placeholder user in the
receiving account for each user associated with the
sending account ticket. The user is created even if
there is a user in the receiving account with the
same name and email address as the placeholder user.
If an agent in the receiving account makes a comment
on this shared ticket, a placeholder end user
account is created in the sending account to
represent this agent. Placeholder users created
during ticket sharing can't be deleted.
It's important to note that shared tickets do not pass on user information – that is, customer information such as email address or phone number are not stored. Tickets are never linked to matching users in the receiving accounts, unless an agent of the receiving account manually adjusts the requester of the shared ticket when the user is created in the receiving account. This adjustment is not recommended as it can cause issues with the sharing agreement. When a ticket is unshared, the receiving account cannot communicate with the requester unless the user profile is updated with a profile that includes an email address.
- Each account's business rules remain separate.
- A shared ticket cannot be merged with another ticket.
- An account can automatically refuse to accept all sharing agreement invites.
- Sharing agreements can be cancelled at any time by either the sender or the receiver.
- Sending email to another Support instance is not supported when a ticket sharing agreement is in place. Automatic email notifications from a shared Support instance are suppressed. If an agent action generates an email notification, the email is also suppressed.
- When tickets are shared between Support accounts, user fields and organization fields are not shared with the ticket.
- Renaming an account involved in a sharing agreement breaks the agreement.
- If you enable the setting Enable secure downloads on the Tickets > Settings page of Admin Center, then add a comment that contains an attachment, any shared accounts will not be able to view or download the attachment.
Understanding how custom ticket statuses map
Sending account - custom status | Receiving account - custom status | Status mapping |
---|---|---|
Not activated | Not activated | No issue. The statuses match, except for the On-hold status, which maps to Open. |
Activated | Not activated | Maps to a corresponding status category. |
Not activated | Activated | Maps to the default status category. |
Activated | Activated | Maps to a corresponding status category, even if the custom statuses match. |
Setting up a ticket sharing agreement
Set up ticket sharing by creating a ticket sharing invite and defining the terms (permissions) of the sharing agreement. You must be an admin to set up a ticket sharing agreement.
- Make public & private comments, sync status
- Make private comments, do not sync status
The first option allows the receiver to communicate directly with the requester and to change the ticket status (for example, setting it to Solved). These ticket updates are also reflected in the sender's version of the ticket.
The second option (private comments only and no status syncing) limits the other account to providing you with information needed to resolve the support request. For example, imagine a company that builds something that includes components from other companies. Each affiliated company (business partner) can set up a Support account and a sharing agreement to provide more details on issues related to the components they supply. In this scenario, the sender controls the ticket from initial request through to resolution, gathering information as needed from the affiliated account.
-
In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Settings.
- Select the Ticket Sharing tab.
- Select add sharing invite.
- In the window that appears, select another Zendesk Support account or a third-party system.
- Enter the URL for the account you're sharing tickets
with. Depending on the option you selected in the
previous step, you'll see one of the following
fields:
- Zendesk Support account: Partner Zendesk domain field
- Third-party systems: Sharing URL field
- Select an option from the Comment status and
permissions field:
- Make public & private comments, sync status
- Make private comments, do not sync status
- Select an option from the Tag synchronization
field:
- No, do not share tags between me and the receiver
- Yes, share tags between me and the
receiverNote: Tags that are added by business rules are not synced between shared tickets.
- (Applies only if sharing with another Zendesk Support
account) Select the custom fields syncing setting.
You have two options:
- No, do not sync custom fields between me and the receiver
- Yes, sync custom fields between me and the receiver
- Click Send Invite.
The receiver is notified of the invite on their Ticket Sharing page, as shown here:
The receiver can view the terms of the sharing invite and either accept, decide later, or decline the agreement.
When accepted, both accounts can immediately share tickets.
If you decline an agreement, the sender is free to try again at another time. If you don't want to establish sharing agreements with any other accounts, you can set your account to automatically decline invites (see Opting out of all sharing invites). You can also deactivate sharing agreements at any time (see Deactivating a sharing agreement).
All of your sharing agreements (accepted, pending, and rejected) are displayed on the Ticket Sharing page.
Opting out of all sharing invites
If you decide to not share tickets with any other account, you can choose to opt out of all sharing invites.
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Settings.
- Select the Ticket Sharing tab.
- In the Opt out of sharing section, select the Decline all sharing agreement invites.
- Click Save Tab.
With this option set, you will never be informed of a sharing invite.
Deactivating a sharing agreement
Sharing agreements can be deactivated by either the sender or the receiver at any time. Deactivated agreements can't be reactivated, but both accounts are free to invite the other to accept a new sharing agreement.
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Settings.
- Select the Ticket Sharing tab.
- Locate the agreement you want to deactivate and then select View.
- Click Deactivate Agreement.
Your agreement partner will be informed of the deactivation via email and this will also be reflected on their Ticket Sharing page. Deactivating an agreement means that no new tickets can be shared and that tickets that have already been shared will no longer be synced.
Referring to shared tickets in business rules
Tickets that have been created in your Support account via ticket sharing can be referenced as conditions in automations, triggers, and views. The condition Update via also includes Ticket sharing as a value.
You can create a view of the tickets generated from ticket sharing, as in this example:
This will show you all the tickets that were shared to you. If you want to create a view of the all tickets you shared to another account, you can add a tag to the tickets and create business rules from that.
You can create automations or triggers that include the ticket sharing conditions. Again, using Update via is Ticket sharing as a condition you can create a trigger to escalate the shared ticket to a specific support group, to add tags, and so on.
Additionally, you can filter the view to show only inbound or outbound tickets if you have set up receiving agreements in your account.
- For inbound tickets, add a clause: Ticket sharing: Received from > (instance name of who you are sharing tickets with).
- For outbound tickets, add a clause: Ticket sharing: Sent to > (instance name of who you are sharing tickets with).
Syncing custom fields with another Support account
As described in Setting up a ticket sharing agreement, you can select to sync custom fields with another Support account. To make this work, each account must create the custom fields separately. For example, if you want to sync a custom field called "Camera model" it must exist in both accounts and must have the same title and data type.
The custom field title is not case sensitive so the sync will be successful even if one custom field is called "Camera model" and the other is called "Camera Model".
What is important to keep in mind is the data types used in each custom field; they must be compatible. The simplest way to ensure this of course is to use the same data type for each. In our example, both versions of "Camera model" are drop-down lists.
Other syncing rules include:
-
Support includes two types of ticket fields: custom ticket fields and system ticket fields. It's not possible to sync system ticket fields. For more information about the differences between these two types of fields, see About ticket fields.
- If an incompatibility between custom fields does exist, the ticket will sync, but the incompatible custom fields will fail (no data will be transferred).
- If you're using a ticket field that has tags associated with its corresponding values (for example, drop-down fields), the tags must be the same across both instances. If you have matching ticket field names and values, but the tags differ, the sync between ticket fields will fail.
- If a ticket is shared between two accounts, only the account where changes to the field value are made will see a record of that change in the ticket events/audits. The other account will see the altered field value, but will not see any details about the change, such as who made it or when it was made.
- When syncing custom fields between two accounts, the custom fields must be present on the default ticket form of the receiving account, since shared tickets in the receiving account will use the default ticket form of the receiving account.
52 comments
Arlene
I'm trying to find a way to create new tickets that can then be shared with a shared with another Zendesk Support domain within our company. All the assistance I've been reading has to do with sharing established tickets that came from an end-user. Ex: If our visitor support team needs to send a ticket to our IT Zendesk team by creating a new ticket, how would this be addressed? All our testing hasn't proven successful. We can't use our own email (support@) as the requester, but the information doesn't need to be shared with any end user.
I hope this was a clear question.
0
Dave Dyson
Hi Ariene,
You can accomplish this by creating a new ticket (e.g., by clicking +Add in the agent interface) and add yourself (or one of your agents) as the ticket requester (so, it will be using their email address, not the email address of your Zendesk instance), select the instance you want to share the ticket with under Sharing, add a Subject and Description, set any other fields you need to, and click the Submit button. That will create the ticket and share it with the other instance. Hope that helps!
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Joanna Walkowiak
Hi!
1) Regarding SLA, how we can set First Reply SLA for tickets shared if we set Ticket Sharing permissions as Make private comments only?
First Reply Time is time between the first customer comment and the first PUBLIC comment from an agent. As we do not allow public. We want to have option Make PRIVATE comments only. Thus, will first reply SLA work?
1
Cheeny Aban
Hi Joanna
As of the moment, a public agent comment is required for the FRT to run. We understand your need for this functionality, so I am marking your comment as Product Feedback. We truly value customer feedback and your voice and votes in the product feedback topics in the community help influence future Zendesk functionality
0
Joanna Walkowiak
Hi Cheeny,
Thanks! However, I saw this article
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205367047-Insights-Reports-Duration-between-two-or-more-ticket-events-in-minutes
Do you think it could help us to measure FRT when we turn on ticket sharing only with private comments option?
Thanks!
0
Cheeny Aban
Hi Joanna,
Unfortunately, Insights has now been removed for most customers. If you used Insights before, you'll now need to move to Explore, the latest generation of reporting for Zendesk products.
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Joanna Walkowiak
Hi Cheeny, Yes, sure I know that Insight is not used any more. Thank you.
But the question is if it is possible to do in Explore? if yes, how?
0
Cheeny Aban
Hi Joanna,
That is not yet possible.If there is no public comment, no FRT will be logged on the system. Thus, we will not be able to create an Explore report.
0
Francois Spinnael
I'm trying to understand why we are able to sync "CUSTOMER Fields" but not Zendesk default fields...
Why can't we sync PRIORITY & TYPE ?
Or do I missed an episode and this is possible ?
Currently to share the information it is kinda crazy, we need to create a target url, trigger to recognize the text & triggerr to update the case.
0
Mark Schäfermann
Has there been an update to how Status sharing works?
Before when I set a Ticket to On-Hold it stayed On-Hold unless the receiving instance chose a status different than Open. Now the Ticket changes to Open when the Ticket is saved in the receiving instance (no status change).
This is very inconvenient as it messes with our process. Also I can't imagine any reason why this should be the intended behaviour.
0
Bry Fitzgerald
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Leif Cederblom
Hi Mark Schäfermann,
In the 'Understanding how ticket sharing works' section above, this behavior is described: "All ticket statuses can match, except for On-hold. When a ticket is changed to On-hold in one account, it will be submitted as Open in the other."
Does that explain the behavior you are seeing?
Cheers,
Leif
0
Mark Schäfermann
Hey Leif Cederblom,
yes, from a technical point of view this description might be understood that on-hold is the only status that is not actively synced. However, I still don't see the use case why you would implement it that way. Why the difference in behaviour, if any agent action on the Ticket triggers the status sync, overwriting the on-hold status.
Ticket is on-hold, agent in receiving account assigns the Ticket to himself, Ticket is now Open in sending account. I just don't see the sense in it.
I more or less assumed that the sending Ticket would stay On-Hold as long as the receiving Ticket would stay open. But that is clearly not the case.
I've built a workaround setting the Ticket back to On-Hold as long as the Status remains Open in the receiving account. Only problem is that it screws with our reports as it now looks like the Ticket has been send back and forth way more often.
Cheers
Mark
P.S.: I was wrong in my post before. This has always been the behaviour. I must have overlooked it when testing the sharing feature.
0
Leif Cederblom
In the instructions above, it states:
"It's important to note that shared tickets do not pass on user information – that is, customer information such as email address or phone number are not stored. Tickets are never linked to matching users in the receiving accounts, unless an agent of the receiving account manually adjusts the requester of the shared ticket when the user is created in the receiving account. This adjustment is not recommended as it can cause issues with the sharing agreement. When a ticket is unshared, the receiving account cannot communicate with the requester unless the user profile is updated with a profile that includes an email address."
We are using ticket sharing to enable agent access for one of our clients, so the expectation is that the same pool of 100 users will submit tickets to the main instance and be shared to the secondary instance. It appears that subsequent tickets will map to the same requester, but it is not possible to map that user to an organization in the second instance.
Is there no way to clean this up so that every ticket in the secondary instance doesn't have the [Organization (create)] button next to the ticket user header?
0
Alina
Hey Leif,
Since this is a rather specific question, I would like to create a ticket on your behalf, so we can explore this a little more in depth. Please keep an eye out for the ticket and speak soon!
0
Marissa Morley
When disconnecting a sharing agreement, I see that tickets will no longer be synced, but will we lose access to tickets that were previously shared?
0
Beto
Hello Marissa, thank you for your question!
As stated on the deactivating a sharing agreement section: "Deactivating an agreement means that no new tickets can be shared and that tickets that have already been shared will no longer be synced."
This means that you will still have access to tickets that were shared previously, but any changes made on those tickets will not be reflected on the other Zendesk account that was previously part of the agreement. The tickets will be independent on each account from the moment the sharing agreement is deactivated.
I hope that was helpful!
0
Jacob Kjeldahl
Hi,
In the last item in the section "Understanding how ticket sharing works" there is a link to a support article "Can I rename an account where a ticket sharing agreement is setup." which is unfortunately broken (404).
Is that article available somewhere else?
I have a multi-brand setup where I have to change the main brand to a new and I would like to know whether that means I have to reestablish the sharing agreements. I guess I have to as would also like to change the name of the account.
Another question if I have to reestablish a sharing agreement the old tickets will no longer be sync'ed, but will they still be associated with the original sharing agreement on the receiving end?
/Jacob
0
Nur Shikin
Has there been any update on how Status sharing works? or how it appears in ticket properties? glad if someone can share any tips or video on this
0
Marion Evrard
Hello!
I understand from the article that it is not possible to sync system fields. However, this is something that we very much need, especially regarding the priority. Does anyone know a workaround for this?
Thank you!
Marion
0
Dane
Based on Understanding how ticket sharing works, all ticket statuses can match, except for On-hold. When a ticket is changed to On-hold in one account, it will be submitted as Open in the other.
@Marion,
The only method that I can think of is by creating a script that will call out the List Ticket API and parse the returned data to get the specific fields you need. Afterwards, the same script will use the Ticket update API to the other account to sync it. Unfortunately, this method is not supported by Zendesk and needs to be coordinated with your developers.
0
Carmel Kleinman
We are trying to measure FRT for tickets that we receive via ticket sharing.
This means that we need to measure the time from the moment the ticket is shared until the first internal note from one of our agents (and not first internal note from the sending account agents or the first public reply). Is it possible to create this kind of query in Explore?
Thank you!
0
Rafael Santos
This link seems to be broken:
0
Joe
In regards to tracking between shared time and FRT.
I think you could:
You might need to have two FRT SLAs, one for shared and one for non-shared tickets.
Specifying the tag "shared_ticket" during reporting should help you see the difference between tickets, shared vs not shared.
If you have more detailed questions start a support ticket with us so we can provide more help.
0
Mark Schäfermann
Today we found out that Requester Changes are not synced to the Receiving Account. The original Requester remains.
Example:
Customer A opens a Ticket which is send to another Account. Requester is changed to Customer B. The receiving Accont still shows Customer A as Requester ans sends Public Replies to him.
Is this behaviour intended? Are there workarounds?
0
Shruti
Hi Team,
Just wondering how the satisfaction survey works for Shared tickets. Has anyone tested that?
Thanks!
0
Yazeed Tatour
Hi Team,
There's an issue with shared contacts where you can't delete or edit them due to the sharing agreement, we have a couple of contacts like this and since we can't even edit their name it affects our workflow. it would be great if someone can consider a solution for this
Thanks,
Yazeed
0
Sabra
Hey folks! Shared tickets do not pass on user information – that is, customer information such as email address or phone number are not stored in the receiver's account. Mark Schäfermann, this is why it's expected that Requester changes on the sender's account doesn't translate to the receiver's account.
Shruti: Since user information including email address is not passed to the receiver's account, there is no email to send satisfaction surveys to in the receiver's account. Therefore, a survey cannot be sent. While it is possible to change the requester on the receiver's account to a requester that has an email address, but that is not recommended as it can cause issues with the sharing.
And Yazeed Tatour, while this is a known limitation, if you would like to see the ability to delete these users in the future, please add a feedback post here!
0
ADMIN
Is there a way to share tickets between accounts but not share customer interaction between accounts?
0
Christine Diego
I am afraid this is not possible as of the moment as ticket sharing agreement allows you to share tickets with other account which includes the ticket information such as the conversation or interaction of the customer. The ticket status, custom fields, and comments can remain synced between the ticket versions in both accounts.
0