Preserve Group and Assignee for user-generated follow-up tickets

106 Comments

  • Official comment
    Dave Dyson

    Hi everyone,

    We're working to get answers from our product team for some of these longstanding threads, and we don't blame you for being frustrated at the lack of response. In the meantime, there is a workaround discussed here (and I'm sorry we didn't link to this sooner, and I realize the workaround doesn't scale easily):

    How can the follow-up tickets retain the ticket assignee?

  • Carrie Modon

    We have created a special view to capture all tickets that have no group and no assignee so as to not 'lose' these tickets.  It would be very helpful if the last group/assignee would be carried forward to the follow up ticket so that these tickets are not delayed in any way from being routed to an appropriate resource.

    1
  • Julia Gilinets

    We definitely need this as well - it seems like such a loss to lose this information when the whole point of a Case Management system is to gather enough information to properly route tickets. Here we actually have all the info we need - would be great to be able to use it. Seems more like a defect than feature that we're able to extrapolate less from these type of tickets instead of more.

    2
  • Maria Nørgaard

    So do we! We use the multibrand function and in order to separate tickets between brands by autoassigning them to different groups based on the email address on which they are received.

     

    However, follow-up tickets do not get assigned to any group and are thus "lost" in the empty space between brands, and neither are tickets received through the web potral (I suspect it'll be the same for the HelpCenter, when we activate it).

     

    Please allow us to set up a trigger to control this.

    2
  • Sébastien Bourrut Lacouture

    Also very interested in this

    1
  • Maria Scarpello

    I am curious to know how ZenDesk handles this in-house?

    2
  • Stuart Duff

    This would be a fantastic functionality to add to the system and would save a lot of manual assigning.

    1
  • Tonmoy Ghosh

    I agree with all the comments made thus far. If a follow up ticket already has linkage with the original ticket, why wouldnt it be able to inherit data from the original email.  

    1
  • Trudy Gibson

    Same problem here.  And because only 2 agents can see everything, only they can action these which is not ideal.

    1
  • Dave Dancsecs

    I agree with the above and I'm very surprised that the follow-ups do not inherit the previous tickets group and assignment by default

    1
  • Trudy Gibson

    Agree.  This is the expected behaviour and it is frustrating to have to work around this.

    2
  • Colin Piper

    My workflow probably differs from others. When a customer replies to a closed ticket (bearing in mind that they agreed to the closure), it is typically with a new issue. I want tot control what group is assigned that ticket. 

    I guess we are all going to be different.

    0
  • Ashley Clayton

    It could be a feature that's able to be toggled on or off like some of the account settings. 

    We use ours to manage our design tickets and like to keep each customer working with a particular designer for efficiency and customer relationship building. 

    1
  • Alan Pinstein

    We are experiencing this bug as well. It's particularly annoying in our case as we have multiple product groups and the follow-ups all end up in a single group and the tickets must be re-assigned to be seen.

    This seems like it's a clear bug... and frankly doesn't even seem to match the documented behavior of follow-up which is to "copy all ticket data" from original ticket.

    2
  • Amy wilkins

    I am disappointed this isn't already a feature, particularly as we have multiple brands and groups and the follow-up tickets don't get automatically triaged anywhere and just sit there for far too long before anyone notices them.

    1
  • Bryan Myint

    We would definitely love this feature as well.  Seems like it only makes sense that the follow up ticket retains that last ticket assignee property when its re-opened.

    1
  • Luiz Faias

    Hey guys,

    I had the same question from a customer and found this article in our Support Tips & notes section: How to assign a follow up ticket to the assignee on the closed ticket.

    Hope that helps!

    Best regards.

    ___

    Edited to correct link.

    0
  • Lauren Mathews

    Hi there, 

    it seems like this would be a bit of a no-brainer to add as a default setting as a follow up ticket would naturally be handled by the same group if not the same assignee. As it is right now it is easy for a ticket to get lost, or for agents to not be able to access follow up tickets and have to rely on admins to find them. 

    Major votes for adding this setting! :)

    Thanks,

    Lauren 

    3
  • emmanuel Toussaint

    Don't know for all of you. But the How to assign a follow up ticket to the assignee on the closed ticket. isn't clear enough for me. Anyone to post screen shots or video how to do it?

     ___

     Edited to correct link.

    0
  • Nathan Scott

    I agree with the previous sentiments on this, that it would be great to have follow up tickets automatically re-assigned to the original assignee. 

    Our recent reports showed these as big backlogs as they were previously being lost. It leaves the ownership with our agents and would also build better engagement if customers regularly interacted with the same staff member for any follow ups to an existing issue. 

    Would be a huge help for us if this can get created! 

    2
  • Chad Dodds

    Any updates on this? It seems like the follow-up ticket should at least be assigned to the same group as before, if not the specific agent.

    2
  • Amanda Yu

    This article lays out how to auto-assign back to the assignee with the use of tags/triggers: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115006932567-How-to-assign-a-follow-up-ticket-to-the-assignee-on-the-closed-ticket

    0
  • Chad Dodds

    Thanks for the article Amanda. I'm sure the method works well, but I am not willing to create or maintain a trigger for each agent in our Zendesk as we have nearly 80 of them and the list is not always static due to turnover. This functionality could be made available via a setting with a few choices to pick from:

    • Automatically assign a new follow-up ticket to the original assignee
    • Automatically assign a new follow-up ticket to the original group
    • Do not automatically assign new follow-up tickets (this is today's behavior)

    It could also be incorporated into the trigger system for greater flexibility, but I'm not sure if great flexibility is needed for this.

    12
  • Joshua Bentley

    Based on what I've read in this thread, it seems like an easy solution (or at least a workaround) would be to have the system automatically assign follow-ups to the agent and if that agent is no longer active, assign the ticket to that agent's group so someone else can pick it up.

    In the interim, I'd like to recommend an app like Round Robin. We started using it over a year ago so we could set it up to use a round robin ticket assignment method so you don't have to worry about agents cherry picking tickets. But it just dawned on me that it could potentially be used in the situation we're discussing in this thread.

    It could be set up to look at a specific view and assign those tickets out to the agents you want. Admittedly, it wouldn't go to the same agent, but at least they'd get assigned out and could be reassigned by agents if necessary.

    I just set it up and it seems like it'll serve as a workaround until/unless ZD puts this in as default functionality.

    1
  • Jacob Bockelmann

    It is disappointing that this routing is not offered by Zendesk as a default option.

    Similar to this workaround, Automatically assigning a follow-up ticket using triggers, I built my own workaround using  3 triggers which pull the assignee ID and group ID from the original ticket, save them to a target, and then pull them from the target when a follow-up ticket is created for use in routing the follow-up ticket to the original assignee and group.

    This method of solving Zendesk's feature gap is way more scaleable than the aforementioned article because you don't need to create a custom trigger & tag per agent. Rather, since it uses assignee and group IDs, you just need to set this up once and it works for all agents as your team grows and contracts.

    I built mine from a Support tip article which it looks like Zendesk pulled down. Bummer.

    3
  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hey Jacob - 

    Thanks for sharing how you worked around this. I have flagged this post for Product to review. 

    I'll see if I can find out what happened to that support tip. Usually when things are archived it's because they've been deprecated. Do you remember what it was called at all? 

    0
  • Jacob Bockelmann

    Hi Nicole Relyea,

    I don't recall the article name but if you search your archives by any of these strings you should be able to find it as they're verbatim from the article:

    The names of the targets used:

    "Set Original Assignee ID"

    "Set Original Group ID"

    "Set Assignee from Original Assignee ID"

    "Set Group from Original Group ID"

     

    Trigger names:

    "Follow-Up Ticket Routing to orig. Assignee - trigger 1"

    "Follow-Up Ticket Routing to orig. Assignee - trigger 2"

    "Follow-Up Ticket Routing to orig. Assignee - trigger 3"

     

    A particular tag name:
    "wait_for_assignee"

    2
  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hey Jacob - 

    I did find the article. It was archived because it is not a recommended or supported workflow because it uses URL targets to update resources within a Zendesk, which can cause all sorts of problems, so we try to discourage its use. 

    -5
  • Jacob Bockelmann

    Hi Nicole,

    That's a bummer because it's the only scaleable solution to route follow-up tickets to the original assignee and group which is a completely reasonable feature request. We have over 200 agents and I'm not going to create and maintain a tag + trigger per agent to achieve this functionality. Friction like this adds up and makes Zendesk a real challenge to use as our agent base has grown.

    1
  • Collin C

    It's frustrating that this has been outstanding for so many years. I had to create **74** distinct triggers to preserve group assignment and priority in follow up tickets. I'd need to add hundreds more to keep the assignee. But the alternative is follow-ups to our highest priority, specialized tickets winding up at the end of our default queue.

    1

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