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As a Zendesk Admin, I want the Collaboration add-on to support markdown and placeholders so that existing agent signatures can be used in Side Conversations



Posted Aug 19, 2019

We use markdown and placeholders extensively in our agent signatures.  This works great in tickets however, side conversations do not currently render either markdown or placeholders.  Additionally, the Collaboration add-on automatically adds the agent's signature (with unrendered markdown and placeholders) when a new side conversation is created.  This means that in order to effectively use side conversations, our agents would have to delete the automatically populated signature and manually add their own.

We like the idea of automatically adding the signature to side conversations, but it's only useful if those signatures are rendered correctly.  For those who aren't using markdown or placeholders in their signatures, I can see the current functionality being extremely helpful but, for us, it becomes a nuisance as it creates more work for our agents.

We would like to see the Collaboration add-on support markdown and placeholders.  This could be useful for all kinds of potential workflows but is essential for including signatures in side conversations.

Short of adding markdown and placeholder support, we would like the option to stop signatures from automatically being added to the side conversation so our agents don't have to delete the unrendered signature every time.


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20 comments

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Toby Sterrett

Zendesk Product Manager

Side conversations should now convert the markdown and placeholders to HTML for signatures!

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Hi Eric,

I agree with you! Along with a lot of other users!
For now, you can sign up for Rich text for Side conversations EAP: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfw9y6pYq7atrxx26IIyJU5nReWo3o3DxlmA0f4z8NCWDZmow/viewform
And you can take a look and comment on this article: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001263308-Using-side-conversations-in-tickets-add-on-?page=3

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Thanks for pointing out the EAP Louise!  I'll check it out.

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Hi!

Is it possible to add a signature automaticly to a side conversation message or not?

Right now you cant see who is the sender of the message witch is a bit annoying...

Ca you add a default text in the message?

// Mia

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hi Mia - 

If the agent has a signature in their profile, it should be automatically included in side conversations. The caveat is that this won't work if they only have brand-based signatures. 

The other thing is that signatures with markdown and/or placeholders don’t currently get processed.

The other option would be to create a macro to add the signature. 
 

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Hi Nicole - is there any possibility to use system-wide signatures rather than individual profile based signatures? Or to just turn individual signatures *off* in side conversations?

Currently we use a system wide signature file with markdown that pulls the correct info from agent profiles and from combines that with brand marketing info for a coherent look, and allow the agents to use the profile signature field to add personal notes such as upcoming holidays, time off notices, etc. Right now, with Side Conversations, only the {{agent.signature}} field is being added which is very confusing given it has personal notes rather than any useful identifying info

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hey Mike -

Apologies for the delayed response here, it took me a little while to track down the information. At the moment, side conversations doesn't enable you to turn signatures off. But the product manager did want me to ask how critical this is for your organization?

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Hi Nicole - no worries! Quite honestly this would be very critical for us and the way we operate, as we have several teams within our department all using Zendesk, all using side conversations quite heavily since it allows us to communicate with non-agents separately from the requester and CCs in order to resolve tickets. We need to be able to make side conversations look as much like real emails as possible to maintain a professional appearance while communicating with other departments and the third parties we interact with.

Our first priority would be to allow the system-wide signature to be usable in side conversations as it's the easiest way to maintain a consistent look across all teams.

Our second preference would be to allow for markdown in the agent signature to work, and I can switch to copy/pasting the system-wide signature to the agent signature field - so far we don't have so many agents that it would be *too* unwieldy to manage.

If neither of those are possible, I would like to be able to disable signatures in side conversations across the board and we will have to copy/paste in a text signature. But that's a worst case scenario for us - either of the first two options are what we would really like.

Thanks!

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Thanks for coming back and sharing that additional detail, Mike. I'll pass it along to the product manager and will let you know what I hear back. 

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It would be nice to have a configuration option of using the brand or account level signatures instead of the ones on the agent profile.  We have hundreds of agents, and even if we initially set the agent signature, they could revise it.  The email signature is a key part of branding for a company, and we have 3 very different brands in Zendesk.  As someone mentioned earlier, we want this message to look like a normal email.

 

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We have lately received  a lot of feedback from our company ZD users on the Signature format in the Public reply and if possible to adjust with some formatting. We have tested the markdown functionality which could have helped, but realized the Side conversation doesn´t support the format. We cannot ask our users to adjust the format of singature every time they send Side conversation. That would bring too much manual workload and they´d  eventually forget to do so. I hope this can be enhanced soon as it is not only our users who complain about the signature format, but it has impact on the email receiving end - our customers. We received feedback the emails look like they were sent by robot. Customers deleted some of these emails as they didn´t look real, looked like potential spam. Thank you.

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Hi,

has the product management given any feedback?

We're having the same challenges that Mike described in detail and the described possibilities besides the agent profile would be great to have.

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We are facing the same issue on our end. The EAP won't fix this issue either. The EAP is just going to offer some text formatting such as Bold and Italics and that's about it right? 

 

Can we look into this further? 

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Julio Cesar

Zendesk Luminary

Do we have any feedback about this? Markdown is really important in our signatures for side convesations :(

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@... Sorry but why does the signature appear BELOW the requester's message, instead of below our message? What's the logic? It creates messy trails and NO ONE is looking for the sender's signature below someone else's message.

You should definately allow us to disable this, because it's annoying and I can;t imagine why anyone would want their signature there. Please please raise this with the product team and ask them to really think what the logic is here. We have to delete it, then use a macro which is a frustrating and unnecessary workaround for all agents to follow for every forwarded email.

Please also add the email address of the sender in Forwarded messages/side conversations, as this is useful for any recipient, or add the normal "To: "From:" "Date:" format that literally every business in the world uses when sending normal Outlook emails.


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Julio Cesar

Zendesk Luminary

@..., this is so true! I hope they'll read and solve what you said ASAP.

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Love to have this!

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+1 for this and I would like to add that the agent signature field should allow dynamic content with HTML formatting and liquid markdown logic

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would be a very important feature for us too. we would like to centrally control what should be a "slimmed down" signature in a side conversation. We would like to use our own/liquid placeholders for this purpose.

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Julio Cesar

Zendesk Luminary

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