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Out Of Office Notifications Recorded In Ticket



Posted Aug 21, 2018

I inquired about the following and was advised by support to submit product feedback for enhancement consideration.

Is there a way for out of office email responses (auto-replies) to be recorded within a Zendesk ticket as a comment? The Out of Office app requires agents to set themselves as out of office within Zendesk which doesn't work for us. We simply want to capture the out of office auto-reply email (Gmail) within the ticket so that the agent who sent it can be notified in the ticket instead of monitoring email separately and assign it to someone else.

Support felt there that there would be value in a feature to keep agents in the loop of Out of Office notifications sent through external email.


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36 comments

Official

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Kolten Kittleson

Zendesk Product Manager

Hello folks,

At the moment the team has completed the rest of the roadmap for the 2023 year, however after reviewing the feedback here and a desire to improve on the application, we will start the discovery phase (also known as review feedback or set up customer interviews) in the first quarter of 2024. 

Feel free to continue to +1 in the comments (that helps collect more interest) and share as much about your use-case as you want!

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Hi Micheal,

 

Let me make sure I'm following.. you don't want to manually have to set an agent in/out via the Out of Office app. (Seems fine.. it it yet another step..)

Instead, you're expecting the agent's OOO email to be recorded in the ticket?  Personally, I'd like those not to go to my end users, as it seems too much information. 

Perhaps an SLA could help, letting someone managing the Zendesk look for any ticket with a reply from en end user (ie in Open state) but which hasn't been touched in X hours would prevent having to act on an OOO.

 

Looking forward to hearing more of your use case!

 

-1


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Matt McLean

Community Moderator

Allen,

Michael is suggesting that Zendesk "allow" ooo-replies from End Users to show up in the ticket, rather than showing up in the "Suspended Tickets" view.

The mention of the Out of Office app was just that it is irrelevant to solving this issue.

Having more options around "suspected spam"/vacation responses would be helpful, especially when customers are using their own email providers' spam filters already.

I can see the logic in an automated / spammy NEW email being routed to the Suspended Tickets view, but if the email is a reply to an existing ticket, it would make a lot more sense for it to show up in that ticket. I understand Zendesk needs a way to prevent "mail loops" but unless both the Agent AND the End-user had auto-replies running, a loop wouldn't happen - End Users aren't normally notified of their own (email) replies. Additionally, even if both the agent and end-user had auto-replies enabled, many auto-reply systems, for example Gmail, don't re-send a vacation response if the same thread gets another reply within a certain amount of time.

Proposed options for handling auto replies:

[ ] Allow for Requesters

[ ] Allow for Agents

[ ] Allow for CCs

Unchecking all the boxes would be the way things are currently - don't allow auto-replies; send them to Suspended Tickets View (though really it would make more sense for it to be Suspended Emails that can then be routed to an existing ticket OR a new ticket)

Checking the first box is what Michael is asking for.
Some ZD customers may want to check the middle box or both top boxes.
I expect very few customers would want to check the bottom box, but it would be a nice option.

 

In short, Zendesk, please give your customers more control and more options! Keep sensible defaults and hide the options behind multiple settings screens if you must, but give us the options!

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Thank you for the detailed feedback, Matt. We've passed it along to the appropriate product manager and they will follow up if they have any additional questions. 

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I've got a connected query, which I'm hope it's okay to post there.

It's never happened before, but when I submitted our weekly release notes on our help centre to which users are subscribed, I ended up in a short loop with an auto responder email.

  1. Published release note
  2. User received the email, but sent an OOF -> Ticket created
  3. OOF created a ticket, which sent a confirmation to the user
  4. User once again sent an OOF email. -> Created another ticket

I've got 6 new tickets because of this. Unsure why it stopped (though I'm glad it did!). Any idea what happened and how to avoid this?

0


Good morning. My team and I are curious about the OOO messages returning in the form of a ticket. After reading these threads, I'm seeing that these OOO tickets should be going to the Suspended Tickets view, but unfortunately I'm not seeing tickets in this view other than spam. What do you folks suggest I do to get OOO replies revealed in the Suspended Tickets view, but ideally into our standard tickets. Thanks in advance! 

1


I am looking for a way to get automatic [out of office] replies to go to the ticket, rather than the Suspended tickets as well.

I contacted the advocacy team and apparently this is not an option.  I was advised to ask our customers to edit their automatic replies or set up notifications when a ticket goes to the suspended state.  Neither of these are viable options.  I can't possibly be expected to ask our customers to change their replies.  Notifications will only add more work to my agents' day.  

The request aligns with most I've read from others on the subject: give us the option of what we want suspended, please.

3


We also need this functionality, to not.receive it is causing  a customer service nightmare. The OOO from requester is not showing anywhere. It is not in suspended tickets or in the body of the email. We need this communication to be listed as part of the ticket. 

Does anyone have an updates on how we can see these OOO reply's, to tickets created by agents on behalf of a requested or to ticket replies issued by agents? 

 

1


We also need to be able to receive Out of Office messages to tickets so we know when customer is on a leave. Another problem with this that we faced recently was that customer wrote the words Out-of-office to the header of the email, so the viable ticket got suspended (we are an IT service company, so we get help requests about things like that). We did not notice this until customer called us asking why we have not gotten back about it.

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The post from Matt is about 2 years old.

Is there any update on the issue?
We would also like to receive requesters OOO emails so we don't spam them with automated reminders when they are gone.

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hi Anton - 

No updates on this request. We haven't seen significant interest in this functionality, so it's not something that the product teams have looked into. 

-1


Nicole, please please give us this functionality, it's badly needed.

 

thanks,

Carlo

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hi Carlo - 

That decision is definitely not up to me; I manage this community but I don't get to make decisions about product development. If there seems to be a lot of interest in it from many users, then the apps team may take it under consideration for future development. 

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Dear zendesk,

 

instead of spamming my customers with status updates in their time off, it would be really beneficial to receive their automatic out-of-office replies immediately in the ticket. For sure the one from the requester itself.

Thank you for considering this feedback in a next product upgrade.

An

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I agree with Meri Miettinen on their response "Another problem with this that we faced recently was that customer wrote the words Out-of-office to the header of the email, so the viable ticket got suspended".

We support our internal employees and someone was having problems configuring their OOO message. Their email subject had the words Out of Office in it and the initial request, along with all of their subsequent replies, got hung up in Suspended tickets.

@..., there seems to be quite a bit of interest in this topic. The original post was in 2018 and multiple people have chimed in. What do we need to do to generate "a lot of interest" so the feature is examined for implementation?

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Do we have any update on this being on a roadmap anywhere? We would also like to receive requesters OOO emails as this causes customer satisfaction issues, with spamming our customer, as well as, not reaching out to the correct person in a timely manner. 

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Also interested in the availability of this feature for two reasons

1) we have a policy request from our clients that if the ticket requester is out of office then we should contact their backup (without knowing they are ooo - then this gets missed, it is not an option to cc the backup on every ticket)
2) We have the Pending to Solved rule set - and it does happen that someone who is OOO covering our rule set up - their ticket can move from Pending to Solved (and even closed) if they are on holiday. We set tickets that where a client has told us that they are OOO to On-Hold - but if they don't tell us and instead rely on OOO - then we run into satisfaction issues

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Also interested in the availability of this feature,

Even within our organizations we need to see if a person is not OOO

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Also interested in this - reason is pretty obvious, it's useful for us to know if the person we contact is OOO so we know they won't be available soon and we should contact them again once they are back.

 

Essentially, people set OOO replies to inform sender that they are away, that's their main purpose, and Zendesk doesn't make it easy or possible for us to get this automatic feedback from people currently which can lead to upset clients if they are spammed or their tickets are closed while they are away.

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We would very much like out-of-office replies to show against Zendesk Support tickets. Currently, we don't receive them in Zendesk at all, not even in Suspended tickets. As per the Why are out-of-office replies not appearing in the suspended ticket queue? – Zendesk help page, I believe that this is because Zendesk sets the X-Auto-Response-Suppress header value to All. The receiving email server then doesn't send any out-of-office replies because Zendesk has asked it not to.

We would like to be able to configure Zendesk to set the X-Auto-Response-Suppress header value to None. That should at least allow the out-of-office replies to make it to Zendesk. They would probably still go to Suspended tickets, but that is better than nothing.

0


We are also interested in the availability of this feature.

The lack of this feature is causing us time and money and will make us reconsider using Zendesk as our company grows.

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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

+1 to this functionality

We are using the Shredder app which goes through the suspended tickets view. You can set up a rule to autorecover suspended tickets, and in this case, we have it recovering OOO notifications. If the OOO references the Message ID of a ticket, it is recovered into the existing ticket. If it doesn't have the Message ID, then it creates a new ticket and we have those going to separate view so that our Agents can see if there is a new OOO that needs to be merged into their conversation

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+1 to this functionnality

 

Agents have no way to validate if someone is OOO.

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200+ to this functionality

customers and agents would love it!

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+1 - this functionality is sorely needed for our agents who are struggling when they can't tell if an end-user is OOO! 

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+1 to this functionality!

We are using the shredder app to auto-recover OOO tickets, however, it doesn't work 100% of the time and a huge issue we see is the OOO is not tied to the original ticket. This causes issues when a group has 10+ agents and don't know where the OOO originated. One agent may solve it out, when another agent needed that OOO to redirect their communication. 

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Kolten Kittleson

Zendesk Product Manager

Hello everyone,

I also wanted to make sure that for people reviewing past comments (and might have missed the pinned official comment), that they do note the update that we will move this feature request into discovery next quarter. 

Please continue to upvote the request and add additional comments as well!

Thank you!

-1


This is definitely needed! It has been a pain point for our agents since we got Zendesk in (no visibility to end user or light agent's out of office). Would love to see OOO replies add to the case but not actively send out as an email to requester and cc on the case (perhaps show as an internal note with the ability to turn public).

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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

+1 we also use the shredder app. When it isn't tied to the ticket, we have it go into a view and solve. This view is accessible for everyone so they can check after EVERY reply to see if an OOO was recovered. This is not sustainable and relies on Human interaction for it to work. It would be best that OOO showed on the ticket (even as an internal note) so that our agents are aware they are OOO. Same for Side Conversations.

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Hi Kolten, as we are almost at the end of Q1 2024 I was wondering if you could share an update on the explore phase given the extensive challenges this is causing most of our businesses please?  Many thanks.

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