Disable / Un-check 'Create follow-up' option
Hi
Is there a way that you can amend a ticket so that it isn't a follow-up?? For example, is there an option so that we can disable follow-up or select un-follow? We have multiple users that raise tickets as a 'follow-up' when in fact they are not related to their original ticket at all.
Our customers have been advised on how to raise tickets but yet they come through as 'follow-up' tickets. As I couldn't find any responses on the Forums - I raised a ticket however Zendesk support have suggested adding my query here. Hope you can help!
Thanks,
Sharon
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This would be great for us as well. Many of our customers find the latest email and just reply to it creating a followup when it is actually a different topic/issue. We would still want our customers to be able to create follow-ups, but once created we would LOVE to be able to change it to not being a followup essentially breaking the link between the new ticket and the old one.
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Hi,
this turns out for us to be a real issue. People make lots of mistakes, they create a helpdesk case via email, then get a reply and use that reply over and over again to contact the support team. Worse of all, when doing so, their Outlook will cache the direct reply address with the ticket number associated. So even when making the effort to create a new ticket via email, they use the wrong address to write to (as it still reads as our helpdesk portal in the description text for the email address). Also, also, tags are propagated, hence filled out forms that had tags, will get tags over and over again, creating false positives in tag-related searches/statistics.
I know it is asking a lot, but any measure to avoid this would be appreciated.
Best
Martin
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In this thread, there is a healthy discussion.
I'm wondering if Zendesk can please most or all of us by giving us options. We have a trigger in place to catch replies to Closed tickets and clear out the tags, but that just doesn't do everything we want. Can we click a box that says "Not a follow up ticket"? and maybe "Clear all fields" and then the ticket is standalone?
In the link above, Leann's comment captures a GREAT way Zendesk could modify current functionality:
--Perhaps you could prevent false follows up by process of elimination. Before a ticket can be considered a follow up two things must be true:
- End user must be responding to the email address that points directly to a previous closed ticket.
AND
- Subject line from new email must contain the full string of the subject line from the original ticket.
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It definitely affects reporting in a negative way. Should we all be paying this much money for something and not able to disable a feature such as this? Reporting is important and affects the entire portal making this pointless.
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Frankly, this should be a direct toggle within Zendesk itself. "Disregard email reply if ticket is closed." Secondarily it would be nice to have a message that can be automatically replied back to the requester with customized text such as "The ticket you are replying to has been closed. Please open a new ticket by emailing xxx@xxx.com. Thank you."
There are too many people that search for the last email they sent and reply to that instead of sending a new email. While it may be easy to train 50-100 customers to stop responding to closed tickets, it's virtually impossible to train hundreds if not thousands, especially when many of them may only open support requests once or twice a year.
My time is valuable and I use tools like Zendesk to automate everything. Any time I have to go into the system and "massage" data, settings, or ticket values that tells me that you need to make your system just a bit more flexible. I hope you take this seriously because the lack of this simple toggle wastes a hell of a lot of time for my company each week. Time we could be using to make money, mind you.
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We have it happen several times each day. Please, please, please - create a way that we can disable this feature entirely. It is a useless feature which serves absolutely no purpose to our organization (beyond confusion & frustration), and until end-users discover they cannot create follow-ups, they'll never follow the proper procedure and protocol for creating new ticket incidents.
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We have also big issue here, because some clients taking old ticket email, deleting information writing down as a new ticket, but zendesk always catch it as follow-up ticket because of reference number. In one of ticket biggest issue that first ticket has 10CC users, and everytime client submit a new ticket (without anyone on CC) everyone still gets information (3rd parties included). So I would say it's a big security issue. Should an option also on closed tickets to "disable follow-up" from that ticket.
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This is a major issue for my company. Follow up tickets are also pulling in our custom ticket fields and sending CC notifications to the people cc'd on the original ticket who have nothing to do with the new ticket. There has to be a way to stop this from happening. This seems like a major flaw that needs to be investigated thoroughly and not waiting for upvotes on an enhancement request.
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Hate being a metoo guy, but I have to agree, if the follow up prevents tickets from being treated as 'new', then I'd like to be able to disable that app.
Not sure if it was mentioned, but now when we get a new ticket in, we also have to check for 'this is a follow up ticket to', as an optional check. Hopefully that will work in the meantime.
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Yes, we face the exact same issue as all of the users above - not only follow up tickets are often not referring to the original subject and are completely separate cases, but also all the information from the previous ticket is being copied (such as tags, for example) - which affects the reporting in a negative way. Since there are different ways to group the tickets from one organisation or one user - this 'follow-up' functionality is a bit restrictive.
Having an option to disable 'follow-up' functionality as a whole would be great for many Zendesk users, of that I'm sure. I see it this way:
- Initial ticket is getting solved (and then closed).
- Customer replies to the same email.
- A new ticket is being created, without the 'follow-up' mechanic.
Would such arrangement be possible to achieve?
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Please let us disable follow-up tickets, when a ticket is closed.
We have many customers who create tickets as a 'follow-up' when in fact they are not related to their original ticket at all. This causes lots of problems with ticket routing and with reporting.
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We have been receiving more "follow ups" at our organization. End users are stating they are creating new emails that should not be prompting follow ups. Any updates on when this issue may be reviewed? An option to remove the "follow up" would help!
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Has there been any movement on this issue recently?
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It still exists and it is really not helping us, the majority of our customers are using the "create a follow-up" rather than creating a new one and the best part if they use it they don't leave any message
See sample attached photo
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Please make this happens.
I have users replying to old tickets with Satisfaction ratings on them that messes up our KPI.
Also there is no reason for my any of my customers to reply to an closed ticket weeks after it been closed. That is the whole reason why we keep it in Solved for 5 days and then automatically closes it.
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Very well said Martin!
This is the exact same case for us and it is incredibly frustrating!
Can we please have the ability to disable follow ups or at least some options to assist in triaging the damage caused by this oversight?
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This is a major issue for us too, a solution is really needed. Follow-ups just make a real mess for our system.
I would love a feature to block a Follow-up and force the user to create a new ticket.
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Hello,
We encountered the same recurrent issue with the ticket follow-up creation.
When creating a new request to our helpdesk by sending an email, some of our end-user don't choose the right email address in the Outlook's propositions:
In consequence, instead of creating a new tickets, it add up to previous one or create follow-ups id the original ticket was already closed.
This creates a lot of mix up, complication, and fustration for both our agents and the end-users.
It's time Zendesk adresses this issue, instead of letting us having to create workaround through trigger and automation.
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THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN OPEN FOR 6 YEARS!!
How do we turn off follow-up tickets. WE DO NOT WANT IT TURNED ON.
It's as simple as that.
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Garry's solution does not seem possible in my setup. There is no Status changed from closed, and an email generated from a closed ticket opens a new ticket.
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Has there been any movement on this functionality?
Re-training users is not practical.
Either having the option to change a ticket from follow-up to a new separate ticket or having an approval process before a follow up is created would be ideal.
It is rare that we have users intentionally creating a follow-up ticket on a related matter (more often they are just creating a new ticket using the old, unrelated ticket's ID), and the idea of emailing users back and saying they are not doing it right and should try again is not a good look.
Please provide us with an update on any proposed solutions to this issue.
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We have a nice flow going with handling the incoming tickets, the follow option disrupts this quite a bit. Is there any news from Zendesk considering disabling this function? Or even better cleaning all ticket information.
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Normally we catch it and update the fields manually so the new follow-up tickets are recorded and routed correctly. But we neglect to do this about once a day.
I don't mind customers creating new tickets from closed ticket links. The problem is when the new ticket inherits all the fields from the closed ticket.
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+1
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Hi Damon,
We were instructed by zendesk support to add the channel 'closed ticket' as an option in the trigger (so either 'closed ticket' or 'web form'). Hopefully that will let us assign priority to follow up tickets as well.
HTH.
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A solution needs to be found.
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This is an ongoing problem for our organisation also and I was hoping to find information on adjusting business rules to handle this but here we are.
Investigating this issue from a user-behaviour context revealed more information that may be of some use:
What is occurring has been well established (multiple zendesk customer organisations are reporting the same mechanism causing the defect and resulting in a set of common issues.
The main assumption as to why this has happened is end-users actively locating and replying to a previous e-mail update from a recent support ticket to raise a new issue - this was the thinking here and at other organisations based on the comments above, and also fits as to why Zendesk wouldn't have predicted this to eventuate as a common issue because surely any rate of non-genuine followup emails would be negligible and due to mistakes. Another theme is end-user behaviour not changing in any meaningful way even after the issue being communicated - I bet there isn't any queries raised either.
End-users aren't doing this in these volumes - they are starting a new email to raise a support case and as they type in the support contact or address name, their e-mail client will show automatically cached recently used addresses (including unique support addresses from previous tickets), and as the support e-mail address Display Name sent to end users for previous cases is often the same as the regular support contact they hit tab or enter without realising that the trailing email address <support+id******-****@********.zendesk.com> will be processed as a follow-up.
It explains why end-users continue to do this even after being asked not to and reasonably explains why this problem wasn't identified during development and testing. It is still largely a theory, but if you can add a prefix to the display name on outbound messages to end users and create self-service instructions to remove the autocached zendesk addresses from their email client and see if there is a reduction in volumes of defect follow-up tickets created it may help.
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I have created a work-around trigger for this that does the trick:
Conditions:
Ticket IS Created
Channel IS Closed Ticket
Current user IS NOT (agent)
Actions:
Email user - (requester)
Email subject - Unable to process request {{ticket.id}}
Email Body - An explanation that requester needs to make a NEW ticket, bla, bla, bla
Status - Closed
Group - whatever group you want
Assignee - whatever agent you want (I created a system user for this purpose)
Add tags - followup_rejected (and I use this in CSAT and other automations to NOT send anything to the requester)
With this trigger the follow-up tickets are auto closed and out of sight, and requester is notified. -
WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY Can Zendesk not address customer requests. People have been asking for you to have an option to disable Follow-Ups since 2017 on here (SIX YEARS). It has caused a major mess in our database. We're seriously about to pull our contract from you all for lack of responsiveness. You dev team does absolutely nothing.
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+1
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