Add 'Remove cc' trigger/automation action

+1

This is especially helpful for our scenario.  Customers of ours will often email our help desk by replying to closed tickets, thus creating a follow-up.  Those follow-ups retain the CCs from the original ticket, and most of the time those CCs have no business being on the new ticket.  I'd love to be able to create a trigger that, when a follow-up ticket is created, strips all of the CCs from that follow-up.  I created a ticket with Support to see if this functionality was available and they told me to create a new discussion, although this discussion already exists.

Needless to say, +1.

Hello everyone, in case you haven't seen this, take a look at this here:

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204579473

Andrey from our team wrote a great article on how to remove/add CCs automatically!

@Andrewd if you wanna reset ALL CCs on a follow up ticket, that's really easy.

You need to set up a target that looks like this: 

Target URL

https://YOURDOMAIN.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets/{{ticket.id}}.json

Method

PUT

Attributes

ticket[collaborators]

Authentication is your Zendesk email address/token and the Token from the API settings.

You can fire this target within a trigger, let's say when the Ticket: Channel is "Closed Ticket" and then within the actions we can notify the new target with the message "null". This will reset all CCs on follow-up tickets.

Please let me know how it goes.

Hello Sandra,

I appreciate Andreys input and I may use it - it certainly takes me well beyond what I had been capable of before.  

However - I am a relatively experienced Zendesk user and this solutions looks pretty daunting, and I am not sure if it will do what we want - though it may do.

If it takes 10 pages to explain how it works, it really isn't accessible to normal users.

I think what you will find, is that people want the following:

Add trigger and automation actions

• 'Remove all CCs',
• 'Remove CC > agent or user name'

I would even be OK with removing ALL CCs on a ticket.

Yet another great idea, that gets stuck in Zendesk's community for years without progress...

Hi Andrew,

We've been using Zendesk for about six months and I was able to implement the recipe in the article without any great difficulty in a couple of hours.  I agree a simpler version would be better, but the solution offered does work.

Brad - the article addresses the removal of all users

Hans - I think your comment is harsh in this instance as a perfectly workable solution has been provided by Zendesk.

Kind regards

Hello Jim,

I think Brad was responding to my 2 suggestions.

The ability to implement depends on the level of understanding, background and experience of the person making the implementation.  I fully appreciate Andrey's tutorial, but just make the comment that a number of users will find it stretching their capabilities. 

Also, you may find people don't like using codey looking solutions if they do not understand them - and for people who do not use liquid markup, this is quite obscure.

Besides, if a user is wanting to implement this with a trigger, having to add a comment or tag 'remove_me', means that a user will have to modify the tutorial to do what they want.

For example - if I want to remove all CCs on a ticket remove it is closed, to ensure that they don't get re-added on a followup - this tutorial is not going to provide a solution without me understanding what it is doing enough to alter it to suit.

And actually, the tutorial will not do exactly what the OP gave as an example.  Making a one-time CC, and automatically removing the CC after this; won't do this without modification.

As you say, a simpler version would be better. :-)

This would really help our business!

Since we are working with CC'ing tickets in order to get them to third party mailboxes which are not using Zendesk at the moment. We would like the CC's to be removed to reduce the amount of mail coming is these boxes, since this is confusing for the agents who are not, and will not be, working with Zendesk.

We also require the option to remove all CC's from a ticket.

Please can anyone confirm whether this is possible?

Leon

It is possible to remove all CCs from a ticket. 

There is not an option to do this using the actions on a trigger. Instead, you have to use a target. The set up of the target is explained   here under the heading 'Removing all users from CC at once'.

This does require some Zendesk skills, so please vote up this article if you favour an easier option.

Would love to have this as well as an action option within triggers!

This is needed... Would help with the already useless light agents.

Is there a way to prevent additional CC on a specific ticket (don't want to restrict CC to agents only)

@Kyle - can you explain a bit more the issue you are seeing?

Do you want to limit the ccs on ticket to a certain number, or an option to lock the CCs at a certain point?

I can't think of a way to limit ccs, unless maybe you could create a trigger that records existing CCs at a point and later fires a target that uses these to keep overwriting the current CCs... just a 'first thought'

@Andrew. I am looking for a an option to lock CC's on a specific ticket.

- Use case, Ticket begins with a request for data manager is CC'd. The CC for the manager is removed before the sensitive data (password to access data bank) is added to the ticket. If the manager replies to their original email, they are added back as CC and can see the password, as well as all correspondence. 

I see suspending the manger's account is an option. However, if the manager were to forward the original ticket to a separate email and reply, the new email is added as CC and can see the password.

Restricting CC to agents only globally is not presently and option for us.

Who are agents and who are the users?

What plan are you on?

You could possibly look at using triggers and email targets to notify the recipient only occasionally.

How many users are affected - or is these a large number of unique users?

We are the agents. Our clients are end users. (Manager = end user, another member of our client's team)

Enterprise

Notifications are not the risk here specifically. If an end user logs in to Zendesk and looks at "tickets I am CC'd on" they can see the full ticket chain regardless of when/if they were notified. End users can add themselves back to a ticket an agent has removed them from (agent does a security check before adding sensitive data).

The # of cases where this happens and has been reported to me seems small. If there were an issue among individuals in our clients organization, the impact could be quite large 

The key problem then is...

If the manager replies to their original email, they are added back as CC and can see the password, as well as all correspondence. 

And you want to be able to prevent the manager(end user cc) from being added back to the ticket.

2 possibilities.

If the manager does not need to respond - or could be directed to email the agent directly for any comments - then you could use a unique trigger to notify the manager - rather than ever adding them as a CC

If they NEED to be CCed initially - then you may want to look down the track of capturing the desired CCs, and removing all others on a trigger/target - this may or may not be possible...

Can you tell me more / link to more about the unique trigger to notify the manager?

Kyle

For removing sensitive details in tickets, you may want to check the Ticket Redaction App under Zendesk Labs in the Marketplace.

As part of your security checks. after removing the CC manager and submitting the ticket, you can then use then App to remove the sensitive information. Now if the CC is added again, the details will not be visible.

If you want to keep details of the removed text you would then have to use a private note.

@Graeme - good catch - removing the sensitive data once sent may offer another option.

@Kyle - this will only work if there are a limited number of people involved - as each will need some unique setup.

let's say the ticket is with User A, and you are CCing User B and C. C is the guy you don't want seeing the sensitive data.

Instead of adding User C to the CCs - you add a tag like 'notify_user_c', then have a trigger set to send the latest comment only, to that user via an email target.

You will need a tag, an email target and trigger for each users to be notified - that is the limitation.  And maybe it doesnt suit the flow you actually need.

I presume this is something like - User A requests something requiring Manager permission, manager then responds and gives permission.

So your email triggered to the manager would have a link for them to click to email the agent giving permission.

Let me know if you want more info - or see this article for notifying non-agents - it covers the steps we used for our first implementation of this.  Variations are infinite of course.

@Andrew/Graeme,

The ticket redaction app is something we already have and use, I did let this particular team know about it.

Thanks for all the feedback. I think we'll let this one simmer for now.

I can't believe the length of this post and the fact that 4 years later the ability to remove CC's via a trigger isn't available.

It is simple really, my first step is to review the ticket, if approved a trigger will change the ticket group and add CC's to the ticket, we want to remove the previous CC from the ticket. This is just like the ability to remove tags.

We know who these cc's are so we should be able to simply say remove CC and specify the CC to be removed.

Once again the biggest problem with Zendesk shows it's head. The inability to act on requests from the user.

Hello Chris, if you are wanting to remove one set of CCs and add another known set, you can do this with a URL target.  Removing all CCs via a target is also ok.

All said and done - certainly adding the function to remove or add CCs via a trigger would be easier, but most of the actions are now available using targets.

These mean nothing to me but I will investigate. In the end Zendesk optimization gets thrown into the too hard basket.

When I click the article link, it says I am not authorized to view it.

+1 for this feature. I am programmically adding CC's based on a dropdown option chosen on a custom dropdown field. After a certain time period (or some other trigger action) I'd like to later remove these CC's while preserving the CC's that were not related to my trigger that added the original CC's.

Lets get it!!

Hi

When clicking the link above it states i dont have access to view it.

Surely this is a simple request to add to a trigger?

@leon @Anthony - which link isn't working?

The one to Andreys original post about URL targets is broken by the look - possibly the post has been removed due to URL targets being replaced by HTTP targets.

See this post that might point you in the right direction - https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/204437667-Adding-CC-to-ticket-one-line-PUT-or-POST-request

We've got this working now.  Was certainly worth learning about HTTP targets, though I'm honestly only 10% of the way there yet!

How long we should wait for this new future? It's lack of management...