Add end-user as CC via Trigger or Automation

Would also like to see this and be able to CC external users.

At least some explanation from Zendesk why this feature hasnt yet been implemented would be appreciated. 

UPDATED 4/11/2018

Hello again -- I wanted to give an update about the other project I mentioned which was going to provide a foundation for this functionality. It's just been released to a limited beta. There would still be work to do to leverage that feature for this one, but this moves us a huge step forward. The beta is literally days old so after it's had a chance to run for a while, we'll come back and update again.

UPDATED 9/25/2017

Sorry we've been so silent, but we don't want to repeat the past mistake of posting as "planned" something that's still in research mode. But I can tell you that a project is underway right now to lay the groundwork for this feature. Depending on how it goes, we hope that we'll be clearing the way for 2018.

Please bear in mind that this is not a guarantee, and that our priorities may shift between now and then.

--

Hi everyone -- there's been a ton of conversation around this proposed feature and I understand it's of critical interest to many. Folks are asking why it was never built and it's an excellent question. I wish I had an excellent answer but honestly, I don't know exactly why, as Jake and Erin have moved on.

Asking around for folks who were involved with conversations over the years, I was able to find out that they couldn't easily surmount the problem of scale presented by the end-users data set.

However, I hear you all very clearly that it's important that we continue to look at this. I've initiated a few discussions already and I'll continue to investigate our options and whether anything has changed regarding technical constraints. In the meantime, to avoid confusion, I'm officially removing the "Planned" label.

This thread has been open since 2009. I'm frankly astonished that Zendesk does not have the means to add CC's to a ticket as a trigger.

One approach I envision would be within the end users profile.

In the section where you add them to an organization, there could be a checkbox next to that organisation that says "auto cc this user on tickets in with organisation"

Triggers could also be used.. but this is a clean place to add this function.

This is the most important missing feature for us.  

Why after 7.5 years  is it's status going backwards from planned to "we are not sure why we cannot do this" ?

Kristen - can you elaborate on " they couldn't easily surmount the problem of scale presented by the end-users data set" ?

I do not understand why adding a cc by a trigger or automation would be massively different than when we add them manually now.  Adding them manually is just a lot more work for us.  

I suspect as others may have pointed out, that it would be a way for organisations to add agents without having to pay for Light or full agents. So they have no business reason to implement this feature.

Sorry Lachlan but light agents are free. Everything about your comment is incorrect. All that can happen is an account be added to a ticket whatever the status of that account.

For us we just want to automatically CC an end user when a ticket comes in for their company. Simple really.

Light Agents used to be free, but not anymore:

https://www.zendesk.com/support/compare/#compare

To add unlimited light agents to your current Zendesk account is $250 USD per month. (Unless you are lucky enough to be on a legacy plan.)

I agree it's simple, but they have no motivation to do it. With a little creative thinking, you could reduce your Agent count with this feature.

I still fail to see what Agents of any type has to do with any of this.  This cost for light agents is something I have not seen but it isn't an isssue for us.

Light Agents can only work on tickets using internal comments. Light agents can ALREADY be added to tickets via triggers.

This request was to add a CC (a standard user) to a ticket via a trigger as you can't do this currently.  That being a standard user account so that they were automatically included in on a ticket where required.

The only reason you have agent level accounts is to control a ticket and to make internal comments that the end user does not see. 

It is issues like this that sees Zendesk lose customers like us as they do not listen.

Of course Light Agents can already be added via trigger. That's the whole point.

So you could decide to not buy any Light Agent licenses, but you want people in your company to be notified of certain tickets and even respond to them. You just add a CC for the end user, then they can reply as normal via email. Right now, you have to buy Light Agents to achieve this.

I'm with you, I would like this feature, that's why I signed onto this thread like 3 years ago. But I can't see it happening.

Hi folks,

I am following this thread since when I first began setting up my instance, I felt this would be a beneficial feature. While it would still be "handy" I have gone an alternate route for those folks who just need to be "notified" in certain instances, but do not need to comment in any way, or close and handle tickets. 

Alternate Route: Email Targets can be CC'd through automation: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203458476-How-to-email-ticket-info-automatically-to-Non-Agents 

You do not necessarily even need the macro portion if you do not want it.

Please note: This would be cumbersome if you had a lot of folks who need to be notified (in which case, i do recommend the light agents feature - that is what it is designed to do) In my case I have only 1. You could create a mail distro group if you needed to notify a group of people.

This is exactly what I am looking for.  We have an enterprise customer that one of the upper management would like to be CC'd on Critical tickets.  I cannot do this without this feature.  It should not be hard to setup a text field instead of a dropdown menu with autocomplete that utilizes search based on the information being typed.  It could include both name and organization to further clarify information for potential duplicate names.

If for some reason your database is not setup easily to do this.  You can always put an option on the end users to "Make available for CC" as a checkbox which will then make them available in the current drop-down menu.  This doesn't seem like an overly complicated feature.

I would guess what @Lachlan Robbins said above is most likely the case - Zendesk wouldn't want to do this as it would compromise their licensing model.

At the moment we all know a 'Light Agent' can be added on CC to all tickets using a trigger. But it's severely limited for obvious reasons. An answer from a light agent is only visible to other agents in Zendesk - not outside. The light agent has to literally sign in to Zendesk to even see who the end-users are on the ticket even if they wanted to answer via e-mail since they'd have to manually add the users to their outgoing e-mail.

If Zendesk added the functionality requested here, any user could be CC'd on tickets, and if they hit reply on their e-mail, the comment would be public. So you could potentially have an army of non-paying agents all using Zendesk license-free. And selling licenses is the Zendesk model - so it would be business suicide.

Since the ticket's been open so long it seems Zendesk haven't found a way to solve this to date. And in all honesty, I can't think of a solution that wouldn't defeat their current licensing model.

With that said - I'd still love to see a solution to this!!

@jordan totally correct. This can be done with the API. I do it for a few rare cases to pass tickets an email just like you can in the ticket UI. I posted this. A while back.

+1

At least, you could provide a Macro Code, so that we can just put the email address of the person that need to be CC'ed there.

Saves a ton of time, when we have to re-enter the same email address in the CC field every time, when are sending the ticket to the same person.

If the issue is the size of the end users' table, a quick fix would be a checkbox on the user record along the lines of "Allow Triggers" - which then puts that user just like the list of agents in any trigger menu. 

For many of these use cases, feels like anyone who works with enterprise clients, seem like there is a "key customer contact" for accounts want to be in the loop on all, or certain types of, activity

+1

+1

While allowing all users of an org to view a ticket is necessary, in our use-case, the customer wishes each of those users to also be notified with updates on the ticket.

@Drew Wasson - a trigger can send email to a group...can you create a group that is exactly everyone in the organization and then use that group?

@Jim Stratton -- The cc is to an external end-user (or set of them).  I think we will use the Target for notfications

Has this really not been fixed yet???

Zendesk, STOP with adding useless features and add this one now! This is a basic feature that almost all customers of Zendesk would want to use.

I see an opportunity here for a plugin! I have no coding knowhow but surely someone can make some $$ with this opportunity.

I'd PAY for this fesature..

@Kristen Mirenda

Why don't you just skip the "lookup" functionality for triggers/automations if someone (like me) wants to CC an end-user and just give us the option to manually enter email addresses?

I understand that being able to do lookups on an entire end-user data set can be a very difficult task on a large scale, but at this point we just need the feature and not the lookup functionality. I think everyone would be perfectly happy to have the new feature even if it meant that there is a chance we could type the wrong email address at times at it not end up getting delivered.

It looks like this feature has been missing for 7 long years, so I would like to see the "Planned" label back on this popular request!

Based on my interactions with Zendesk support regarding this issue, I suspect that Zendesk is refusing to implement this feature because they feel that anyone who should be CC'ed on a ticket should be an agent, and therefore you should buy a license for that person. If Zendesk allowed us to CC anyone we wanted on tickets, and then anyone who is CCed on a ticket could contribute to that ticket, that could be used as a "backdoor" way to allow additional agents to use the platform without paying for licenses. Of course, even if you did this, you still couldn't assign tickets to those users and those users wouldn't have any of the other functionality of normal agents, but I believe this is Zendesk's thinking on this issue.

This is all speculation on my part. However, it would be so trivial for them (technically) to implement this feature, it's hard to believe that the reason they haven't done it is technical.

Zendesk recognizes that the current implementation of CC is confusing to many and has been actively researching (perhaps even implementing?) a completely different (more email-like, and for most people, more intuitive) usage for CCs on tickets. 

@Jonathan March if that is the case, why is this feature not labeled "Planned"?

Who is confused by carbon copies? That term has been around since the 1950's I'm pretty sure, and I would imagine that it has been used with emailing since its creation. If someone is confused by the idea of that then that is an end-user problem. One thing that makes Zendesk so great is that to the end-users it looks like a simple email instead of some complicated ticketing system, so it is a bit crazy to think that the ticketing system that can automatically tweet a user's Twitter account with a trigger does not have the ability to automatically CC a non-agent user email address....

@James just my guess as a longtime user: because the trigger aspects are secondary to the basic CC model. First things first.

@Matthew actually the ZD ticket CC is currently not like a standard CC in fundamental ways. To pick only the most potentially embarrassing aspect -- a user can remove all the CC's from his response, thinking he's just writing back to the company, but they'll receive his response anyway because they are still on ticket. Etc, etc, etc, etc.

@Jonathan, that seems irrelevant to the request here though.

I understand other people may be making requests for something like the ability to "remove a CC," but that doesn't seem very important because the ZD agent should be responsible for making the decisions as to who gets CC'd and who does not or else they just need to disable CC and utilize the "target notifications" that are built into ZD. So really it is not a confusing process. It works similar to a BCC except that the ZD CC persists when the user replies. That seems really straight forward in my opinion.

Even if everyone is confused by the whole thing, email is not changing any time soon, and I don't really want to wait another +7 years to have this feature :(