Recent searches


No recent searches

Add end-user as CC via Trigger or Automation

Not Planned


Posted Oct 22, 2009

Desired functionality: a way to automatically add a CC to tickets that match a certain condition.

Example: Trigger if Organization is "Acme Co" and Priority is more than Normal, then "Add CC" - specifying an end-user email address.  This would allow the organization's primary contact stay in the loop about what their employees have requested.

Workaround: use a notify target "email" type to send emails to the person who needs to be CC'd.


489

518

518 comments

Hi this has been shown as planned fdor some time do we have an approx time scale,

0


We do need the ability to setup triggers that CC other end users of the organization.

+ 1 for this feature.

3


Seems to be a waste of time adding to this request as it has been ignored for years now and I doubt there will ever be any progress made on it regardless of the constant promises to the contrary.

Disapointed.

3


Yup, 

I opened up a ticket and had my request sent over to the services group.  They don't even seem to want to touch this one, even though all I need to finish making this work through the API and url targets is a half line of code to remove CCs for a specific user.  

I have adding CCs via triggers and automations working well.  

1


Please, 

Can I request that the ability to remove CCs also be included when this is implemented in 6 years from now?  

That way we will not have to start this decade long process over again.  

1


I'd hazard a guess (and someone may have already said as much in the 6+ pages of comments) that I doubt this will ever actually happen.  Being able to use automation to CC non agents basically allows us to bring in people that we haven't paid for automatically ...not quite as agents, but pretty close.

Useful feature?  Definitely - and I'd love to have it.  But we have at least one case in our org. where we'd be able to use this exact thing instead of pay for more agent seats to tie key people into the ticket resolution workflow.

0


It wouldn't circumvent paying for an agent. They still wouldn't have access in any real functional way any more than manually adding a CC. You can get around this lack of user support that Zendesk seems to enjoy by locking down the light agents - add your end users into the light agent role (free and unlimited) and allow them to only see their tickets - now you can create a trigger based on the light agent. That being said, I find article after article after article with people upon people asking for the same things. Printing help articles, adding triggers, etc. with very rarely anyone actually solving a problem that involves a lack of features. We asked about the screencast function when we saw that current company was shutting down and were assured that they were actively pursuing a replacement. Is there a replacement? Of course not! If we ran our tech support and customer service in this fashion we would be in deep trouble and people would be losing their jobs! Personally, we've been looking for an alternative.

 

4


Adding CC's who are not agents via a trigger would be helpful to our company as well. We are considering leaving ZD because this feature does not exist and the poor formatting of the new portal vs the old portal. The new portal wastes so much space compared to the old portal.

3


My organization needs this as well, high priority item.  An update from Zendesk would be great

4


Sigh.

Coming up on year SIX of this request, and still nothing.  Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Hey ZD PM.... how about an update on this.

 

2


Yup, 

Pretty disappointing!  

They also just closed a ticket on me regarding this issue without even letting me know.  I inquired about the status, and then didn't even hear back, so I went to look at the ticket, and it was closed.  I had to open a new one again, and still haven't heard anything on that one.  

They were supposed to refer it to services to see about coding a small piece of the API / url solution to remove a user cc.  

Maybe everyone should just open tickets, so someone else in the organization notices?  

4


Good Idea. Another thing we can try is every so often we should reply to this topic, and maybe the ZD product manager will take note.

I too have noticed that ZD agents are way too eager to close out tickets.

1


We have system generated tickets that certain team leaders MUST be CC'd on, these team leaders are all end users ... we have to MANUALLY add them EVERYTIME the tickets come in .... this is DAILY!!!!!

This is a MAJOR issue for us and we are now forced to find another solution, it will be GOODBYE Zendesk as they seem to be more than happy for us to find another product rather than just implement something that is so simple!

A real shame as it is a good product but needs to move with the times otherwise Zendesk will become another M$ and just get left behind the competition!

1


Mike,

We are also having to consider our options due to lack of development on issues such as these.  Are you able to share which alternatives you are reviewing that cater for functionality like this?

thanks

 

1


On August 17 Erin Boyle (Zendesk Product Manager) promised to re-review the cases over the next couple of days. In a few days, this statement will be two months old and in some months from now it will be forgotten completely. That's my impression of Zendesk's efforts to implement the functions we are now discussing in this thread for six years.

The GOODBYE solution suggested by Mike probably will become reality for many of us. Sad but true.

0


@James,

We're currently looking at FreshDesk as an alternative to Zendesk.

0


Hi all,

I know I posted here a couple months back, and then went radio silent on you. That was certainly not my intention, and I apologize for the lack of transparency.

I want to start off this post by summarizing the 4 main use cases we're seeing throughout this entire thread:

1. Certain organizations always want a person or group of people to be notified of tickets

2. Certain organizations always want a group of people to be notified of all tickets, but want certain individuals to be notified of a subset of tickets

3. Certain users always ask for a person or group of people to be cc'd on all of their tickets

4. Account managers or other semi-dedicated internal agents want to be notified of all tickets for a specific organization

We believe use case #1 on this list will be addressed by the planned feature (no, really) Deepa mentioned earlier, which is organization subscriptions. This seems like it's the largest use case, and it is on the roadmap.

Use cases #2 & #3 we do not have a solution for yet. I know the request here is to provide a way of adding these email addresses in directly to triggers & automations, but I'd like to think about the right solution here. We need to think about the manageability of these types of lists, possible implications on the volume of triggers, etc.

As for use case #4, this really fits quite nicely with our vision for Light Agents. These types of people (account managers, technical account managers, etc) typically do need access to view and participate in tickets. Aside from the fact that Light Agents are only available on the Enterprise plan, is there a way in which Light Agents don't meet the need here?

Let's focus in on use cases #2 and #3 in order to have a productive conversation and spend energy on the use cases that aren't already being addressed by a roadmap feature. It's clear that there is a real need here that's impacting both your agents' productivity and, in some cases, your credibility with your customers.

Some questions:

  • How often do you find that organizations have multiple sets of people that need to be notified in different cases? (e.g. A, B, and C want to be notified of only High or Urgent tickets, and D only wants to be notified of Urgent tickets)
  • How often do you find that individual users (not at an organizational level) expect to have automatic CC's?
  • In all of these cases, how often do these lists of people change? Do agents need to easily change or add to these lists?

Thanks for your continued feedback and participation in these discussions. We really do want to understand the problems you're facing, and look forward to working with you all on this.

Best,
Erin

5


Erin,

Thanks for taking the time to write a reply, since this has been going on for so long it is about time we got a proper response from Zendesk, so thank you for taking this on.

We have tickets that are automatically generated on a daily basis, these cover a multitude of issues over a multitude of departments and we have to be able to automatically CC end users on these tickets based on their content/urgency. We can test for the content just fine and indeed create a trigger for each type of ticket received, we just can't automatically add an end user as a CC at the moment, so we have to do this manually, everyday!.

Sometimes there is only one person that needs CCing other times there may be 2 or 3, but we could handle this in the trigger just fine if we had the ability to add end users as CCs via triggers.

The lists of people that need to be CC'd only change if we have staff changes, IE: People leave, join or change departments other than that they don't change very often at all however we need to be able to CC end users (Not agents or light agents) on a daily basis and at the moment it just isn't possible. The amount of time my agents are wasting on a daily basis CC'ing end users on tickets is ridiculous and we've reached the point where we are looking at other solutions for our help desk system.

It really is very clear from this huge thread that what we are asking for is what most people are asking for, just a simple field in the trigger where we can type in the email address(s) of the end user(s) we want to CC would suffice.

Since you already have code in place to be able to email agents then the underlying code is already in place to handle email, we just need the ability to add end users email addresses and not just agents.

Having been a senior WebOps/DevOps guy for many years now I really don't understand why it has taken so long to get nothing done, there clearly is a massive call from your customer base for this and since you are in the business of customer support one would have expected this to had been addressed a long time ago.

We are all continuing to feedback and participate as you have noted above however at some point you have to do something, we can't just go on discussing this forever.

 

1


Hi Erin

Glad to see its on the roadmap but can we have an eta , a road map is off little use unless we know when the road is likely to reach it's destination

thanks

 

1


@Mike: Thanks so much for taking the time to share your use case in detail. That certainly helps! We may very well just add a new option to add email addresses in triggers, but we like to understand a problem fully before jumping directly to a solution.

@Adam: Unfortunately I cannot give you an ETA right now. I will tell you that the engineering team(s) who would work on this type of feature already have a full slate of projects this quarter, so the earliest we would be looking to break ground on a solution is in the new year.

I'll keep you updated as I have more information. In the meantime, please keep the use cases and answers to my questions coming!

Best,
Erin

1


For our situation, when some one from company A submits a ticket in ZD we would want the trigger to CC a project manager or other responsible person who belongs to company A.There are also times when we may wish to CC in a third party. 

I see us needing this trigger for 10-15 customers, and then once this feature is established and working it would be rolled out to every new customer that goes live that uses our software. At this time it would be 4 -8 customers a month. I expect the trigger to be active for 2 - 5 months and then discontinued. 

1


@Erin,

Thanks for the reply.

Since this has already been going on for 6 years can it not be put to the top of the pile, having to wait until next year without any real commitment isn't a good sign :(

 

1


Adding a note here as it may have been missed in this long thread, so for those who don't know, it is possible to add CC if the CC is an agent or light agent. So for product managers/account managers within the company its possible on Enterprise to set them as light agents and add them.

We achieved this with custom organisation field and mapping.

The real issue is adding a 3rd party/external contact as CC which is the request.

Sadly, other platforms can offer this, hoping Zendesk can raise priority of this feature

2


@Erin, many thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm new to this conversation, so it's extremely timely. We have only one customer who's really held our feet to the fire about this. We're going to simply try to remember to do it manually for them, or to use Triggers to send us a reminder email. :-/

How often do you find that organizations have multiple sets of people that need to be notified in different cases? (e.g. A, B, and C want to be notified of only High or Urgent tickets, and D only wants to be notified of Urgent tickets)

In our use case, we're a B2B software company, and one of our customers has two primary stakeholders in our software's implementation, and they don't always see eye-to-eye. There's been enough missed communication and miscommunication to date, so they want to be aware of every new ticket and new comment submitted by anyone in the organization.

 

How often do you find that individual users (not at an organizational level) expect to have automatic CC's?

This would only be for two users at an organization with many users.

 

In all of these cases, how often do these lists of people change? Do agents need to easily change or add to these lists?

Based on my experience with our customers in general, and with the customer in particular, I think that a list for a given organization would not change more than once or twice a year. I would like for Agents to be able to change the lists, but honestly all of our Agents are unfortunately set as Admins anyways (so that they can turn on out-of-office Triggers for themselves when they're on vacation), so I'm not heavily invested in the permissions.

0


@Erin,

It's strange you are asking for use cases... the fact of the matter is that it doesn't matter. This is a feature everyone is clamoring for (just look at the number of comments in this thread). If you want to push people to paying more for the feature, which you currently do by requiring us to upgrade our plan and move to a plan which allows for unlimited light agents, which in and of itself is confusing. There are actually not technical hurdles in play, since we can manually add addresses to the CC any time we want. The functionality is already there. If you can make a case why it consumes additional resources on your end, fine. Offer it as an additional paid feature for $5-$10 a month per agent. I doubt anyone would care, especially because for many of us this is literally making or breaking our business.

If you still require use cases, here is a legitimate one we run into daily:

We oversee IT for several retail chains. Direct support requests always come from in store management. District management wants to be notified about all tickets opening, and all tickets closing. They also like to be able to add input when necessary, especially when they know information that the store manager wouldn't. Also, their corporate IT staff wants to know how often certain requests are being made, so they would also like to be notified as tickets are opened. 

A second example would be in many of the office environments we oversee. Every individual needs to manage their own support per their "cubicle" or individual computer station. Because many of our customers are on an hourly rate the office manager likes to know how many tickets, and of what type, are being opened on a daily basis. This helps office managers determine whether it's cheaper to keep fixing dippy problems like clearing browser cache, or bring us in for a 1 hour training course on computer basics.

The use cases will be nearly limitless. Can you please detail us the hesitation in adding this feature both currently and in the past? 

3


Since 6 years worth of "Quarters" have already passed the engineering teams that @Erin talks about have had plenty of time to do this, there clearly just isn't the interest in Zendesk internally as they see it as nothing more than an additional revenue stream and not an enhancement request.

Whilst Zendesk have this attitude it makes no difference what we say here, things will never change.

1


+1

We have a very similar need on a daily basis! Basically this is a very elementary feature that is missing in Zendesk (otherwise Zendesk has worked quite well for our needs). We routinely need to manually add the same end-users on new tickets day after day! I find it shocking that after six years of requests for something that should be a basic feature/option, there is still nothing available from Zendesk! What's happening with your Product Management!?!? Also, if Zendesk has just chosen NOT to implement anything like this (perhaps to promote their licensing model?), they should just tell it straight up.

Ms. Boyle has now recently kindly responded to the thread and indicated that Zendesk actually has something on their roadmap to address (or alleviate?) one of these use-cases. Other two use-cases - not so much. Is Zendesk just ignoring the requests for years or how does it take 6 years to get anything on the roadmap (not to mention whenever will anything actually be implemented/available)!?!

To @Erin: In our case (very basic), we receive support requests from end-users on mobile units (defined as organizations in our Zendesk). We routinely need to make sure that named contacts in their respective HQ/base organization are CC'ed on all their tickets. This means manually adding, typically 1-3 end-users on every ticket. The HQ/base organization end-users rarely change so maintaining the rules would not be too much effort.

In any case, we are also starting to look for alternatives for Zendesk due to this. As our volumes are growing with the business, we need to be able to automate some basic things and not waste time on routine repeating things (not to mention remove chance of human error).

 

0


The only thing I can think about is making a new ticket on this topic to Zendesk's support on a daily basis. If Zendesk can't communicate in forums let's touch their support balls.

1


+1 to this...  I run the help desk for our school district and have a need for this functionality to exist.  We have 6 schools in our district and have one agent for every two schools.  We also have Technology Teachers that work at each school that need to be able to see the tickets for their buildings.  At the moment, our techs need to manually CC the tech teachers on each ticket.  This is time consuming and rather archaic.

All we need is to change the dropdown list of only agents, to a text field that functions like the CC box on the ticket view.  For example, if I start typing "Smith" the automated search will bring up all users with "Smith" in their name.  I can then click on "John Smith" to be a CC on that ticket.

I need this to be a trigger or automation.  We have all of our end-users tagged with the building that they belong to, and this is what allows us to assign the tickets to the proper Techs.  I also need to CC those tickets to the proper Tech Teachers.  As has been said before, this is not an unreasonable request, nor is it so complex that it would take SIX YEARS to complete.  Yes, today is the six year anniversary of this request's submission.

PLEASE stop sweeping this under the rug and just get it done.  Six years to solve a simple issue is absolutely ridiculous...  Thanks guys!

0


Given the complete absence of information from the Zendesk on this issue, I plan to look at the recently released GLPI 9.0. Helpdesk & CMDB/Inventory all in one for free. We use GLPI for years already as CMDB. In past we have been using GLPI for HelpDesk too, but switched to more friendly interface of Zendesk.

0


Please sign in to leave a comment.

Didn't find what you're looking for?

New post