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Customize Help Center "Follow section" email notification
Posted Feb 06, 2015
Currently, when my customers follow a section in my Knowledge Base, if I add a new article in this section, they receive an email notification containing the full article.
Ideally, I would like to be able to edit a template for this notification.
In my case, I would simply put a link to the new article.
That would be a nice new feature!
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78 comments
Kathy Reynolds
We would like to be able to customize this messaging sent from our Help Center to reflect our brand as well as to remove the identification of the author of the article as we do not display that in our center.
3
Stephen
+1 on the ability to customise the Follow email sent via Guide.
We use markdown in our articles to style them to our companies brand guidelines and make them more visually interesting - none of this detail is received in the email sent when someone Follow's an article. This can mess up the reading experience on those mails.
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Daniel Shteingart
Zendesk, Any update here? we really need the ability to modify outgoing Email templates for new articles.
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Daniel Shteingart
+1 Any updates? this one is open since 2015... 8 years ...
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Angela Werdenich
I also want to support the call for this option - especially since we noticed that there is a major GDPR issue involved. The email notification contains the name of the author of the article which is not acceptable from a personal data protection perspective. So this means that we cannot use this important feature at all.
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Katarzyna Karpinska
Angela Werdenich,
In your specific case, I'd suggest using a generic name (e.g. "Support team") in the author field. That way you won't be breaching PII retention regulations.
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Angela Werdenich
Katarzyna Karpinska Thanks for the suggestion. Is there any way we can bulk-change the author of all articles? We have some 40,000 articles in our knowledge base, so doing this manually for each article would be quite a pain...
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Katarzyna Karpinska
Hi Angela Werdenich,
You can always change the author to another agent, both on the singular article level and in bulk.
You might be also interested this article which describes how to solve this problem by displaying alternative author name for all the articles in HC.
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Arno (EMEA Partner)
Referring to one comment earlier, I also think that having author name in notification can be problematic, and it seems like additional and even unnecessary piece of information that many might not wish to send out.
I would recommend removing it for now, as there is no way to choose, whether you send it or not.
I understand that there is a workaround by setting specific non-existent author to each article, it could be one light agent user used for those that have light agents, but as I see, it would be better to remove author from notifications, or allow selecting whether you send it not.
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Jesse H
It's interesting how the default Copenhagen theme lets you disable the author's image and name from the articles, yet the email is not configurable.
If we choose not to display the author's name against articles then someone who subscribes to sections and comments will still be able to see the author's name because it appears in the email notification.
This shouldn't be like this.
If the email notification is not configurable, then at least develop a setting in Guide Admin that lets you choose to include the Author's name in email notifications or not.
1
KM
To comply with GDPR and our company's privacy policy, we're not supposed to send out names of our writers in the notifications. Indeed, pls, take this is a high-level privacy issue because of GDPR and your EU clients. Do keep the Author field in Zendesk CMS so in CMS we can continue to sort articles and audit content creation accordingly. Make it possible to remove author names in Follower notifications. We managed to remove author names so they don't display in Search results, but need the option to disable it in the company notifications as well. Thank you.
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Yaakov Simon
+1 Please add the ability to customize the Follow email templates
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Andy Prisacaru
any news on this feature request dating February 2015? Should we expect it to be considered or receive a response from Zendesk PMs when it's celebrating its 10 years anniversary? :))
1
Shawna James
I understand how our recent updates about this feature not being prioritized might have caused frustration because we didn't reference our guidelines in this post. Product feedback that is provided in this space is not guaranteed to be included on any product backlog or roadmaps. While we listen and read every piece of feedback that comes through this forum, in some instances, our product teams need to make the tough decision to work in a direction that is not aligned with a particular piece of feedback. This Community forum is simply for sharing your challenges and how you use the product, but it is not a case/resolution system.
We appreciate your continued engagement in this space! Thank you.
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Wynn Larson
+1 to customizing these emails! The ability to edit these emails through triggers (as ticketing emails are handled) would be a vast improvement for our end user experience.
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Miguel Contreras
I do hope that you add it to your roadmap for next year since you have almost all email templates covered that we can control and modify. Our leadership & exec team hates how the content of this email is displayed to customers and really wants us to be able to edit it. So much so that we may stop using the follow feature fully and just input a manual process via hubspot or something were we get people to sign up for help center alerts, and then have someone write each update we are doing so customers have a better experience
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Rachel Perry
Yes, I'd love for there to be an “unsubscribe from updates" link directy in the email. In addition, I'd love for all the follow links for our products to be summarized in one digest, rather than having to login individually to unsubscribe!
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Vivian Carter
Chiming in from 2025 to add that we STILL need the ability to customize these emails.
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