Send Email Notifications to Secondary Emails in Support
Posted Nov 12, 2020
2020-11-12 We have been struggling with issues surrounding primary and secondary email addresses for our end-users. There is a ZD Support thread here that looks like the issue has been going on for over 4 years now, and I haven’t seen a workaround or fix published.
Here’s our backstory…
In our configuration, we do an export out of our HR system each night and upload that to Zendesk to populate email addresses for our employees. Each employee should have a company-issued email address and a home email address on their profile. The API sets the company email address as primary and the home email as secondary.
The problem we have been running into s has been that our employees will email us from their home email stating that they cannot access their company email. When we go to respond, Zendesk sends the notifications to the primary address on file, which is the email they do not have access.
We realized the issue after several upset employees complained that we never responded to their requests. Their words were, “If I email you from my Gmail account, you should respond to my Gmail account.” We couldn’t agree more.
So then our agents started adding the employee’s Gmail address into the CC field, thinking it would send the notification to both addresses. Unfortunately, Zendesk is too smart. It knows the Gmail address is assigned to an existing user and only emails the primary company address.
We then discovered that we could switch the primary email address on the fly however our agents do not have access to modify customers. We do this because all customer data should be coming through the API. We further secure our instance by allowing only those customers created through the API to submit a request.
We always want a notification to go to their company address for tracking and communication purposes. Our dream would be for Zendesk to message all email addresses on file every single time. We would settle for being able to message both the primary and secondary on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
After raising the issue to Zendesk support, they recommended two workarounds...
- To treat the secondary email address as email Targets and then notify those Targets through Triggers (not the most convenient considering the high number of users we are talking about here).
- The other thing would be creating a new user profile using that secondary email address.
Option 1 isn't an option when we maintain thousands of customer records. Option 2 is technically possible but creates another issue. Here is why...
When we receive a ticket, it is auto-assigned to that single person record. Our agents then look at that person's record to get a history of their previous requests. They look for things like:
- Have they requested the same thing before?
- What did we do last time?
- Was that issue resolved, or did it bump-bump-solve?
If we were to create a different person record for every single email address on file, the agent lookup functionality would become much more difficult. We would need to search across multiple people records instead of it being housed within one record.
It would also detract from our reporting capabilities since management looks at things like top requesters and an individual’s request history. Since we have several departments inside of Zendesk, it helps us get a better picture of how often someone is reaching out for help which, in turn, shows us where we need to do more training for our employees. Splitting our employees into individual records for each email address would skew things like top requester and require extra effort to view a person’s history.
If we could send mail to all addresses, or even CC the secondary address, this would resolve a pain point for our agents and a major communication breakdown for our employees.
2022-12-09 This is still an issue Zendesk. Please help us help our customers.
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46 comments
Erik Davies
Hopefully, the following provides a good "How it Started" vs "How it is Going". In short, nothing has changed and that is unlikely to change in the near future.
TLDR: This has been an issue repeatedly brought to Zendesk's attention since at least 2012 based on another thread with a similar feature request linked below. Between comments within that thread and the most recent official Zendesk response pasted below, I doubt that this will be addressed soon if ever. Everyone will need to decide for themselves/their company whether or not this is a dealbreaker feature.
Benjamin Kirsch
March 11, 2024
Zendesk Product Manager
"Hey all, thanks for taking the time to provide us with your feedback here. This is a valuable feature request and it is in our backlog backlog for future consideration.
We're currently working on a couple other features focusing on surfacing outbound bounce notifications and Email connectors for Exchange and SMTP Relays. Once those feature are complete we will consider this for future development. However please note that we can't commit to prioritizing any one piece of feedback we receive in the community.
I'll leave this post open for comment to allow others to continue providing their feedback and use cases to help with prioritization in the future."
Similar Issue with Relevant Comments Included
How can i send email notifications to secondary emails
"Dave Dyson
December 16, 2021
Comment actions
"Hi everyone, I just wanted to let you know that I've spoken with our product team – this is something that is on their radar, and they are planning on having more internal discussions about it next year. Follow this post for updates: Send Email Notifications to Secondary Emails in Support"
From comments in that thread it sounds like it has been an ongoing issue that will never be important enough to address:
Jonathan March
December 15, 2021
Community Moderator
Comment actions
"I would not want to attempt a black-box analysis on ZD's internal processes, but this is indeed a long-standing (9 years with us) source of friction and pain, and this workaround is really not an acceptable solution."
2
Official
Benjamin Kirsch
Hey all, thanks for taking the time to provide us with your feedback here. This is a valuable feature request and it is in our backlog backlog for future consideration.
We're currently working on a couple other features focusing on surfacing outbound bounce notifications and Email connectors for Exchange and SMTP Relays. Once those feature are complete we will consider this for future development. However please note that we can't commit to prioritizing any one piece of feedback we receive in the community.
I'll leave this post open for comment to allow others to continue providing their feedback and use cases to help with prioritization in the future.
-1
Christian Becker
Hopefully we get this bug fixed in 2024. Or a statement why it is so hard to implement.
1
James Peterson - Eastern Logic
+1, still an issue, no reasonable workaround, alerady at 60 upvotes, would be nice to see someone from Zendesk provide an official response. Huge issue!
3
Movell Sarran
Any update on this?
What is the logic in not emailing back to the email address that emailed us?
2
Eddie Santillan
Hi Zendesk Team - Is there any hope for a solution here? Anything we could do via the API?
3
Afton Rupert
+1 still an issue - please prioritize Zendesk!
4
Ann McKinney
I reported this same issue in a different thread over a year and half ago, so I'm very disappointed to find no response by Zendesk in the three years this thread has been extremely active.
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Chris Richmond
+1, still an issue. It's amazing to have multiple emails in a user's contact for things like automatic organizations to work correctly. But as mentioned, for anyone using ZenDesk as internal support, it is very common for a user to email us from their personal email email address when their company email address isn't working.
Creating a 2nd profile for each user creates additional issues, and does the overhead of the agent (if even allowed) needing to change the primary email address for the user on a ticket-by-ticket basis. There really should be a way to click on the user's name in the comment section and have a check mark or some way to indicate which email address to use on this individual ticket.
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mws
Well, the day has finally come. I'm so excited to share that we're finally off of Zendesk. Moved to Helpscout earlier this month and it's been such a breath of fresh air. The point here isn't to promote HS, though.
Our whole support team is so glad we don't have to deal with the following issues any more (and, is very regretful we didn't make this change sooner) :
- This issue...insanely struggling with browser performance and autocorrect not working.
- The ticket views not automatically refreshing (seriously, how is this acceptable? It's 2023)
- Horrible/painful handling of CCs in tickets where multiple emails need to be Ccd in.
- Thoughtless handling of primary/secondary/multiple emails for a single contact. Basically, you can't give a contact multiple emails, you have to create a separate contact for each email they'd like to be notified at. Ridiculous.
In the years we've been with Zendesk, no new features have been added; and if anything, features have been "broken"/degraded. Zendesk is the most basic solution for ticket management, and cares not one bit about listening to their users. I hope to see even more solutions recognize this, listen to what their users need, and build more alternatives that make sense instead of using Zendesk.
I've been waiting for this day to be able to unsubscribe to this thread. Best of luck to all of you, and hope you find an alternative that works for you.
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