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Preserve Group and Assignee for user-generated follow-up tickets

Completed


Posted Mar 13, 2012

Whenever a user writes back to a Closed ticket, a follow-up is created without Group or Assignee.

If the original ticket was assigned a Group or Assignee, i think those should be preserved in the follow-up. 

It would help keep track of the follow-up tickets better. (right now they are just lost in an "everything else" view) 


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109 comments

Thanks @Rich.      I have a report set up now to monitor for unassigned tickets and your suggestion gave me a great idea!     Rather than create a second set of triggers for closed tickets, I'm thinking I'll just have my original "Assign" triggers both add and check for specific tags on each group we use in our support organization.    That should cut down on the overall trigger maintenance and simplify the process for us.     The only thing I'm not sure of is if the tag already exists will it re-add it again on the ticket on responses.      Either way still beats losing the tickets all together.   Thanks for your suggestion!!

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60 comments over 7 years and it still didn't make the prioritisation list? Folks, this isn't some nice-to-have idea, this seems like basic functionality that should have been included from the start.

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@Robin, the numbers here do not represent at all how serious this issue is. We all have landed here after we have discovered this flawed on the system. There are many Zendesk users out there that have no idea that this issue even exists.

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@Gasper, the crux here is in 'discovered'. Regardless of the company or specific use case, I think we can work off of a few assumptions:

  • The vast majority of ZD email users will have a need for somewhat persistent Groups and Agent assignments
  • All of these users are likely to use some form of trigger to assign to these Groups (unless contact volume is so low that all of that sorting is done manually)
  • It is impossible to predict or prevents end-customers from replying to emails after an indefinite amount of time, creating follow up cases.

This alone tells us, that many, if not all users, will receive follow-up tickets and have a need to treat those tickets in the same way than the original case, whether the reply comes after 1h hour or 1 month. 

It would be feasible to either transfer all the data of the parent ticket, including group/agent assignment, to the follow-up or transfer none of it and treat the follow-up like a new case, trusting your triggers to route them the same way as they'd done before.

However, somewhere in the design there was a deliberate decision to only transfer partial data, making it impossible for a trigger to distinguish between an already routed open case and a follow-up case, entirely without group/agent assignment.

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+1 please

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Bump

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Hi! I think this would be a great feature to have since a lot of end users follow-up and expect to be speaking to the same agent. 

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+1. This should be standard functionality within a ticketing system.

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+1. This should be standard functionality within a ticketing system.

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One more on the waitlist for this feature to be developed. Any news from the new Product Manager?

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I am also waiting on this. We have a lot of tickets and agents and get follow up tickets all the time what get assigned to all agents and we need to re-assign them to the agents.

It would be such a help to have this issue solved

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Looking forward having a new feature/solution that would automatically assign the followup ticket to the original Group as today they are just falling into the cracks

The workaround that was suggested so far is not realistic for companies with many agents & turnover in the teams.

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yes, @... I think so, too.

We are too many agents to arrange a workaround like the one suggested for every agent.

 

 

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Definitely a +1 here too. We use the triggers (tags) to manage this but it would be much easier if it was pre-built indeed.

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Yes, it would be great if the follow-up ticket at least inherited the same group; that would be enough for us. Same agent would be nice too, but the group is what is important.

So far I have implemented the suggested workaround for 10 of our groups: a trigger to tag tickets that are closed with a tag that identifies the group, and then a trigger for follow-up tickets to assign to that group. That was 20 triggers. I now have to do it for 10 more groups, so that is 20 more triggers. We have too many groups to be creating two triggers for every group.

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+1 

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This should be fixed by now, folks. Please.

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Just wondering if there is update on this and whether a solution will be put in place, the work around would be ok but it has to be done for every agent which is a bit time consuming.

 

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Andrew J

Community Moderator

The Agent Activity Tags app, may help with this.  It will automatically tag every ticket an agent works on. This does not automatically clear tags, so you will see tags from multiple agents if they get moved around a bit.

From this you could set up triggers for reassigning if tickets reopen. For groups, your trigger could be set to 'contains any' of a list of agent tags.  Multiple tags could cause an issue as presumably the last matching trigger in the list would make the call on who it goes to. Depending on your situation, this may be manageable.

Disclaimer: We are the developers of the app mentioned.

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Andrew J

Community Moderator

Sorry - I should have said: the above may help because tags are preserved in followup tickets.

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This post is from over 8 years ago and obviously a lot of Zendesk customers need this - how is it possible this feature is still not implemented? 

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+1

this goes right to the list of obvious missing features

the deeper you work with Zendesk the more you ask yourself why a lot of functions are only implemented half baked.

What could possibly be a good reason to have the follow up ticket created without a group and requiring manual assignment. and no, adding triggers for this is not the way to go. I already have too many triggers fixing missing SLA integrations.

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Andrew J

Community Moderator

@mark, the 'what could possibly' is fairly obvious. The vast majority of follow up tickets for me are created by customers replying to an email, usually an old email. A customer in the situation is not 'creating a follow up ticket', they are replying to a closed ticket. There are 2 possibilities here, that it is related to the original, but closed request, or that it is a totally unrelated request. If it is an unrelated request, then subjecting it to the regular incoming ticket classification, prioritisation and assignment process usually makes perfect sense. In many cases, pushing these back to the same group or agent will MISassign the ticket. And skip any queue for incoming requests.
If the ticket is genuinely related the original request there is a question around why the ticket is closed if the customer issue is not resolved. Is it closed too fast?
Also, do people finding this an issue have any system for classifying their requests? In our helpdesk, every ticket has an issue type field with multiple options that are divided into group related issues. Our incoming allocation system uses these issue types to automatically route tickets to the appropriate groups. These issue types automatically tag the ticket. Tags are preserved on follow up tickets, and this makes auto allocation very simple as the same rules used to allocate tickets initially will apply.

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Ok, I see your point.

As we provide technical support, the chance is very high that the customer uses the "old" email again, to tell us that the issue has come back.

The part about using fields and tags to auto assign tickets is also exactly what I meant by features only being applied half baked. This only works if you have only so few entries that it can be managed manually. For example in a multi select field you can use :: to create categories. But those categories can't be used anywhere, no trigger, no nothing. I would have to add every single product in a trigger to make this work.

I like Zendesk for a lot of features, otherwise we wouldn't have bought it, but it is lacking when you want to have more than the standard "enduser has a question to 1 of 20 possible categories" process.

 

 

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@..., while you're describing the use cases correctly, this is not how Zendesk currently behaves. The tool actively mixes behaviours, treating the a follow-up as a new case (without group assignment) as well as an existing case (with previously applied tags) at the same time.

Either one of these options would be workable, either deleting all old meta data and starting routing from scratch or keeping old data and returning it to the agent/team who previously worked it.

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Andrew J

Community Moderator

@robin.  If as you say 'Either option is workable', then for you, strip the tags and clean the ticket. 

Create a single trigger with the following settings;

Conditions: Ticket Channel is 'Closed Ticket'

Actions: Set Tags: follow-up

Place this at the top of your triggers list, and a new follow up ticket will be wiped clean.  Test it, you might find some other adaptions to be made but it should do the job.

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Andrew J

Community Moderator

@Mark, Just an idea. To retain group, if there any part in your original assign process that uses either macro or trigger, you can use this to set a group_tag.  Then this can be used to reassign to a follow-up ticket.

Of course if you have 20 groups or more it will get complex, but once set up should do the job smoothly. 

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I think the purpose of this feedback thread is to have the Zendesk behaviour changed, not to determine a workaround for badly implemented features via additional triggers.

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+ 1  Please sort this soon!

Assign follow-up to Group / Agent / None trigger.

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I just "discovered" this behavior in Zendesk.  Our groups share a lot of tickets and in one case Team A started the ticket but then reassigned the ticket to Team B.  With the original ticket closed out, our customers/users like to respond to the last email received from us which this user did.  Zendesk proceed to create a follow up but then assigned all attributes back to Team A which is not intuitive.  The last team to work with this customer on this request was Team B.  As a result Team A isn't vested and Team B is unaware the user has responded but it is sitting with Team A.  This resulted in many lost days and frustrated user/customer not getting a response in a prompt manner as expected.

Zendesk team, change this to assume the attributes of the ticket as it was when it was closed, not when it was opened.  Easy fix....

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