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

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....

+ 1  Please sort this soon!

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

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.

@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. 

@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.

21562824, 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.

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.

@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.

+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.

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?