New Follower and CC's problems - CC's getting removed by End-user unintentionally
We recently upgraded to the new Followers and CC's experience, and while we like most of the new feature set, there is one glaring flaw that is a huge problem for us.
- If a person is CC'd on a ticket, and they haven't interacted with the ticket yet (by replying to an email), then if the Requester just hits the Reply button (instead of Reply All) on whatever email client they use, then all CCs get removed from that ticket.
This basically guarantees that people who were specifically chosen to be communicated with are going to miss key information.
Example Use Case -
- we work with enterprise customers, which have multiple locations (organizations) rolling up to a parent entity.
- We are taking the individual locations through an onboarding process, and the enterprise contact (our primary customer) is always CC'd so they are in the loop and can help the individual location as needed from the customer side.
- Just because they are not hitting Reply All, the end-user is not intending to remove their enterprise boss (in this case) from being CC’d on their response, but just replying to the ticket in the same way they always have
Tier 2 linked me the the KB article explaining how this feature works, but in that article, it is not clear at all that this is the result of upgrading to the new CCs. I think we're going to have to revert unless this is fixed immediately, which concerns me for the future, as I see a forced upgrade at some point.
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John
This is a really difficult design decision. Because the CC experience follows email conventions, if an end user uses reply over reply all, there is an assumption that the end user did not want the other CC users to share in the reply and the reply becomes an internal comment. So the end user replying is safe in responding knowing that their reply is not viewed by the other users by email or through the Zendesk Help Centre.
Now, following the email convention, the CCs are removed just as if this is an email exchange.
I would say that keeping the end user's reply internal is reasonable. But agree that there has to be a better way to restore or preserve the original CC users on the ticket.
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@.... I agree it's a tricky design decision. However, I do not understand your comment - End Users can never make an Internal Reply, so why would they expect privacy in their responses? Also, in some cases, the public ticket comments are put at the bottom of every ticket update, so a CC'd user would be able to see the whole public ticket history anyway, no matter when they were added.
I totally agree that the system as designed makes an assumption about the user intent, which is exactly my problem. The absence of an action is not the same as choosing the opposite action. In database parlance, it's the difference between 0 and NULL. The implications are very different depending on how it is applied.
I could see an argument that someone is choosing the Reply button instead of Reply All, but in the context of a multi-party ticketing system, there is additional meaning carried by one of those choices that the user isn't aware of, and it would be way too complicated to explain, much less get them to change their behavior.
For that reason (and others), I disagree that the CC email experience follows email conventions. Obviously these changes move it closer to that, but frankly, I think trying to move towards mimicking the email CC paradigm (while understandable) is flawed. Why not re-name the whole thing Followers for both agents and end-users? There are ways that emailing with a ticketing system will never be able to fully replicate a native email expected functionality, so you're setting up some level of planned confusion.
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John
Thanks for that.
The previous CC feature and the new CC\ Followers certainly have their merits and limitations. I am certainly not smart enough to have the answer. Hopefully, your post will stimulate more discussion or at least alert customers of the pitfalls.
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I have users who are cc'd on tickets and have been since the ticket was submitted yet their email replies go Private. How do I fix this? I've also had Followers replies go Public when they are not CC'd. This is messy and I am considering disabling the Followers option. Anyone done this and if so is it smooth or did that cause issues?
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In it's current form "Follower and CC" is completely unusable for us. Just like John mentioned - there are often people that MUST be CCed in certain cases, regardless of what the end user does. Anyways, why are followers and the new CC logic rolled into one feature? Why not simply split them into two features that can be activated independently from each other?
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This is True.
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