Remove Follower and/or CC for ticket update per trigger/automation action

Hi 17337007288

Maybe the Notify Target action in triggers and automations may help.

You'd need to be able to define the condition which would require the removal of all CCs, then define the JSON body to clear the CC and follower fields, including the collaborators, which would look something like this:

{
   "ticket": {
       "follower_ids": [],

        "email_cc_ids": [],

        "collaborator_ids": [] 

   }

}

The setup required for this is described here:

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203662136

 

Note that Zendesk is just another "external" target in this context. My setup for a target to update Zendesk tickets is:

The URL is ending with https://<yourdomain>.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets/{{ticket.id}}

 

 

Yours truly

Peter

P.S. Thanks, @Oliver Tietze for the collaborators tip.

Thank you very much @Peter Hochstrasser, we will check that at our end! 

Bianca

If you want to retain certain but remove others (always static per trigger, though) have a look at:

https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/support/tickets#setting-followers

@Peter Hochstrasser thanks for that useful workaround. We suffer from plenty of problems caused by the Zendesk integrated instransparent automations, especially with merging tickets.

Rolling out your solutions we realized that the tickets remained with a "CC" shown in the ticket.

Adding "collaborator_ids": [] fixed this. You might want to mention this in your original solution.

As far as I learned, if a collaborator is present, this is turned into a follower or email cc by Zendesk. But deleting the followers and e-mail CCs will leave the collaborators intact and strange things happen (the ticket shows NO 'email_cc_ids' in the object (retrieved by the API) BUT the frontend shows the CC user still in the form (and no change visible in the events log).

Resetting collaborators obviously removes it from everywhere.

Regards
Oliver

Thanks, @Oliver Tietze, I integrated your extension.

@peter11 thanks for this solution, the webhook works as a charm.
But, I only want to run the trigger when a specific follower is added.

Do you have an idea how to do this? Since it isn't selectable when creating a trigger nor does it add a tag when a follower is added.

Hi @jorn

You need to be able to assemble the trigger condition in Zendesk's triggers.
As CCed, collaborating or following users are not in the list of trigger conditions, you are out of luck doing this with internal means.

I thought maybe you can use a tag on that person's record, but that only works for requesters and assignees, if I'm recalling this correctly. So, you're really out of options here.

You have to resort to an API solution, either as an external solution running on a web server, or by creating your own Zendesk Support app and check all tickets being saved for your conditions.

So, in short, no, you cannot do this at this time with the means offered by Zendesk.

Yours truly
Peter

@peter11
Already thought there was no solution within Zendesk itself, big bummer.
I'll give it a try by setting a trigger on ticket creation and let the API call do it's work at first.

Hi All,

I set up this webhook using the following:

EDIT: here is the correct trigger there is no coma after []

Scenario: I often ended up copied in on a Zendesk ticket, I then receive loads of emails which I don't really want.

Case: I would like to be able to click a button in the email to remove me from being copied into that ticket.. At least until someone re-adds me. Much like clicking on the ticket URL to see more of a description or also a link like unsubscribing from junk email

Does any function like this exist in Zendesk where we could create a link for this in a trigger email?

@rachel29 did you get any further on removing just followers and not CC's 

I've tested this today and likewise it only removes followers if collaborators is included but then it removes CC's too.

Just thinking is there a way of having the webhook add the CC's back in.  I tried it earlier but couldn't work out a way of getting it correctly formatted in the trigger to prevent an error.

I can see this being very useful. 
We often get customers sending a single email to all service providers requesting pricing or other information. 
We already mark our competitors as such using custom fields so would be great to be able to remove them (or at least alert to the presence) of them on the ticket from a customer. 

would be great to be able to setup triggers for this.

Hi Bianca - PM for Triggers and Automations here. Thank you for providing this feedback and apologies for such a late reply! 

It sounds like there are potentially some workarounds but they don't fully solve for your use case.  

This is a great feature request and I will certainly at it to our backlog. This means that we will think about adding it as a priority later in our planning cycle. We are going to leave this post open for comment to allow others to provide their feedback and use cases, however please note as is stated in our Community Guidelines that we can not commit to prioritizing any one piece of feedback we receive in the community. 

Thanks again for your feedback and to others for helping each other out! 

Zendesk: 4 years. 

That's how long it took your product management to finally see the merit in this request.

In our (your) industry, that is eternity.

You get good ideas and requests from your customers daily. 

Pls. find a way to vet them all quickly.

Don't know if it was possible before, but I didn't got it to work before.

It's possible to delete specific email addresses (based on their user ID in Zendesk) from a ticket, with this API call (so not native in a trigger)

{
  "ticket": {
    "email_ccs": [
		{ "user_id": "21158606842258", "action": "delete" }
    ]
  }
}

This way you don't have to delete all CCs. This works in my situation.

@peter11  @joel19 4 years for a response or development seems consistent with other ZD development suggestions from their customers and users.  At least Zendesk is consistent even if consistently slow. 

I'm the CS world as you suggest 4 years is an eternity. We have to measure response times in hours otherwise we loose customers. 

Please Zendesk. Respond to the needs of your customers quicker. We implore you. 

@jorn thanks for your advice and API recommendation for CC'd users.  Does this work for followers too?  Do I need to amend the API code for a follower as opposed to CC?  I haven't tried this yet, hoping to later today.

@rolf11 I don't think it removes the followers as well, but I haven't tested it with agents (so only tickets without followers).

You can also delete (or add) specific followers, see this documentation: https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/ticketing/managing-tickets/creating-and-updating-tickets/#setting-followers

In case the link goes dead:

{
  "ticket": {
    "followers": [
      { "user_id": "562624", "action": "put" },
      { "user_id": "624562" },
      { "user_id": "243642", "action": "delete" },
      { "user_id": "562", "user_email": "existing-user1@example.com", "action": "delete" },
      { "user_email": "existing-user2@example.com", "action": "put" },
    ]
  }
}

Thanks @jorn I've managed to get this to work well now and through some test tickets and this API call you mentioned above it works well.  It is always just the same user ID that we need to remove so answers the above questions I had.  Thanks again for your help in solving our challenge.

+1 for being able to set a trigger or macro inside of Zendesk where I can remove a specific follower (or all followers).