Verification for anonymous help center requests

I second Tommy's request. We have a form that is only accessible to staff but which is used to submit on behalf of customers (using the customer's email address). We do not want the customer to have to verify their address before the ticket is created, that will create an unnecessary step for them. Please make this an optional feature, on a per-form basis.

Agreed - we specifically do not require sign in for customers because we do not want to present a barrier to contacting us. We have other processes in place for handling spam and bad actors and need the option to opt out of this additional email. 

This feature does not align with our business process. Please ensure that there is an option to disable the feature. 

100% +1!

It hard enough getting our customers to use the help centre instead of email.

Also agreeing on this, this is a NOT WANTED burden. 

We do not have sign in option chosen for customers. Therefore every customer would need to go through the pain + on our staff side extra burden to manually unsuspend tickets.

Stop this.

Extremely upset by the very short notice to manage this

Additionally, the fact that auto-replies will not work when the user is not signed in means that they will not receive important information from us. This is a significant change.

Agreed. Our Help Center is currently fully anonymous = all requests are anonymous. This would be a major disruption in our systems. 

This should not be mandated; we need the ability to disable this. Organizations are capable of making their own decisions on what risks they are willing to accept.

Agree 100%. Not only did they give customers minimal time to prepare for this change.

 

This is going to break so many of our workflows, and you've given us virtually no time to figure out new solutions.  I don't know who came up with this idea, but it might be one of the worst that you've come up with.

+ 1  would like the ability to turn this off

Hi, 

Seconding this request as well. Our Help Centers are gated behind product access where customers must authenticate themselves in order to access the help center and submit a ticket. Implementing this with no control will create unnecessary friction with customers and additional work amongst agents, managers, and admins in order to triage and restore tickets within the suspended tickets view.

Please consider this another emphatic vote for being able to opt out of the ‘anonymous help center requests verification’ behavior

I’d like to add my support to the request to make this feature optional and to delay the rollout.
 

The timeline feels very rushed for a change that can significantly impact existing workflows. In our case, we currently don’t have issues that would justify adding this extra verification step, and it would only create unnecessary friction for our customers.
 

If some organizations need this level of protection that makes sense, but it should be optional so each team can decide what works best for their processes.

This will not only be a barrier to customers contacting us (many are not going to bother going through a verification process, so we won't hear from them), but it will also break many of our existing workflows and burden our already strapped team with manually checking suspended tickets multiple times each week. Please make this OPTIONAL.

ZD please confirm 

It does not apply to:

• Requests created by sending an email to your support email address - confirm this refers to end users sending an email to our Verified support email address WHICH then ingested and creates a ticket

Users are not going to take the time to create a Zendesk account or go through this verification process. We switched from direct email support to focusing on web form with Zendesk because we were assured it would be EASY for our customers. Please provide an option to disable this.

I would also like to echo this. Please make it possible to opt out of this update.

The web form is our primary channel, and our support flows are entirely anonymous. Because we are a global brand, adding an extra verification step written only in English could cause significant confusion and customer frustration. You have also given us less than 3 working days to adapt.

Echoing everyone's comments here. 

This change will dramatically disrupt the workflows we currently have configured in Zendesk, and the one-week notice period is extremely short for something this impactful.

A large portion of our users submit tickets and reply without creating or signing into accounts. Requiring email verification for anonymous submissions will introduce significant friction into our support flow and will likely result in legitimate tickets being suspended or never verified. This directly affects our ability to provide timely support and creates additional operational overhead for our agents.

At minimum, we need the ability to disable this behavior on day one. Without an opt-out or admin control, this change forces a major workflow modification with virtually no lead time to adjust processes, documentation, or user expectations.

Can you please confirm:

1. Whether there will be an admin setting to disable anonymous email verification, and if so where it will be located.
2. Whether there is any way to delay or opt out of this rollout for our instance.
3. If there are recommended alternative configurations that preserve current anonymous submission workflows.

We strongly recommend that changes of this magnitude include a longer rollout window and an opt-out mechanism so customers can adapt their workflows accordingly.

I 100% agree that this change should NOT be mandated/made - please do not do this, especially with such short notice. The change doesn't align with our workflow for customer support (through Zendesk) and would make it harder for our customer to access our Support team. 

We are an email provider, and often customers will contact us if they are having an issue setting up a custom domain or accessing their email.  If we mandate email verification, we make it harder (and sometimes impossible) to easily get in contact with us. 

If this “fix” is in response to bad actors creating Zendesk end user accounts and subsequently triggering the sending of “Welcome” emails as part of the Zendesk Account creation process - please consider another option such as monitoring and throttling the creation of Zendesk User Accounts entered with the same user name/email or over a threshold (say 20 per minute or whatever is the Zendesk industry normal threshhold) so if a bad actor is scripting the creation of Zendesk Accounts, that can be stopped. 

Yes, we contacted Zendesk and reported the problem that a script could be used to create 6,000+ Zendesk Accounts which triggered welcome emails to all of these accounts, but we want to be able to throttle/stop the creation of scripted/quickly created accounts and the sending of the emails vs.  NOT allowing unverified accounts (we want to continue to offer this feature.)  Please add a helpful fix to the real problem! 

Yes, security is undeniably important in today’s environment; however, providing advance notice of changes is equally important. Feedback was not requested, and reading the comments it seems decisions appear to have been made without consultation from any of your clients. The help centre serves as one of the primary intake channel for Zendesk with structured requests for anonymous users; making this a default option is just not feasible.

 Agree with all the others here and we would strongly recommend Introducing an administrative toggle for this feature , enabling us to adjust the platform to our unique requirements. Without the ability to toggle this setting, we find that usage of Zendesk will be significantly impeded.

The new workflow feature is creating major challenges for our company. Auto-replies don’t work when users aren’t signed in, meaning customers may miss critical information. This also forces our team to perform unnecessary manual work and introduces friction for our customers. For us, this is a significant change that reduces flexibility and impacts service quality. Organizations should have the option to disable it.  Please make this an optional feature. 

I would like to know what happens when a suspended ticket is recovered following this change? Specifically, will the pre-filled webform fields be retained or removed?
 

All of our Help Centre requests are currently submitted anonymously, so we’re not yet sure how many may end up in the suspended queue. If they do and we recover them, ideally we would want all of the fields to remain populated so the relevant triggers can run as expected

Please reconsider - this should be optional. Our customers have no possibility to sign in. Its an additional burden, customers will miss to confirm which leads to a drop in service quality and custoemr satisfaction.