Best practices for discontinuing email as a support channel | Community
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Best practices for discontinuing email as a support channel

  • May 7, 2022
  • 3 replies
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Allen11

Instead of sending an email, we're embarking on a big push for customers only to create tickets via the Zendesk web form. I'm thinking of discontinuing email support, but I want to make sure I'm considering everything.

We could create a trigger to set any newly created tickets via the current email alias to closed and send an auto-responder pointing to the web form. But is that the best solution? It seems too easy.

My other concerns are:

  1. Will this solution still allow replies from agents to be sent from our current email alias?
  2. Our webform will require customers to sign in to their account before submitting a new ticket. But what about customers that are locked out of their account? What alternatives do they have to be still able to submit a ticket to us if we automatically close tickets created by email?

    3 replies

    Jacob20
    • Jacob20
    • May 7, 2022

    Hi Allen, that is very interesting, I've wanted to do the same multiple times in the past, but have not had the necessary support from the organization.
    Apart from the technical best practices, I would put a lot of emphasis on that message sent when requesters try to contact you via email. It needs to have a strong value proposition, it needs to convince them that it is worth the inconvenience and actually to save them time and effort, and provide a quicker and better resolution of their issue.
    1. I don't see why it wouldn't, but if you have a sandbox available, it is a good idea to test out numerous scenarios.
    2. If your webform is in Zendesk Guide, a password reset should be possible for users. You may also consider adding a web widget on that login page to assist with this use case.

    Hope that helps.

    Allen11
    • Allen11
    • Author
    • May 7, 2022

    Thanks, @jacob20! Adding a web widget on the login page is a good idea.

    T
    • Tom31
    • June 2, 2022

    Hi @allen11, thanks for sharing this - it's an interesting question of how and whether to remove email support.

    I did a related post (https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4647146945690-Pros-and-Cons-of-Removing-Email-as-a-Support-Channel) and wondered if anyone has any metrics or experiences on this before seeing your post. 

    If you do discontinue email support, it would be interesting to hear how you managed the "Can't login" scenarios and how / whether it changed any key metrics. Thanks 

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