Notifications for internal comments

Hi Chris - When a user is mentioned on a ticket, they should already be receiving an email notification once they've been mentioned. Are your agents not receiving this email notification, or was this question moreso related to creating an email notification without the individual being added as a Follower on this ticket?

If it's the latter, I'm afraid there isn't a way to prevent the user mentioned from being added as a Follower on the ticket when using Zendesk's @mention feature. However, your agents could manually remove the individual as a Follower on the ticket once they no longer need to be notified of any updates on the ticket. I'll let other users weigh in on whether they found a workaround for this, but I personally haven't found a better solution. 

As far as the Assignee email notification is considered, you might already have a trigger that Zendesk adds by default called "Notify assignee of comment update." As long as this trigger is activated within your instance, you shouldn't need to do anything further to send an email notification to the Assignee. Do you know if your team is currently using this trigger, or was there something different you had in mind when sending an email notification to the assignee?

Thanks, Chandra.  From what I can tell, users aren't added as followers on a ticket when they are just mentioned in an internal comment, nor do they get notifications on the comment.  I'd like to prevent having to manually add them as a follower but if that's the only solution, we'll have to go with it.

Thanks
Chris

Hi Chris - thanks so much for clarifying!

We use the @mention feature frequently at my company, and it should automatically add any agents that are mentioned as a Follower on the ticket.

When you say that your users aren't added as Followers when mentioned in an internal note, are you specifically referring to End Users in Zendesk or Agents?

I am curious about this, too. When I @mention an agent in an internal reply, they get added as a follower, but they receive no email notification. We would like to change that - what's the point of mentioning someone internally in a comment if they don't get notified? (Note that in this article - https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021500433 - it says "It's also important to note that the trigger action Email user + (requester and CCs) is suppressed if a ticket update does not include a public comment. The trigger still fires and performs any other actions that may be included in the trigger, but the email message is not sent. You must include a public comment if you want to use this action to send an email message.")

Hi @Justin Near - It looks like the line you quoted from Zendesk's help article is specific to emailing the Requester and CCs, not Followers. 

As long as your agents are being added as a Follower to the ticket when you are @mentioning them in an Internal comment, they should be getting an email notification for that internal comment as well as all future internal/public comments (provided they are still listed as a Follower on the ticket at the time the new comment was made). 

According to this help article, "Followers get email notifications when comments are added to tickets they are following, and this happens as soon as you turn on Enable followers in your admin settings." This has been my personal experience as well as we use the @mention functionality quite frequently at my company. 

If you've confirmed that Followers has been enabled for your account and your agents still aren't receiving email notifications for either internal comments or public comments left on a ticket that have been added to as a Follower, I'd definitely recommend reaching out to Zendesk's Support team for further assistance so that they can take a closer look at your instance. 

Thanks @Chandra Robrock - we will continue looking into it. (The way we originally set everything up is really messing with things). I appreciate your help!

@Chandra Robrock, what I think would be amazing with these sorts of notifications, is to provide options other than receiving them via email.

For example, we use a few great services which alert via a system notification message which lives in a little  "notifications" window on the frontend that alerts us to an internal note or changes to a ticket we are working with, rather than an email.

Is this something that Zendesk is able to adapt to as it does help with scaling such internal processes?

@Nabil Sabih At the moment, Zendesk will surface an in-app notification to the agent in the UI when an agent is @mentioned on the ticket, but I'm afraid they do not support the ability to create a trigger that fires an in-app notification. 

I'd definitely recommend posting a Feature Request in the Feedback on Support section of the Community to get Zendesk's eyes on this request. 

That said, you can definitely trigger notifications to other systems using Webhooks. If that's of any interest to you, feel free to check out my Get Notified in Slack when @Mentioned on a Ticket community tip for an example of how to accomplish this.