Sending one email to two support addresses

Hi, 

We are currently facing the same issue and will be happy to get any tips related.

Best regards,

Raphaël

Agree. strongly. and not a happy bunny

this is an incredulous limitation and either an oversight by the development team or a sales ploy. 

we have deployed 4 separate instances. (as recommended by Zendesk in the first) and have 2 partners who also use Zendesk support. and the best option is to tell our 4000 customers to change the way they send mails... Really! 

we now have entered within my business road map a migration to a working support system. 

We also had to give up the migration for the part of the team that it was mandatory (1/3 of the users).

This is a significant issue - many organisations will be silently missing tickets with no way in Zendesk of knowing the email to their subdomain has been ignored.

We even hired an outside consultant to help us, unfortunately they were unable to resolve these technical issues which wasn't much an suprise for me, but hey, we are desperate :(.

They had some ideas like using forms on the website for primary way of contacting us so that the user cannot send the request to multiple addresses, of course email would still be the "backup" way for contacting us. Or having a one main support address for all support requests in where the agents would sort and redirect incoming tickets to different support groups (not very elegant way to solve this because of privacy and security reasons) etc.

In the end the problem remains, these solutions are just workarounds. The worst part is not knowing if you have missed something important.

At this current stage I fear that two our deparments will stop using Zendesk, which is shame, as setting them up and training people was a lot of work only to run into this show stopper.

Hi, 

We are also running into this problem. At our company (2000 employees - Non profit) we are in a process of migrating more and more departments to Zendesk. However, if this issue cannot be resolved I'm not sure if Zendesk is the way to go.

I think it's quite normal for an end user to be able to email to multiple support addresses . I can give you multiple situations where this is absolutely necessary.

@zendesk22 Is there a solution on its way or are we having false hope and do we need to start looking at other, better solutions?

Kr, 

Frank

Out of curiosity, what if the end-user has in the TO field 2 non Zendesk emails and a Zendesk email. Would the ticket still be created or would it skip Zendesk?

What if in the To field, there is one support address and in the CC there is another. Is it based on trigger order on which one gets the ticket created for? Or is it random? Or does the TO field take the priority?

My organization is facing the same problem. We have multiple support addresses, some of which are for city council members. There's no way we can train community members to only send requests to one support address. They typically don't know who to contact for most city issues, so they CC every address they can find. Triage and reassignment helps, but some council members still want a copy of the initial message they were CC'd on, even if it's not theirs to respond to.

I created a proof of concept that's a potential workaround for us...

First, set up a webhook that calls the Zendesk API, using the tickets/create_many endpoint.

Next, set up a trigger that fires when a request is received that includes CCs. Add an action, "Notify active webhook," and dynamically create the JSON body using the Liquid template language to parse the CCs and create a new ticket for each one.

This is the JSON body I'm using:

{
  "tickets": [
        {% for cc in ticket.ccs %}
            {
                "comment": {
                    "body": "{{ ticket.description }}"
                },
                "subject": "{{ ticket.title }} - copy #{{ forloop.index }}",
                "group_id": {% if cc.email == "commissioner1@city.gov" %}1234567890{% elsif cc.email == "commissioner2@city.gov" %}0987654321{% endif %},
                "requester": { "email": "{{ ticket.requester.email }}" }
            }{% unless forloop.last %}, {% endunless %}
        {% endfor %}                
  ]
}

It creates a ticket object for each CC included on the original request and uses the original description, subject, and requester on each copy. I even added logic to assign to certain groups depending on the email address. This isn't ideal, because it means the addresses are hard coded in this obscure piece of config (who's going to remember to update it if the addresses change??), but it does the trick.

You also need to make sure to conditionally add a comma between each object in the tickets array (but not at the end), or the API won't be able to correctly parse the JSON. 

My code assumes that only valid support addresses will be used as CCs. If there's a chance other non-support email addresses may be included, you'll need to wrap this in additional conditional logic to check each address before adding a ticket object to the array for it.

More info about Liquid: https://shopify.github.io/liquid/

Realizing I can call the Zendesk API from a trigger that notifies a webhook was a game changer. Even more when I realized Liquid logic can be used to dynamically generate a JSON payload. Liquid can also be used in notification emails. It's super handy!

This really gets into the weeds, but I hope it helps someone.

Hi!

We have the same problem at the moment, because it's necessary in some cases to write a mail to multiple Zendesk support adresses and have individual tickets for each adress included. 

Is there a solution in planning? 
Without any solution this is a huge complication for us if we want to implement more teams into Zendesk.