Disable / Un-check 'Create follow-up' option

I use social messaging add-on to integrated Facebook Private Messages with Zendesk 

What I found is it mark any end-user ticket after the first one as follow up then follow-up after follow up and so on !

Zendesk Customer Support said that no solution yet.... because end-user replied to the same message through messenger even after the tickets were closed so that made it a follow-up ticket.

How can end-user that chat with us on Facebook Private Messages replied as a new messages since it is a chat box ??

This has been up since 2017, is there any chance this request will gain traction/be added to the roadmap in the foreseeable future?

Any news on this? 

Hi, 

I'm looking for a solution for the same problem. Has this been addressed yet? 

I find this feature (follow-up tickets) intersting but it would be nice to have the possibility to unlink to the old ticket in the agent space if the new issue has nothing to do with the old topic.

Five years later... is this something we can get going? I feel that the ability to modify a ticket to mark it as NOT a follow-up would be very useful and should just be a basic function.

Is there an update on this? 

Same question, any chance you can give users control over follow-ups? It's been a while...

Same question. It's not just a nuisance, but really a security concern as described multiple times above.

I have created a work-around trigger for this that does the trick:

Conditions:
Ticket IS Created
Channel IS Closed Ticket
Current user IS NOT (agent) 

Actions:
Email user - (requester)
Email subject - Unable to process request {{ticket.id}}
Email Body - An explanation that requester needs to make a NEW ticket, bla, bla, bla
Status - Closed
Group - whatever group you want
Assignee - whatever agent you want (I created a system user for this purpose)
Add tags - followup_rejected (and I use this in CSAT and other automations to NOT send anything to the requester)

With this trigger the follow-up tickets are auto closed and out of sight, and requester is notified.

Morten's workaround technically works, so thank you Morten for that - I have used your recommendation. However, it is not a great customer experience. It causes a lot of customer confusion, because a new ticket is still created and then closed automatically via the workaround.  So the initial reply a customer still receives is that a new ticket number was created, then moments later they will receive the message about creating a new ticket instead. It can cause a confusing loop for the customer. Especially if they are not constantly monitoring their email and have 100s of emails they sift through daily. 95% of customers will get it, but 5% will see this as a pain.

Zendesk the best solution will be a feature that sends them a message automatically informing them about the new ticket rejection without a new ticket generating all together.. 

I recently realized that I accidentally eliminated this problem when I connected an external address as the primary email address on this page: https://COMPANY.zendesk.com/admin/channels/talk_and_email/email

When I previously forwarded emails from support@company.com to support@company.zendesk.com, tickets would generate an email address like support+123456@company.zendesk.com. Employees would use the autofill in Outlook and email a specific ticket instead of support@company.com, causing this issue.

Now that I have connected the address, all email from Zendesk comes from support@company.com and the ticket is tracked via code in the ticket itself. So now the only email that hits autofill is the correct support@company.com, and this problem has vanished for us over time.

The only time I ever see this issue is if someone finds an old email and hits reply to report a new issue, but that is rare. I have left the trigger in place that auto-closes tickets that I previously posted (just about the same as Morten's) for employees that have very old autofill data.

Thanks John for that note. I believe we would still encounter an issue if a customer creates a ticket via web widget, and saves the reply support+12345 email address. If they email support+12345 after a ticket has been closed a follow up would be created in that situation.

I just created a ticket via web widget and the email was from support@company.com. It did not create the support+123456@ email address. I don't believe it will create the unique email address if you are using an externally connected address, shown below.

And here is a screenshot showing how it is not unique any longer:

Thanks for the help John! This is helpful.  I will use your suggestion and test it out. 

We too need to disable follow ups. Many customers just look for the last email they sent to us and reply. It's usually a new order or inquiry unrelated to the closed ticket.

Zendesk, just allow us to turn off follow ups in the admin panel.

I agree, this really needs to be fixed - our company is a B2B company and so we have literally thousands of customers who can contact us. And people keep old emails. Training our customers is not going to be a solution. 

We can close the new tickets with a trigger but as Luis said, that means they get conflicting email notifications which is confusing to customers. 

My question however is - does this impact on reporting for agent work time or requester wait time? i.e. if a customer replies to an old email after 5 weeks (or 5 months...) Does it calculate as a separate ticket, or does the work time on the original update to 5 weeks / months etc.? This will seriously impact our SLA reporting which has financial penalties for us, so I really need to know how that works. 

Thanks! 

+1 We have it where there is a single ticket, it will close and then the requester and CC will have a conversation and every single reply opens up a new ticket. As you can imagine, this creates 10+ tickets and a lot of work for our agents to merge the tickets together.

If we could unlink the follow ups, it would atleast help.

THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN OPEN FOR 6 YEARS!!

How do we turn off follow-up tickets. WE DO NOT WANT IT TURNED ON.

It's as simple as that.

Hello - I think my issue is slightly different here but I would also like some more control over Follow-up tickets

• I'm more than happy to have customers be able to raise follow on tickets from a CX point of view, and we have a trigger in place so that if a customer responds to a closed ticket this goes into our central customer team
• I would like to be able to disable the "create a follow up" button on closed tickets in support - we find that agents continually use this which initiates our trigger and routes the ticket to the wrong place and it also skews our data as the follow on ticket copies over the fields from the existing ticket. 

There needs to be more granularity and options in the permissions here I think to allow for organisations to manage responses to closed tickets in the way that they see as necessary to their business.

The "follow up ticket" is a major issue for my organization. Our agents solve extremely complex issues and customers will use the follow up option for issues that are not related to the original ticket, expecting an immediate follow-up to an incorrectly routed ticket- and sometimes the customer requests are urgent in nature. This function has created serious confusion and often anger at our support agents since we already struggle with organizational response time. Being able to disable this feature would be a massive weight off our support team by reducing the number of lost/incorrectly routed tickets.

+1 for this. Definitely a challenge. 

 Case: Agent solve the original ticket. This email address for the ticket (support@org.zendesk.com+1234567) stays in their email directory. They either find the last response on the ticket or type "Zendesk" or "support" in the to field and send their new request, creating a follow-up ticket that is not related.

Solve: Allow organizations to turn off "create follow-up tickets". 

Additional ask: Is there a way to have the original ticket copied on the follow-up? I know they link the tickets together, but for Organizations that use custom roles, when you don't allow agents in a specific group to see tickets for another group, it presents a challenge when follow-up tickets are created since the follow-up ticket group cannot see the original ticket. 

+1 this needs to be an option in the system or at the very least add conditions 

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY Can Zendesk not address customer requests. People have been asking for you to have an option to disable Follow-Ups since 2017 on here (SIX YEARS). It has caused a major mess in our database. We're seriously about to pull our contract from you all for lack of responsiveness. You dev team does absolutely nothing.