Reply to forum topics via email

Hi Christian, any update on this?  I'd love if the reply email would be customizable:

"Please do not reply to this message. Email replies will not update Help Center content."

OR

"Please do not reply to this message. Email replies will not update MortgagesLab Forums"

Not having the ability for clients to reply to forum post over email is getting annoying.  I do all my posting from the site so I didn't think to check for this functionality when switching to zendesk helpcenter, but had I known this my recommendation for using zendesk helpcenter would have had this as a big caveat.

As other forum sites support replying by email, its only natural for clients to assume they can here as well.  Unfortunately, all this does is create a suspended ticket in zendesk.  And i'm not entirely sure adding/changing a message to not reply by email will be all that useful as even after explictly telling a client to respond on the site, they responded yet again via email.

This feature is rather important, and if we get more responding by email as community usage goes up, it will turn into a must have due to the added overhead for us and inconvenience for client.

Miguel

Just throwing my +1 in the hat.

Kinda annoying that the helpcenter behaves differently to the standard zendesk email. If you mix both HC and normal Zendesk support, customers don't know if they can reply or not.

+1 on that, we see a lot of confusion from users who got used to reply to any Zendesk notifications from us via email, so consistent behaviour with "reply to forum via email" would be appreciated. Thanks!

With all respect, Zendesk should increase the priority for this feature...

This started in 2012 and 4 years later nothing has been done.

Any way we can raise awareness on this topic?

This is Huge for us, and one of the big reasons we have requested RFP's from other Community sites.  Making users login to answer community or Knowledge base posts reduces the chances that they will do it.  With tickets you can just answer emails and it posts and that is HUGE. We REALLY need this for KB and Community.

Christian,

Now that I have read through all the comments, I have to say that regardless of how big a task this is, it is driving away business and utilization of an otherwise pretty slick new help center.  Not to beat a dead horse but our customers are demanding this.  Is this under consideration at all now?

+1, given the way that the Support side of Zendesk works it was my expectation and that of other users that this would work too.

That Zendesk is so inbox-friendly is one of the reasons I like it. But it looks like Help Center has missed out...

I think not having this feature is frustrating most of our agents and possibly users who follow our forums. If a feature is not considered for 4 years, then there is something seriously wrong about the Product Management at Zendesk. Either they are not reading this or they do not care!!!!

I am sure other CRMs like Freshdesk will catch up (or they already possibly do).

This is becoming a serious criteria for us thinking of moving away from Zendesk!

In previous comments, there was consideration to add text in the email that called out the fact that a reply wouldn't post a comment, but that doesn't seem to have happened. Can that at least be done? Many people (myself included) don't check an email address before sending a response, so the "noreply" is often overlooked. At least if it's written in the body of the email, it's more likely to be seen.

We could also benefit from this feature. Because users are used to replying to emails for tickets, they don't see or ignore the message not to reply to the notification email. We check Suspended tickets regularly, but it would be nice if users could reply directly to the notification email.

This request is over 5 years old and there has been no indication that there has been any movement on it. This is a huge inconvenience for our support team as they have to trudge through tickets that are just replies to community content. Please take a look at this again, because it is not a good experience and if you want more people to adopt the Guide, this needs to be addressed. 

If anyone is out there... could we PLEASE at least have the "Please do not reply to this message. Email replies will not update Help Center content." at the top of the email in a normal font color? Is it truly barely legible and it's no wonder people are constantly replying via email to article comments and community posts. It is reaching epidemic levels on our site.

Hi all - 

Apologies for the delayed response. 

The Community and Knowledge Base are built on separate platforms, so an update to how KB comments/notifications work won't impact the way that Community post and comment notifications work and vice versa. This is an important point to make, as we've recently received the following update from the Product Manager responsible for Guide regarding the Community Platform: 

"For now we don't intend on prioritizing any new Community features in 2018. Unfortunately, we have to make choices in prioritization with how we invest in our products with our time and resources and we see a much larger opportunity to continue investment in our knowledge base features. 

As always we may re-evaluate this decision at some later date but as of right now, I wouldn't expect any new features in 2018. Sorry for the inconvenience."

So we won't see this on Community posts any time soon. I don't know that we'll see updates to Knowledge Base comment notifications, either, but there's a better chance of that.

I encourage you to continue up voting the original post and sharing your comments and use cases. Your participation and feedback help Zendesk make decisions, and we appreciate hearing from you. 

Very important issue to take care of Zendesk!  Hope you guys prioritize this!

Could we at least get a change to the notification email? I feel like if the text stating that you can not reply to the email was at the top of the message and not in low-contrast gray, fewer people would reply via email. 

Hey Chandra - 

It's possible some of the notification emails will be changing this year, but that effort is being driven in the Support product and I do not expect that to roll out to the Community. 

An update for you all - development on the Community platform is resuming in 2019! Please up-vote the original post and add your comments here if this is something you'd like to see the team prioritize. 

Thanks @Nicole - I like removing barriers to entry (community contributions); in past communities I have managed, the reply by email feature is very popular.

Cheers,

Toby

+1 This is a much needed feature.

I hope in 2019, customers can finally reply to forum threads from their inbox. 

Thanks, Lester. It's not one of the first things that has been prioritized by the team that is making improvements to the community platform, but they are aware of and evaluating the idea. 

Hey Lester, 

I think this is an interesting feature, would you care to share a bit more a bit why you want this specific behavior?

We actually have a separate thread with a customer requesting less functionality from the email so he can get users to actually go onto the community. 

I am not saying we can't support both, but I am curious as to what leads to these two different expectations from the product.

Your feedback has been noted and we are looking into this in correlation with our work for improving the email notification experience.

Thanks!

Oscar,

I'm not who you're addressing, but here's our reasons:

1. It is in line with Zendesk support functionality, where agents can act on tickets from their Inbox. The difference between the behavior of Support and Guide confuses users. Even I as an Admin when we tested this assumed replying via email would add a new comment, despite the indications to the contrary in the message, because I'm so used to that behavior.

2. We have some occasional users who don't live in either of these 'modes' but will sometimes want to drop in on a conversation. If they don't have a low-friction way to do so they simply won't, especially in the case of very busy upper management types who live in email.

Thanks,

Tom

Hi Oscar

Sure. 80% of our customers are locked down behind firewalls where they have no internet access, beyond email, for security reasons. It’s very typical for our customer segments.

What we find is customers do want to participate in conversations off tickets, particularly around issues that are not really support related. For example, discussing alphas/betas or best workflows.  We have been doing this through Google Mailing lists. But it’s a nightmare to use. We hate it, Customer hate it. But they are reluctant to move off it because they can’t use anything else.

We developed a solution around the Zendesk Communities for a very specific customer base who had internet access and they loved it. We used the Post Actions so customers can see what’s happening with each post and our Engineers have a way to provide feedback. It works really well and we wanted to roll that out to a wider group of customers. But the problem is, a lot of the target customers won’t be able to access the site to interact with us.  

Even if they could access the internet, what we hear is; “If it’s in my inbox, I’ll help and provide a response. But I’m not going to bother going to a website to see what questions I can answer or take the time to login and post a reply”.  If a user has to go out their way to provide answers, it’s a real barrier. The other problem is as people have mentioned, a customer who interacts with Zendesk assumes that they can reply to everything via email. Who really looks at the dontreply@ email address.  

Our ideal solution

• Community threads are clearly branded differently to support tickets to avoid any confusion over who the recipients are.
• Customer can reply directly to a Community thread from their inbox and their response will be added to the topic.

I’m happy get someone to walk you through what we built and where we think it can be improved if it’s helpful.