Question

Sending one email to two support addresses

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
December 13, 2021
14 replies
112 views

Hi!

We have a problem, when user sends an email containing two or more support addresses in the same message, ticket gets created only for the first support address. There is no indication (that I know) that the user was trying to contact other support addresses too.

For example:
a) address for HR
b) address for Payroll questions

So if user sends an email containing both support addresses a) & b), ticket will be created for only support address a). This is actually real life problem, because in our company it is common practice for people to send email to those addresses at the same time. It is common practice to send one email to multiple recipients in general, so we cannot require that people know this, and even if our own workers knew this, people outside of our company would have no idea. I cannot believe other Zendesk users have not run into this problem?

Now our agents have to keep track both the Zendesk and the shared mailbox accounts in order to spot the possible missing tickets.

According to this article we cannot send one message to two different account addresses.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408881694362-Can-I-send-one-email-to-create-two-different-tickets-in-two-Zendesk-accounts-

But in my testing this does infact seem to work? Using M365 shared mailboxes and IF those two support addresses are in their own seperate Zendesk accounts/instance. If those support addresses are in the same account/instance then Zendesk will just quietly ignore the rest.

For example:
Email -> M365 shared mailbox a -> send to Zendesk account 1
Email -> M365 shared mailbox b -> send to Zendesk account 2

With this setup sending one email to both a) & b) in the recipient list M365 (I guess) will create two separate emails (?) and everything works just fine, user will get two tickets and two notifications from both accounts.

Any ideas what to do to resolve this?

So far only idea that I have is to separate the support address a and b to their own accounts. This of course increases the administrator work, because we have to administrate several different accounts in Zendesk. In our case this would be 5 different Zendesk accounts which is not impossible does seem to defeat the whole idea of having groups and multiple support addresses in one Zendesk instance.

Thanks for any help!

And I am sorry if this is wrong place to post this question!

workspaces

Hervin

Employee

Hi Henry,

Thanks for creating such a detailed post. Reading over your inquiry makes sense and hopefully I'll be able to be of service to you.

One thing I have to note right away is that Zendesk does not support the use of shared mailboxes. Non-standard email clients are not supported due to the added complexities of routing and the issues that come up while troubleshooting. I apologize that this runs against this potential workaround you've found in leveraging a Microsoft365 shared mailbox to redirect emails to create tickets in separate Zendesk Support accounts. More information on this limitation can be found here: Can I use an email alias, distribution list, or Google Group as a support address?

With that being said, I understand that you wish to be able to have an end-user submit an email to two different support addresses to create two different tickets. Since there are hard limitations in this workflow, like the article you mentioned about sending one email to create two different tickets, in addition to issues with shared mailboxes - I think the best workaround would be to change your admins'/agents' workflow instead of creating different Zendesk accounts.

I understand that changing business practices for your end-users may be difficult since you mentioned it is common practice in your company to send one email to several different addresses at once and have their different needs addressed appropriately. One thought here would be to ask your users to change this practice if they have a request that goes to different parties.

Another idea might be to have agents in your Zendesk Support manually monitor and assign tickets as they come in, kind of like ticket triage. That way, they can keep an eye out for any incoming tickets that have requests for more than one group. If there are two requests, perhaps they can manually create a ticket and assign it to the right group for the requester.

I apologize for these limitations in working with Support and email, but I hope this information is helpful nonetheless.

raphael12

Hi,

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

Best regards,

Raphaël

M

Matthew38

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.

raphael12

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

Z

Zendesk38

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.

H

Henry16Author

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.

Frank32

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

Sydney12

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?

R

Romona

Employee

Hi Sid,

As long as there is a Zendesk email in the "To" field of an email, a ticket will be created. It does not matter if there are other email addresses in the "To" field as well. Hope this helps.

Sydney11

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?

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