Zendesk email integration

Why you need ForwardThis

Email is messy, every message asking for something different. It means constantly leaving your inbox and juggling tabs. ForwardThis skips all of that: forward an email along with some simple instructions, and it’s handled. Compatible with every email provider, and it works across the apps you’re already using.

Questions

How does the Zendesk email integration work?

In Zendesk the ticket is created with the requester, priority, group and assignee set from the same instruction, or the email goes onto a ticket you already have as an internal note or an attachment, and because nobody can delete a Zendesk comment, not even an admin, a public reply is shown to you first. Forward the email to your ForwardThis address with a simple instruction, like "raise an urgent ticket for Owen and put Priya on it". ForwardThis creates the ticket and replies to confirm with a link. The first time, you'll need a free account with Zendesk connected, which takes about 30 seconds, and that's the entire Zendesk email integration. Creating a Zendesk ticket from an email has a page of its own.

Can I forward an email to Zendesk as a new ticket, or add it to one I already have?

Either. Say "raise a ticket" and you get a new one, with the sender as the requester and the email as the first message. Name a ticket instead, by its number or its subject, and the email goes on that one as an internal note or an attachment. You can change a ticket's status, type, group, assignee, due date and tags in the same instruction.

Can it reply to the customer, or does it only file things internally?

It can do both. With no recipient named it replies publicly on the ticket, which the requester sees straight away. Name someone else and it opens a side conversation and emails them instead. Both are shown to you for a quick OK first, and the recipient always comes from your own instruction, never from anything written in the forwarded email.

What if it puts something on the wrong ticket?

Undo works for 24 hours on the things Zendesk can take back, like the ticket itself, its tags, its status and its assignee. Comments are the exception: nobody can delete a Zendesk comment, not even an admin. So a public reply is shown to you before it goes, and an internal note stays on the ticket once it is added. ForwardThis says so rather than promising an undo Zendesk won't honour.

How is this different from Zendesk's own support email address?

Zendesk's support address turns anything sent to it into a ticket from whoever sent it, which is exactly right for customers writing in directly. Forward a customer's complaint on from your own Gmail and the ticket comes from you, not the customer, with no priority, no group and no agent on it. When you want to forward email to Zendesk and have it land as an urgent ticket for the right agent, tagged, with the attachment on it, forward it here.