How do I forward tickets to an external user?

Question

I need to forward tickets to a new external email outside of Zendesk. How can I forward tickets to an external mailbox? How do I forward emails from Zendesk to an external third party who isn't a user on my Zendesk account?

Answer

There are multiple ways to send a message to a user who doesn't currently have a profile within Zendesk. The solution you choose depends on your use case.

CC the user

Use side conversations

Create a PDF of the ticket

Change the requester

Set up a webhook

CC the user

You can CC someone to add them to the ticket conversation and notify them about a ticket. Once CC'd, they see all public comments and replies in the ticket thread.

To CC someone on a ticket:

In a ticket, add the email address of the external user to the CC field. For steps on adding CCs to tickets, see Adding CCs.

Reply to the requester as normal

The CC'd individual receives the updates by email

Use side conversations

Side conversations allow you to email external users from the ticket. This conversation is separate from the main ticket thread, so manually add any information you want to share to the side conversation. This is useful if you need an extended conversation about a ticket with an external user and must reference it easily.

If you want to include one or more ticket comments as part of a side conversation, hover over the response you want to forward. Then, click the three dots icon and select Forward via email.

For steps on creating a side conversation, see Creating side conversations.

Create a PDF of the ticket

This is a good option when you need to occasionally notify external users about a ticket but want to do so completely outside of Zendesk.

To create a PDF of a ticket:

Open the ticket and click the ticket options menu in the upper right, then select Print ticket.

The account creates a PDF of the ticket. Attach the PDF to an email to forward the ticket

Change the requester

The new requester receives all the ticket details when you next update the ticket with a comment. Changing the requester of a ticket changes the ownership of that ticket. This means the new requester becomes the ticket owner. Unless you CC the original requester in the ticket, they won't receive ticket updates.

To change the requester on the ticket, see Updating ticket requesters.

Set up a webhook

Developers use webhooks to send HTTP requests to a URL. By using webhooks, you can send ticket information from Zendesk to another system such as Slack or Asana. This option is best if you need to notify external users frequently and at scale.

Once a developer creates a webhook, they can use a trigger to send ticket information to the webhook using the action Notify webhook.