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 is not a user on my Zendesk account?

Answer

There are multiple ways to send a message to a user who does not currently have a profile within Zendesk. The solution you choose will depend 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 will be able to 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 the article: 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 kept separate from the main ticket thread, so you need to add manually any information you want to share to the side conversation. This can be useful if you need to have an extended conversation about a ticket with an external user and need to be able to easily reference it.

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 the article: 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, select Print ticket.

Your account will create a PDF of the ticket. Attach the PDF to an email to forward the ticket.

Change the requester

The new requester would then receive 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, and unless the original requester is CC'd in the ticket, they will not receive ticket updates.

To change the requester on the ticket, see the article: 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 your developer has created a webhook, they can use a trigger to send ticket information to the webhook using the action Notify webhook.