How do I set up agent forwarding for emails?

Question

My agents would like to forward personal emails they received from customers to create tickets. How do I set up this workflow?

Answer

Agent forwarding allows agents to automatically create tickets from forwarded emails with the original sender as the ticket requester. In order for agent forwarding to work correctly, the following four criteria must be met.

Enable email forwarding must be enabled on the Agents settings page.

The user forwarding emails into Zendesk must be an agent or administrator.

The email subject must include fw or fwd or the foreign language equivalent.

In the body of the email, the From: text and the email address of the requester must be on the same line.

Note: Comments added by the agent are added to the new ticket as private comments. Attachments and inline images are not supported for the agent comment. This option only applies to ticket creation with agent forwarding.

The most common issue with agent forwarding occurs when Zendesk sets the agent who forwarded the email as the ticket requester instead of the customer. This occurs when the From: line in the body of the email only displays the customer's name and not the customer's email address. A common cause for this problem is Microsoft Outlook, which strips this email address from the body of the message. This problem may occur with additional email clients as well.

Note: Agent forwarding is intended for agents who are forwarding end-user requests, not other agents' requests.

In the example image below, the end user Katie's email address was stripped from the From: line. As a result, the agent Bonnie will become the ticket requester of this forwarded email instead of the end user Katie.

One workaround to resolve the issue is to use the #requester Mail API command to correctly set the ticket requester. Add this text command at the very top of the forwarded message followed by the customer's email address. This command will set the ticket requester in Zendesk as the customer rather than as the forwarding agent.

Note: It may be possible to stop the removal of the original sender's email address from the body of the message if your administrator allows it. Reach out to your company's email administrator for more information.