Email commands for ticket creation

Hello there,

Can you please elaborate on the scenario with a little bit more detail, so we can understand the ask here?

Thanks,

Sudha

I copied this post since it was closed and could not comment on it.

https://support.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/1547

Hello there,

Thanks for sending us your feedback - can you please elaborate your scenario again?

Currently, sending an email to a support email address creates a new ticket. Email commands help an agent change ticket properties while sending a reply to the customer from an email client. 

I'm still unable to understand your use case very clearly, so if you can elaborate, that would be great!

Thanks,
Sudha

I receive emails to my personal inbox quite frequently. To have them entered into our Freshdesk system, I forward them onto our support email that does go into Freshdesk. It would be great to be able to forward those emails with email commands and have it create the ticket and fill out those fields from the command. 

Hello there,

We do currently support Email commands - here's a solution article explaining how to use them. https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/49012-performing-actions-on-tickets-using-email-commands

Thanks and hope that helps.

Sudha

Unless I'm missing something, this still does not help.

In that post it states:

When replying to notification emails from your mailbox,

I'm not replying to a notification, I'm creating a ticket by forwarding it into Freshdesk. And when I use them in that scenario, it does not work.

Ok, I understand what your scenario is and have added it to our backlog. Will update the thread on when we can implement this functionality.

Thanks,

Sudha

This was added FOUR MONTHS AGO - where is the update on this thread????? I would really like to know the resolution to this issue as well!!

Thanks.

I'd also be interested in being able to use email commands when creating a ticket.

Hello all,

While I understand that Matt detailed out his use case, I think its not a blocker and I have a couple of workarounds to share for his specific scenario.

1. Use an email command when replying to an email notification after the ticket has been created in Freshdesk.

2. Alternatively, configure a dispatch'r rule to set the ticket properties appropriately based on the some keywords in the subject or other conditions. and not rely on email commands at all.

Matt, I had a question as to why specifically you would like to set Ticket properties via Email commands - is it because you are on the go and don't have access to the web portal? Have you tried using the Freshdesk mobile app to help with this scenario?

Others, please let me know if either of these workarounds would not work for your scenarios or feel free to ping me your use cases and we can see if there are other workarounds possible.

Also, you can reach out to support@freshdesk.com to get more assistance configuring your helpdesk.

Thanks,

Sudha

Our organization does not have access to the support email inbox, Every ticket we work on is through the site. When I receive emails in my personal inbox from clients that should have been sent to our support email, I need to forward them in. It would be great if I could forward them in using email commands. 

Even if I had access to the emails, replying to an email I just sent in, is double the work compared to simply adding a command to the first email.

Dispatcher Rules and Scenarios dont work for us either. I have roughly 85 different scenarios that I could possibly use and to look through the scenario list to find the exact one wouldn't be efficient.

Matt,

I understand that the solution you are proposing is what would work best for your scenario. However, given our own priorities at Freshdesk, we are unable to give you a concrete timeline for the implementation of this solution.

Regarding Dispatcher rules, is there a specific configuration you need help with? An agent from our support team would be glad to guide you through the process. I think that would work out best in this scenario since they are always executed at Ticket creation time. Do let us know how we can help you.

Thanks,

Sudha

I understand how the dispatcher rules work and I have setup quite a few, many of which are to solve this limitation. Thank you for the workarounds, but Im looking for an enhancement. 

Hi Sudha,

Further to Matt's request, I would like to be able to create an Outlook 'Quick Step', that I run on an email that was sent directly to me, but should have gone to the helpdesk. In that 'Quick Step' I would have it forward to the helpdesk address, while adding the following text to the body of the email:

@Simonsays "priority":"low" "agent": "Brad Alexander" "product": "ProductName" "help-desk": "HelpdeskEmailAddress" @Simonsays

Am I correct in assuming that to get this working currently, I would have to use Dispatcher rules?

If this is the case, are the Dispatcher rules able to remove the @Simonsays line from the ticket, and I'm assuming there is still no ETA on this request?

Cheers

Brad.

Hi Brad, that is my end goal also, but cant continue until this road block is removed.

Let me chime in and add my voice to the chorus requesting this feature.

Email commands should be processed even when creating a new ticket from an initial email message. I would also suggest restricting that to only cases where the initial email was sent from an agent's email address, but this restriction could perhaps be a configurable option.

In my case, I want to be able to use ticket commands to set properties of new tickets created by automated systems. For example, I am currently adding error checking to a powershell script that runs as a scheduled task. If the data used by the script is invalid for any reason, the script sends an email to our helpdesk address to open a new ticket. Due to the nature of this issue, the ticket should be treated as urgent, and will always be dealt with by the same group. As such, I have included these email commands as the first line in the body of the email:

@Simonsays "priority":"urgent" "group":"support" "type":"Problem" @Simonsays

Unfortunately, when this email is received by freshdesk, the ticket commands are not processed. Instead, they are included in the ticket description, and have the html "notextile" code appended. The first line of the ticket description looks like this:

<notextile>@Simonsays "priority":"urgent" "group":"support" "type":"Problem" @Simonsays</notextile>

As this email is generated by a script, having the script monitor a mailbox for replies and then reply to the new ticket email from freshdesk just to add the email commands in a reply would make things much more complicated.

If freshdesk can just add support for the existing email commands to be used in an initial email, this would make things much easier.

Looking at the original thread linked to by OP, it seems this feature has been in a "Planned" state for 5 years now.  Wow.

Hello Steve,

Thanks for detailing your use case very clearly. I was wondering if there's a way you can create a ticket using the API from the powershell script instead of including an Email command? You would have access to all the properties on the ticket if you did it in this way.

Email commands were intended only to be used in a specific scenario of an agent being on the go and replying to tickets when the customer had responded via an email notification before we built the mobile apps (iOS and Android). Apologies that we hadn't closed out the older thread with the right resolution. I do hope this clarifies our position to you.

Matt, for your use case, I do think its valid that we could build an enhancement to parse email commands when Agents forward tickets to the helpdesk. Let me discuss with my team and get back to you in a few days. 

Thanks for your feedback!

Sudha

We would also like to have this functionality. In our case we are doing integration with an external system and need to automatically populate a custom Field which references a unique identifier in the external system.

Sudha - It's possible that I could use the API to do this, although it seems like that would take a lot more work on our end than just adding the ticket commands in the email.  I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer, so interacting with APIs isn't exactly in my wheelhouse.  I could probably figure out enough to do what I need, given some examples to start with, but unfortunately your documentation doesn't include any powershell code samples.  

I'll chime in with another business case:

We often have reps on the road who need to forward in requests that originated from their customer, but they still want to assign a priority and set a need by date (for example).  

They can do this when they login through the customer portal, but that is cumbersome, especially when details of an email need to be included.  

I would love to be able to allow them to use email commands when submitting the ticket.  

We also have the scenario that others are describing where we have to forward in an email that we got sent directly that should have gone into freshdesk.

Having email commands would make that a one step processes. 

I have about 2 dozen dispatcher rules already.  The tricky part about utilizing dispatcher rules is that it stops once it finds a rule that matches, and I am not able to create and/or criteria, so using dispatcher rules would not be a sufficient work around for us.