Verifying without activation email

Hi

Is it possible to have an update regarding this or a one time work-around?

This has not been implemented. I cannot find any way to verify or at the least remove the verify message which I suspect is what the majority of people want to do.

user activation email is turned off under admin -> requester notifications 

Unfortunately that's only available for requesters/customers. What everybody wants is the same feature for Agents.

They just don't get it.  OVER FOUR YEARS of asking for this simple change and they keep changing other things that they "think" we want.  So incredibly frustrating dealing with a company that has no concept of pleasing the customer.

So, let me present a workaround that I think will save some frustration for you - at least it does for me.

1. Make sure that the User Activation Email for the requester is turned off

2. Create a new Customer - yes, a Customer - not an Agent!

3. Set a password by clicking the Change Password button

4. Click the Convert To Agent button and select what type of agent you want

We're done! And the most beautiful thing; when you convert a Customer into an Agent - no activation mail will be sent out!  :)

As a bonus: When you create Customers you can import them from a CSV file, unlike when you create Agents, and that potentially saves a lot of time when adding multiple new users in a batch. Unfortunately there is no way to set passwords or convert Customers to Agents in batches, at least not out of the box and that I know of.

Adding to my previous post; I found a way to automate batch conversions of Customers to Agents. It's not out-of-the-box, but it works. And it's pretty creative if I may say so myself...  :)

So, my challenge was that I wanted to add 100 occasional agents without any of them getting an activation e-mail, and also to avoid a lot of manual work. Here is what I did:

1. Download Tiny Task (http://www.vtaskstudio.com/support.php#tools), a super small tool of 33 kb that provides quick & easy automation by recording/playback and that runs straight from the exe-file withouth any installations, and fire it up

2.  Turn off the User Activation Email for requesters

3. Under the Customer section you'll import a csv file with all users and map the fields (I made sure the all belonged to the same company so they would be easy to find in a collected list view)

4. Place the mouse pointer over the first name in the list and start the recording in Tiny Task

5. Click the name, set password (I didn't need this because my occasional agents will only interact with Freshdesk through e-mails), and convert to an agent. After this I clicked edit agent and selected some groups. Save. And then I jumped back 4 steps in the browser history, so that I came back to the list with names in the Company under Customers.

6. Make sure to go back with your mouse pointer to the exact same place as you started, i.e. over the first name in the list, and then end the recording in Tiny Task

7. Set the Repeat Task Count in Tiny Task to the amount of users you want to convert (99 in my case) and go back with the mouse pointer to the starting point (over the first name). Then execute the recording using the Playback Hotkey.

8. Take a lunch break or sit back and enjoy Tiny Task performing the task automatically

Done!

When I came back I had 100 new occasional agents added without any of them receiving the dreaded activation e-mail. And it all happened without me doing any manual grunt work.

Hope this can help someone else in my position and please don't hesitate to ask any questions.

This is extremely bizarre. I've been following this 4 year old post for almost a year. Forcing users to go through a validation under MANY use cases serves the interest of absolutely no one, and actually will, more often than not, serve to further frustrate a user who has come to you for help. I can't tell you how many times not being able to simply add a contact to our instance of FreshDesk has gotten in the way of providing the level of support we are seeking.

This is ridiculous.

This feature is not a major implementation job from a development standpoint. A little UI and some supporting backend CRUD to allow admins to create contacts/users without triggering a validation email. The fact that FreshDesk has chosen to outright ignore this simple request, while saying nothing other than "we're working on it" for 4 years, says volumes about the company's understanding of the variety of use cases that can come into play in a support environment. And, it says volumes about how much support they are willing to provide for their own users.

I will have one my devs starting to evaluate other helpdesk solutions starting right now. We will begin our migration away from FreshDesk by the end of the week.

The ability for an administrator of any system to 100% control the users who are registered to that system is a fundamental feature of any system that manages users. In the hundreds of systems of many many types that I have used over the years, I can't think of one that had such a high level of friction for something as basic as adding users.

It would be helpful if someone at FreshDesk would comment on the precise reason WHY the company has decided that their user management system should be so much different than virtually all others. I have to assume that there is some rationale, otherwise I will be left to assume it's simply incompetence, which is my present thinking.

Amen to that Stephen !

I have posted so many messages in this thread and tried to explain it as simply as possible to the "genuises" at FreshDesk and yet they respond with platitudes.  The one that galled me the most was a response saying that they implemented a solution that they thought would be better than what we are asking.  GIVE ME A BREAK !! Please, please, please, FreshDesk, don't give us what you think we want or what you think is best, but give us what we are actually asking for.

Don't they understand that some users are such neophytes that even a simple validation E-Mail will cause them issues?  We are trying to prevent tickets, not create more.

If it wasn't so pathetic and ironic (a support software company having zero response to a client request), it would be downright comical how long this is taking and how they refuse to implement such a system.

It's just pathetic, frustrating, and annoying to deal with this.

Can you imagine administering an Active Directory domain with even just a few hundred users and having to generate an activation E-Mail each time you had to create a new account, or reset a password?  Where's the logic in all this?  Hey FreshDesk, are you sure you don't secretly work for the US Government?  The level of ineptitude has reached that level.

Sorry for being so direct (and otherwise rude), but we have all tried to be rational here.

I decided to contact the FreshDesk live support directly about this, and have attached screenshots of part of my conversation with them.

Essentially, it sounds like in all the product development meetings and after $150 million dollars of investment, it never occurred to anyone that a "Helpdesk solution" could ever be more than a "Ticket management solution". 

As bizarre as it seems, at this moment in time, Freshdesk is useless to any company that wants to provide support to users and centralize the management of support email communications - without forcing users to set up an account. FreshDesk is good at managing "tickets", not helping users, and this is their myopic focus.

If, for example, you use application monitoring and can detect when users are having trouble - before they even have to look for the support link - which can then trigger a proactive support email, then Freshdesk is not for you. If you're migrating from another system and have a big list of known users that you don't want to bother with a new validation process, then FreshDesk is not for you.

I can think of several other use cases where a company might want to initiate support-related communications with a user without forcing them to set up an account, but these are a couple that make FreshDesk unusable for my company. 

I knew this a year ago when my company was just getting started, but I assumed that such a simple request would be taken care of before it really mattered for us. Unfortunately I was wrong, and now it matters, so we're looking for a "helpdesk solution" that has a bit more vision about what that phrase means.

I'll update this thread when I've heard back from FreshDesk support.

I've raised this issue as well and watched this ticket for over a year now waiting for someone to actually take notice. I concur with Stephen and others. Please let us know if you find a better support system. We are a training school that knows all our potential support users so ideally we would be able to import users and create passwords for them and approve them directly... Serious lack of user support from a support ticketing system !!!!

Marcus,

  I really don't think you are talking about the same thing.  We are not looking to create agents.  We want to create customers!

@fgioffrebr>

That's strange, and maybe I misunderstood something, but the initial post says:

"It would be nice for agents to be able to verify contacts without going through an activation email."

But if you want to create customers (=Requesters) I don't see why you have a problem, because for Requesters it's possible to turn of the User Activation Email (screenshot 1). It's "just" the Agent's User Activation Mail that can't be turned off. And if you turn off the activation mail for requesters, you can - if you want to - still manually send it out right after you have created a new customer. And once the customer is created you just click the Change Password button (screenshot 2).

And my workaround a month ago suggested that to create an agent you just do the above and then one more step; convert to Agent. As I see it it's this way possible to create both Customers (Requesters) and Agents without sending the Activation Email

But maybe if you tell me your specific use case I can help you or at least understand better what the problem is.

Hi Marcus,

  The wording of that sentence refers to an agent being able to create a contact (i.e. a customer).

  Thank you for the clarification on the notification setting.  It seems that does indeed work now that I tested it.  What threw me off is that even when having the option turned off, the user still shows wording about needing activation.  It seems that after you manually set the password, it then gets cleared.  Why couldn't anyone from FreshDesk just say that?

@fgioffre/p>

I have no idea, but I'm happy I could help out, even if there were some misunderstandings along the way. :)

Actually, what you've been asking for has been possible to do since way back and a year ago when the possibility for an agent to set the password for a customer, the loop was closed, i.e. the "unverified status" can be avoided.

For me the big thing is that I needed to add 100 occasional agents and didn't want them to get the Activation Email, and since that feature can't be turned off it was a bigger obstacle (IMHO). That's when I decided to get to the bottom with the problem and came up with the workaround.

@MarcusYou're right, the workaround for creating Customers without the activation email does work, and solves the problem. Thanks! I was also thrown off by your original post, because it focused on creating agents (not customers).

@fgioffre/p>

"Why couldn't anyone from FreshDesk just say that?"

...really good question. I was in contact with 2 FreshDesk support representatives, and the case has been escalated, but I still haven't heard back from them since my initial contact. Fortunately, someone (Marcus) knows how their product works...

Thanks to both of you for your discussion, and bringing clarity to this.

Hi,

First, my apologies for the lack of responses on this thread. Community forums have never been our forte and we're trying to improve our presence here. You would certainly notice a lot of changes in the coming weeks. 

Though majority of the users in this thread might be aware of the option by now, posting it here for closing the loop and we thought it might also prove fruitful for new users.

Note : In case if you're using the Single Sign On login method for users, they wouldn't receive an email from Freshdesk requesting for account activation . It would be disabled by default.

Requirement :  Allow agents to verify users without sending the activation emails

Workaround : You can disable the activation email under Admin -> Email notifications -> User notifications section . Navigate to the contacts page , choose the unverified filter and locate the contact that you would like to verify . Set a password for the user and the contact would be considered as a verified user.

Cheers!

How can I verify multiple contacts (all of them) in one step? Or even disable the verification-feature completely?
We want all contacts synced to google contacts, and it is not working if the contacts are not verified.

Marcus's comment from 3 years ago is spot on! Worked for me. So people dont need to scroll so far back:

So, let me present a workaround that I think will save some frustration for you - at least it does for me.

1. Make sure that the User Activation Email for the requester is turned off

2. Create a new Customer - yes, a Customer - not an Agent!

3. Set a password by clicking the Change Password button

4. Click the Convert To Agent button and select what type of agent you want

We're done! And the most beautiful thing; when you convert a Customer into an Agent - no activation mail will be sent out! :)

As a bonus: When you create Customers you can import them from a CSV file, unlike when you create Agents, and that potentially saves a lot of time when adding multiple new users in a batch. Unfortunately there is no way to set passwords or convert Customers to Agents in batches, at least not out of the box and that I know of.