Emailing external contacts from existing tickets

Question

I am evaluating FreshDesk and generally pleased with what I see. However, I have a use case that doesn’t seem to be addressed. It seems like a pretty straightforward situation so I hope this is just me missing something.

A VA at my company creates a ticket (initially for internal discussion).
We work the ticket and come to a conclusion or fix the issue.
We then want to email a customer. We need to track that email in the ticket so that everyone is aware. IMPORTANT : Until this point the customer has had nothing to do with the ticket.

I am stuck on this, as follows...

As I understand, I can’t use Reply, since there is no previous communication with the customer so his/her details are not available.
Forward is not an option since that would include the whole (internal) discussion in the email sent to the customer.

I am hoping that someone can put me out my misery and tell me how to achieve this. This would be a very common use case for my small business.

Thank you.

Keer · Accepted Answer

Hi@markwill, for your usecase, you can edit the requester of the ticket and change it to customer’s email adderss.Now, you’d be able to reply back to the customer in the same thread and they’d be able to view the details in the quoted text as well. If changing the requester of the ticket is not ideal, you can simply cc the customer’s email address in the reply.You can also start a new mail thread with the customer using ‘New Email’option.I hope this helps!

Riaz · Answer

Welcome, welcome@markwill!We’re glad you’ve joined the community!I’m no product specialist per se, but I thought I’d take a stab at this.The tool seems to be primarily created around a customer, which involves receiving their concerns, problems, ideas and feedback, i.e., it’s an avenue where the customer is usually the one to contact you about something first, and then the team on this side helps to resolve it.In the case you’ve mentioned, how was the ticket first created? Did the customer reach out about an issue?It’s a recommended best practice that the requester of the ticket be that of the actual customer, as there are various forms of having internal discussions present within the product.Notescan be used to pass on information internally, keeping it private (you’ll find a toggle to make it public/private) and non-visible to your customers -- so that’s a great way to keep information tagged to the ticket for your references!I have another set of questions too:Is it something within the existing ticket you’d like to inform the user about or do you want to just track the outreach in the same ticket?Why not use the Outbound Email function to help create separate tickets, allowing you to track the work that you do for both the client and internal stakeholders alike? This will also help to allocate separate SLA timers for the tickets in the system and thereby not violating any SLA policies.That being said, when you click onForwardyou’ll also find (in the same editor box), towards the bottom, three dots that indicate the quoted text you’re about to send. You can click on this to open up the quoted text and thereby delete any/all messages as you forward on the email -- do you think this will help?Let me call in on our experts;@Keer, @hemanth.ramyawhat do you think?Keep us informed @markwill!