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Proposal to enable CC and Followers feature in Zendesk Global

Problem Statement

  • What is the problem?

Due to various issues occurring in the support team’s ticket management, such as (not limited to) absences/PTO, high priority tickets SLA requiring cross-region support, etc., the support team has requested (in many previous issues) the ability to have multiple assignees on a ticket. Sadly, this is not natively possible via Zendesk.

  • Why is this a problem?

The support team greatly believes that having multiple assignees will fix the numerous problems in the related issues (see below). As Zendesk does not natively have this ability, we had to think outside of the box.

Proposal

1. Support Ops will:

  • Enable CC + Follower in Zendesk Global

    TL;DR of this is:

    CCs - when enabled, this will automatically allow both agent and end-user to add/remove other users as CC. Agents and end-users can be added as CCs to tickets and include them on ticket notifications. Agents can use the CC function to indicate co-assignees on tickets but their email addresses will be exposed to end-users.

    Followers, on the other hand, allow agents to add themselves as followers/watchers on tickets. Agents who are followers can receive updates on the ticket without exposing their identity to end-users. (End-users cannot be added as followers on tickets)

    Once CCs + Followers feature is enabled, this would entail:

    1. Changes to the ticket UI
    2. Changes to Support workflow:
      • Followers are now what CCs used to be
      • CCs are now publicly visible to the end-user, meaning GitLab team member emails will be seen in email headers on every email.

  • Create and update triggers/automations for the new feature

    Enabling the CCs and Followers feature will affect any business rules we have in place. As such we need to create or update those so it will send out email notifications to both CCs and followers. For future iterations, we can also create triggers/automations to automatically add followers to tickets.

  • Update Zendesk Apps for this feature

  • Update Support Ops documentation to reflect this change

2. Support will need to:

  • Update workflows/processes to utilize Followers as watchers on ticket and CCs as assignees on ticket
  • Update support handbook to reflect aforementioned changes
  • Work with support to educate the team on the changed workflows/processes

3. Other teams

  • Communicate changes to other teams (billing, security, proserv)
  • Might need company-wide communication, as this could even impact light agents

DRI

@avilla4 will act as the DRI for this issue.

Required Resources

  • Support Ops
  • Manager/ Senior Manager approval
  • Handbook changes
  • Time & effort (lots of it)

Potential Roadblocks/Things to consider

  • This impacts more than support, it impacts every agent who uses Zendesk.
  • This will require company-wide communication of changes.
  • This adds new levels of complexity to the CC system
  • Using the CC function will expose the agent's email address to end-users.
  • This will require a lot of workflow/process documentation and changes in the handbook
  • There is no way in Zendesk to create views based on followers or CCs. As such, there will be no native way to see these in Zendesk, short of custom Zendesk built apps (such as the reminders app) or via the user profile page. This means engineers would still need to manage tickets where they are the DRI/ secondary DRI on in multiple views
  • There is no trial form of this, the only option is to enable it or not.
  • Rolling back from this change is not simple, it basically requires the same (or more) work/time as implementing it

Desired Outcome

  • What does success look like?

    Either:

  • We implement this without any negative impact to:
    • SLA
    • SSAT
    • Agent stress/workload
  • We decide against this and look into a simpler, more boring solution

  • How do we measure success?

  • Check if SSAT, SLA metrics have improved.
  • Since tickets have multiple DRIs, tickets handled by the SLA hawk/response crew should be reduced.
  • Gather feedback from the Support team to ensure the changes has no negative impact to their stress/workflow

  • Where would future feedback go?

  • For generalized feedback: support-team-meta
  • For ops/Zendesk feedback: support-ops-project

Related Issues/MRs/Epics/Tickets

Edited by Alyssa Villa-Dionela