Configuring Email notifications

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Freshdesk by default provides different email notifications that can be automatically sent to agents, contacts, and CC'ed users upon specific actions performed on tickets. This keeps agents and customers informed and stay up-to-date on their ticket activities, ensuring a seamless communication experience. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Access Email Notifications
• Agent Notifications
• Requester Notifications
• CC Notifications
• Templates
• Changing Font Settings

Access Email Notifications

To access the different email notifications, log in as an administrator.

• Navigation:

  • For Freshdesk, go to Admin > Workflows > Email Notifications.

• You will notice that there are four tabs on this page, viz. Agent Notifications, Requester Notifications, CC Notifications, and Reply Templates.
  
  
  • Agent Notifications: This gives the ability to alert the agent through email notifications when a customer replies to a ticket, when a ticket is assigned to the agent etc. so that they stay in the know of ticket activities in the helpdesk and action tickets accordingly.
    
    
  • Requestor Notifications: This gives the ability to alert your customers through email notifications when the agent comments on a ticket, solves a ticket, closes a ticket, etc.
    
    
  • CC Notifications: This gives the ability to alert the user emails added in the CC field when a new ticket is created by the agent or when a public note is added to the ticket by the agent or customer.
    
    
  • Reply Templates: This gives the ability to customize and prefill default information you want to be added in the agent ticket replies such as dynamic content like the requestor name, ticket URLs, and agent signatures

Note: Failure notifications related to the setup or modification of these email notifications will be sent to the Account Administrator.

Let's take a scenario where say you want to make sure your customers receive an email notification immediately after they raise a ticket to assure them that their issue will be fixed in 24 hours.

Here is how to do it: 

• Under the Requester Notifications tab, click on New Ticket Created.
• The notification template for your primary language will appear.
• You can personalize this using the content of your choice and including various placeholders. Click here to see the list of all placeholders available. 
• You might want to include the {{ticket.id}} and {{public.url}} of the ticket in a new ticket notification to provide better reference for customers. 

• When you are doing the same for the agent notification, you can choose which agents should be notified when a new ticket is created in your helpdesk under the 'Notify Agents' section of the template. 
• Post saving the changes, enable the notification to start sending out automatic email notifications immediately.
• Pro and Enterprise plan users can send out these notifications in more than one language. Learn more here.
  

Agent Notifications

The following events will trigger an email notification to the agent if enabled. For these email notifications, you can include the ticket's URL, simplifying the process for the agent to access and review the tickets.

Requester Notifications

The following events will trigger an email notification to the requester if enabled.

Note: If the requester - user activation email is toggled off, the email notification will not be sent to customers post sign up unless you trigger the activation email manually from the contact profile. On that note, the password reset email will not be triggered in such cases.

CC Notifications

You can modify the email notifications sent to user emails added in the CC field of tickets. There are two kinds of CC notifications:

• New ticket created: This notification is sent only when an agent creates a ticket on the customer's behalf and adds a user as a CC in the ticket. CC notifications will not be sent when the customer sends an email with a CC user or when the agent adds a CC user in their replies because those emails will be delivered to the CC users' mailbox as emails (making notifications redundant).
  
  
• Note added to ticket: This notification is sent to everyone in CC when a public note is added on the ticket, whether they were added by the agent/customer.

Workflow:

1. A ticket is created by the agent with a requester and CC email. 
2. The new ticket-created notification is sent to the CC email.
3. The reply added to the ticket will not be sent as an email notification to the CC address because they will receive it as an email.
4. The public note added notification will be sent to the CC address - no matter how the ticket was created.

Templates

Freshdesk provides an option to customize how agent replies and ticket forward emails are sent from your helpdesk. 

Every time an agent clicks on the reply button on a ticket, the contents of the agent reply template will be shown to them. For example, if you want all your agents to add the public ticket URL in their replies or if you want to standardize all the agent signatures, you can do that through the agent reply template. When the agents reply, they can add to the template or even edit it as per their needs. 

Similarly, you can customize the agent forward template when forwarding tickets to third-party/external people in your helpdesk and include ticket details and properties via placeholders.

Note: We recommend adding ticket ID placeholder with the format [#{{ticket.id}}] in the subject section of the agent reply /forward template to help email threading in Freshdesk.

How to add placeholders in templates:

1. Click on the Edit button next to the Agent Reply Template.
2. By default, the subject section in the template will only have the {{ticket.subject}} placeholder which fetches the ticket subject information dynamically when responding to tickets.
3. To add the Ticket ID placeholder in all agent replies, click the Insert Placeholder option and select Ticket ID from the Tickets option. 
   
   
4. Click Save.
   
   

You can also customize and send custom email notifications based on various conditions in tickets via Automation. For example, you can send email notifications for a ticket being open for quite some time via Time triggers automation or an agent receiving a bad satisfaction rating, via Ticket updates automation. You can also include product-specific placeholders in your email notifications if your Freshdesk subscription supports multiple products.

If you support customers and agents across multiple languages, you can customize your default automatic email notifications corresponding to the user's language settings. For example, a requester whose profile language is set as French will get email notifications in French, while a German requester will be notified in the German language. Please refer to this article on how to set up multi-lingual email notifications.

Changing Font Settings

The default font for the portal

An administrator can set up a default font for the agent portal under Admin > Account > Helpdesk settings. This is the font that your agents will use while composing emails/replies to your customers. We have included more font family and font size options as of today. You will also be able to see a preview of how the font would look like.

Agent’s font preferences

If you want your agents to change the font format, then you can enable the ‘Font preference for agents’ option in Helpdesk Settings.

The agents can choose to change the font family or font size from the reply editor under the ticket details page while replying to the tickets when the option is enabled. When the agents click on the icon 'A', they will be able to view and choose the formatting options as shown below: