Email Customer to include replies

[Jeremy]

Is it possible to look into whether we can include previous emails in the 'email updates' that we send to customers as sometimes this is useful so that people get the whole conversation we have several users that are copying and pasting in previous emails so that the customer is aware of the next steps etc.

[nasimg]

+1 for this - common complaint is email chain is not there.

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Jeremy,

I would suspect that this is something that probably wouldn't be considered.  While Hornbill has a lot of integrations with emails, it doesn't attempt to be a replacement for an email server and client.  If you look at the email notifications that you will get from the community forums (and this particular update to this topic), they contain minimal information with a link back to the full forum topic.  The forum emails don't contain the entire conversation within the topic and one wouldn't send a reply email to the notification.   I know that some users are more comfortable with following a discussion within an email, however, if I were configuring a service desk for customer support, I would remove the email action from the requests and have customer notifications enabled for when a customer visible update is made to a request that sends a notification email with not much more than a link back to the request.   I know that there will be scenarios where email seems to be the more appropriate means of communication, but in my opinion, the more you can do within the request, the better.  

[samwoo]

Just wanted to add my experience... I agree with what @James Ainsworth is saying, though it is not always going to be easy or even possible to switch to avoid using emails, that being said we do things as a hybrid... if we know someone quite well and they respond to updates via tickets directly, then we never email them, for everyone else, we do... even if we have told users to update the ticket directly, not everyone is going to.

However we do email suppliers and contacts directly using email within the request, so this would be the biggest reason why I think having a reply action would be a huge +1 from me, as these people won't have any access to the tickets.

So I just had a thought to the original request, why not have the ability to add a "Reply" action to any timeline posts that were created as result of an email going into the ticket? You could set up a dedicated template that we could amend which will allow pull the contents of that post into it. The email we send as a result of this reply action will update the timeline of the ticket.

Wouldn't that be better than identifying the previous email? 

[Jeremy]

31 minutes ago, samwoo said:

So I just had a thought to the original request, why not have the ability to add a "Reply" action to any timeline posts that were created as result of an email going into the ticket? You could set up a dedicated template that we could amend which will allow pull the contents of that post into it. The email we send as a result of this reply action will update the timeline of the ticket.

This is a better idea, the option of adding these emails to the timeline would be great as I know that sending emails this way does not link to the timeline in anyway.