Working in IT, I sometimes have to send some (or all) customers a short ‘newsletter’-style mailing regarding security issues, urgent updates, data breaches in web services, and so on.
It’d be great if I could do that via Zammad – i.e. create a ticket ‘template’, then add customers (maybe even based on rules) and every customer gets sent an e-mail about that specific topic…
Right now, you’d have to create a ticket template and then look up customers one after another.
Personally I think that Zammad is the wrong type of software for doing this.
But that’s just my thoughts.
I guess it would be easier to do this via API if you want to keep track of those mails within Zammad.
Please be aware that creating huge amount of ticket data (depending on how many customers you do have) might lead to poor performance on Zammad side.
The benefit of doing this via API is being able to auto close the ticket and also to do this completely unattended e.g. at night.
I like the idea. While I agree that actual newsletters are out of Zammad’s scope, we have at least one similar use case where this would come in really handy (there might be more, but I have to ask our sales people about that):
Our sales staff tracks when the warranty of our customers’ servers expire and then send a mail to all currently affected customers to inform them about this, to tell them that they can get a quote for a warranty extension or a new server from us.
In our old ticket system Kayako, our sales staff used BCC for this. They essentially create a single ticket, To: info@ourcompany.tld, BCC: customer1, customer2, … and put a generic text into it that applies to all recipients.
That worked, but IMO it was already a bit awkward, because as soon as the customers answer, you have to manually split off their answers into separate tickets. Zammad doesn’t have BCC (and our sales people actually groaned a bit during the training when I told them that ^^), so this will no longer work; I advised them to use the ticket template feature as a workaround.
@herzkerl’s idea sounds like it could solve this kind of situation very well. I imagine it to work like this:
“Create ticket” gets a new ticket type “Send Email (multiple)”
When you choose this ticket type, the UI essentially looks like “Send Email”, but you can add multiple customers.
When you click on Create, Zammad actually creates a separate ticket for each customer that was added to the list. These tickets inherit all settings as configured by the agent, e.g. title, CC, text, group, owner, state, priority etc.; they only differ in ticket ID and customer. The tickets are linked with link type “normal”.
Each customer receives a separate email; they cannot see the other recipients in their copy of the mail.
Further communication with the customers occurs separately in the separate tickets.
I think the API would be the best option here.
This helps you in two ways:
A system will automatically monitor the warranty state of customers and if the warranty is going to expire, create a ticket via Zammad-API and whoooza, you have your mail going to your customer plus you have it inside of Zammad already. So if a customer now answers, you’re good to go without any merging and manual work around it (to the point the customer answers).
I’ve created something similiar for us. We wanted to have a specific ticket with some general Information and a warm welcome for every new employee that logs into zammad.
The idea is first creating a list of all users eligible for the ticket you want to create (for us, this meant checking if this specific greetingticket already exists for that user) and then create the ticket on behalf of that user.
.
(Don’t forget the “X-On-Behalf-Of” Header in your ticket creation, Introduction — Zammad System Documentation documentation)
You can try to build your list of eligible users with different API calls too, or maybe even from another system. For us, it looks like this:
Beware though: Creating a high amount of tickets might cause problems with other parts zammad, such as Reporting, Overviews, your Triggers if you’ve set any up. I personally solved this by only having the same title for all of these tickets, and exclude that title from any possible trigger, overview, etc. Which is easy since I only create one ticket for each user, it might get more problematic with multiple tickets.
We figured it out, but it creates a lot of things you have to think of when keep working in Zammad.
I wanted to mention that I am doing something like this with my accounting software by sending a BCC to the email address that Zammad watches—which automatically creates a ticket for each outgoing quote, invoice, etc.
I sure could do something like this with my newsletter software as well…
