Hello all,

There are some great features in Zoho Desk, but the more I work with it, the more I find massive flaws that you would just expect to be there and apparently aren't.

One of the things i am currently attempting to set up is a way for the users to view tickets that they have been CC'd on by other users. I turned on the CC field for the new ticket web form in General Settings > Tickets, and enabled "Customers can view tickets of other users in their account" in Help Center > Access Settings. I then went through all the Contacts and added them to one common Account. This allowed anyone with a Help Center login to view their own tickets, and ALL tickets for the entire office in the Help Center portal. 

I have searched the heck out of ways to show the user only their tickets, and tickets they have been CC'd on, but every time I come across a post or knowledge base article, the response is that it can't be done. Part of the problem is that when someone types in the ticket form CC field, the system is not searching existing contacts. As you type, it pops up a box labeled "Searching.."  but never actually populates with any results <shown in the attachment>. The user has to type the full email address of the person they want to CC, which seems completely ridiculous to me when the person they are CC'ing already exists in the Help Center, with an email address.

My next thought was that I could create a customer Account for each department, then add the pertinent users to the correct accounts. This partially works (like when a department's co-supervisor opens a ticket for a team member and the other co-supervisor would be able to see it, and vice versa), but to really get it working properly, I would need to be able to assign a user to more than one Account.

For example, a user in Human Resources opens a ticket for a new employee in the Admin department. The HR person is in the Human Resources department (account) and will need to follow progress, but also the supervisor of the Admin department will need to follow progress as well. Since a person can only be a member of one department, only the HR person is going to see the ticket in their "All Tickets" view. The Admin department supervisor will just have to live with reading and responding to all updates via email. ?!?!?!?!?

If everyone who possibly needs to see tickets has a user account in Help Center and they all log in to the portal, why does this fundamental feature not exist? Even if the responsibility was placed on the tech support agent to add all the necessary recipients to a ticket, it would be at least usable. The only way to add other people on to a ticket is to click Reply All, and start typing their name in the To or Cc line. The maddening part is, a short list pops up because it is recognizing what I am typing and comparing it to the system Contacts. What it's NOT doing is associating that contact with a Help Center User, because there is no way to actually link the two together. I've used ServiceNow and Remedy in the past, and something as simple as adding an existing portal user on to a ticket so they can see status and updates has been a standard function on those platforms for at least a decade and a half, if not two. Baffling and maddening...

Yes, I know that adding recipients to the ticket will mean they get placed on the email notification trail, but the whole thing breaks as soon as someone clicks Reply, instead of Reply All. Not to mention that nobody wants to go digging through stacks of email to find the last reply to one specific ticket. It's not efficient and defeats the entire purpose of having a ticket system. Help Center users should be available to add on to a ticket, and should remain on the ticket regardless of how anyone replies to the thread. Everyone who has been added should then see that ticket in their My Area on Help Center.

Does anyone out there have any ideas, or know of something I am missing?

Best regards,

Ben