"Reply" action in UI unclear

[jacotec]

When a new ticket appears, it has these options directly under the message:

Auf intern setzen / antworten / abspalten

The text field below, where you can enter a reply (Prefilled with "Antwort eingeben oder Dateien wählen") does not create a response to the customer, it just creates a "note".

Beside me at the first time, anyone I've showed this typed his response in this field, assuming that the customer gets the reply to the ticket. I think this is a potential trap for the agents and should be more clear in the UI:

• either leave the text field away and just leave actions below the message like "Auf intern setzen / antworten / kommentieren / abspalten"

• or make the "antworten" form the default and "kommentieren" (or "Notiz hinzufüggen") the option.

[kersten]

I think it would be best to be configurable what the default is.

And it would be nice to see that the TO field is prefilled with the customers email address and in the CC field there should be all addresses that are in contact with the ticket.

[hirbod]

Really need to send a ping here. Why isn't the TO-Field pre-filled? I was testing the heck out of me and couldn't understand, why the fetched email won't receive an answer. Such an awesome piece of software fails at what is most important...

[benadler]

When we started using zammad, it took us a week to start wondering why no-one replied to our support answers. Zammad is great, but this is a UX desaster. Customers ask questions, so "enter answer" implies this will be sent to the customer.

Why not "reply" vs. "add note"?

[nsrosenqvist]

It's a great piece of software but this really confused me as well. Please consider prioritizing this issue higher. Related: #938

[splattner]

+1

[ateuber]

We also need the possibility to change it to reply by email by default. It's quite confusing for new Zammad users.

[HLeithner]

Email answer as default (as option) would be really useful, it happens too often that a reply is only added to the ticket system and don't get send out to the ticket opener.

[SniperSister]

I make this mistake at least once a week, so I can clearly confirm that this is a real UI issue.

[thorsteneckel]

@mrflix - Do you think you can you address this in the same scope of #1135 which we discussed yesterday?

[mrflix]

Yes we're addressing them both at the same time.

In some companies a lot of communication happens inside the ticket before the customer gets a response: colleagues give advise, additional information from devs gets requested etc. These commenting agents are currently happy that they can directly start to write internal communication using the big input field.

On the other hand the big input field does totally look like an answer field and it even has the placeholder "Enter Answer". So this is a big mistake from our side (historically the default behavior was "answer" but we changed it to "note").

We could introduce an option to choose "note" or "reply via initial channel" as the default. We would need to keep this generic because tickets can start out as mails but also as tweets, written down phone calls etc.. For this case we face the challenge that we have to choose which one will be the initial default and if the default is not "note" then we might make agents that are used to the current system unhappy.

A more favored idea we have in mind right now is to hide the big input and instead present big action buttons with "reply", "reply all", "forward", "note" + additional possible channels that you could use to communicate with the customer. Google Mail, Mail.app and probably many more apps handle it this way:

Clicking one of the action buttons would show the big input, select the correct channel and autofocus your input to the input so that you wouldn't need another click to start typing.

[HLeithner]

Big buttons would be a good solution.

[mbabker]

I myself just ran into the same issue this evening. What would it take to get this addressed?

[nsrosenqvist]

Any timeline for this issue?

[MrGeneration]

No timeline yet.
This is a feature backlog and we'll address it when there's time for it. :-)

We currently focus on the knowledgebase.
I'll lock this issue for further discussion, as there has been no further usefull input beside of pushing the issue. This is to reduce the noise for those who're watching this repo.

[MrGeneration]

Unlucked for voting (on the initial post).
Please do not post any further comments on how much you want this and when it will come, as I will then lock the conversation again.

[gety9]

Was confused by this as well.

From UX point of view i suggest default selection for channel be channel through which ticket was opened, and making (note) last possible selection. (cause it will be used most seldom)

[MrGeneration]

The reply button does always use the same channel the message came from to answer.
That is, if the reply button is available. If it's not, you gotta answer via note or phone article.

[shtefcs]

The reply button does always use the same channel the message came from to answer.
That is, if the reply button is available. If it's not, you gotta answer via note or phone article.

Are you sure you didn't do this because of your SaaS version and forcing users to use it instead?

Like this nice software, but having such a bad UX as you can see stops people from using it.

Why you can't make it simple as you have on your SaaS version? Like you have all those features, and give to us, but u don't give us an option to simply reply to the ticket via email.

Maybe I am missing something, but how I reply to the customer directly via email? https://www.screencast.com/t/Rd7NM0l38

I was struggling to find this for months, been over settings 8 times in every option, but i couldn't figure it out. Maybe its me, but thankfully found this Github Issue and i see people are facing the same problem.

You have very simple way of doing it over your SaaS, but not in Open Source version. I might be wrong, but this tells me you are doing it on purpose, so you convert OS users to Paid SaaS users.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

[MrGeneration]

@shtefcs Sorry for your trouble, but this is a technical question not a bug.
This technically is not different than our SaaS offer - the difference is that you buy default don't have an mail account.

I suggest having a look at your group settings and maybe consulting the documentation.
If you still have issues, please create a post on the community at https://community.zammad.org .

If you're interested in our commercial grade support, you can check out https://zammad.com/pricing#selfhosted if you're interested.

As this issue hasn't had any usefull feedback I'll be locking it to contributors only.
Please don't get me wrong, this is to reduce the noise on this repository which helps us to concentrade on fixing issues.