[Status: Launched! 🚀] Email notifications for external request form submitters

Hey Tyler :) I understand why you're asking for this. Just to try and explain the current reasoning, I think the idea is that people who are submitting external Request forms wouldn't necessarily need to stay up to date with what happens after they make their submission. 

However, in your case it sounds like the people submitting forms are definitely invested in the outcome of their submission. I'm wondering if it would make sense to make more people Collaborators? That's a free user type that would allow people to get email notifications when a task's status changes. They could still have a direct link to a form (and wouldn't need more training necessarily), but it would enable more notification options. 

Being able to update people of the status of the request who submit an external form is something that is very applicable to us. One example of why is for Leave Request form for our employees. The ability to put this online has become quite effective, however, it is not feasible at this time for us to train and maintain approx 60 additional collaborators (employees not on Wrike) just to be able to access a request form when we can use an external link. As they supplied an email when submitting the request form, it would be great to link it to the task and be able to update them on the status when completed. 

Hi Bailey, this makes total sense. Thanks for your input here. We'll make sure this thread is brought to our Product Team's attention and provide updates here as we have them👍

Regarding "... the idea is that people who are submitting external Request forms wouldn't necessarily need to stay up to date with what happens after they make their submission."    It would be very useful if each organization can make this decision, customizing each form as they see fit.   It would be great if the Wrike Product Team could include an option for this during the creation of the form.  It would also be great if the organization can customize the contents of the automatic email during the form set-up.

Specific example from my organization --  We have a regional group of agencies involved in dispatching calls for service.  The staff currently send emails to my organization to request additions/corrections to the data used behind-the-scenes in the dispatching software.  We want to share an external form link for requesting data additions / corrections.  This form would create a Project From Template with several tasks, assignees, and custom statuses.  The agencies making the requests have high-turnover, and some of the staff have limited tech skills.  The work-around to have my organization invite them to be Collaborators so they'll know when a task has been completed is not ideal -- it would cause us extra work and would be overkill for the form submitters.  These external form submitters:

• Work at a place with high turn-over.  -- My organization as well as the regional group of agencies would have extra work because they'd have to notify us about changes in staff, and then we'd have to invite people to be a Wrike Collaborator and disable old accounts.
• Are not very tech-savvy.  -- They'll be intimidated by having to log-in to Wrike to see the status of their request or to set up email options to receive notifications about changes.  My organization would have extra work because we'd have to train these new users, and we'd have to answer frequent questions about how to use Wrike.
• May fill out the form very infrequently.  -- They would most likely forget how to use Wrike to see the status.  
• Don't need to see every Comment or change in Status for a Task.  -- When the form is submitted, it would create a Project From Template with several tasks and assignees, who'd input lots of notes in the Description and Comments, and change the task Status (several custom statuses).   If the form submitter were a Collaborator and had set their email options to see every change, they could get a lot of emails (and be annoyed by how many they get).  The form submitters just need to use a simple online form and then get an email whenever their request has been completed.

Hi Valerie, thanks so much for this level of detail. Great points made here and it really adds value to internal conversations 👍

For our company, automatically alerting the external requestor of project status is a must-have.

We have a lot of Wrike users but external of Wrike, we have a large base of project/task submitters who are requesting projects.  We just started using the external project request forms, which are in the process of being implemented. However, the issue is that the requestor (although they include their email at time of submission) gets no notification of milestones or completion.

We were excited that we could use the external form to cut down on email requests. However, the lack of a feedback loop causes an email chain to occur to communicate status updates. Therefore it doesn't eliminate the email chain at all.

If we had a feature on external forms that would update the requestor of major milestones (acceptance into timeline, finish date changes, completion), it would be a great help and would eliminate emails that are unnecessary, allowing our design team to focus on the task instead of emailing status reports.

In talking with Wrike customer service, it seems a work-around would be to invite the external requester as a collaborator, however only an admin can do this, and it is an additional an unnecessary step, particularly when Wrike is capturing the requestor's email at the time the request is made.

Our company recently started using Wrike and we also have the need for this to be implemented. My department and I were just discussing if there was an existing setting to make this happen and I came across this thread in a search. As stated above, we would also like to keep the communication within Wrike instead of creating a separate email chain to communicate status updates.

We have over 1,000 people in our company and hundreds of them could potentially be filling out requests. Implementing this feature would make much more sense than creating them all as collaborators.

Exact same request for this feature with the same issues and request as per detailed request from Valerie 👍.

I am just testing at the moment and it is the only but a big negative so far.

How do we know if this feature will make it into a future release?

Thanks

I would really like to see this go through. I understand the reason on both side to have or not. This should be an option on the admin side when creating the form. Maybe even have the option and a yes/no question for the requester if they would like to be notified when the status of their request changes. 

We were also in great need of this email trigger option.
It could be notified in certain statuses.
Is there any deadline for implementation?

This is a definite feature we need in our organization as well. Keeping the requester who submitted the form updated as it changes status is critical to keeping the communication flowing. Please implement this. It would be a HUGE help. 

This feature would make an external request forms much more useful!

My need is very similar to the ones outlined above.  I am looking to use Wrike as our customer support and ticketing system but the communications and automated triggering of these messages is a mandatory element for us.  If I can not find a way to do this in Wrike I am going to have to add an additional system just to manage this.  I really don't want to do this when the current capabilities cover most of my current needs.

Adding all of the potential submitters as collaborators would not be practical for us as there are far too many.  I also do not want them to be able to log into the system. I just need them to be able to get updates on the status of the tickets submitted. 

As the initial request goes back to early 2017, I'm not optimistic that this will be added any time soon.  Please let me know if this is a feature that will make it into an upcoming release.

We are in a trial period and the ability to update status of requests without adding everyone as a collaborator might be a dealbreaker for us on whether or not we make the purchase. 

Hi there,

I echo everyone else's comments and suggestions in this thread. It would be SOO useful if we could update people of the status of the request who submit an external form. There's no way we would add these people as collaborators, as our organisation has made Wrike request forms available to 500+ employees. 

It would be so ideal (and a total gamechanger + timesaver) if an email could be sent to the person who sent the request form, informing them of which Wrike user was 'assigned' to their matter as well. Automatically alerting the person who sent the request form of who was assigned their project and/or project status is a must-have!! I am literally on my hands and knees begging you to add this functionality into Wrike 😂

I want to add additional support to this feature request.  As an easy starting point, it would be great to have an ability to set an internal email address that is copied on the submission confirmation email that goes out to the client. That at least allows us to have an email chain where a member of our internal team can use the submitted form as a conversation starter with the client that submitted the form (dropping the noreply@wrike) address from the email reply.

However, I agree with the other ideas listed above that a more robust and automated update system is needed in Wrike!  It would provide significant time savings to have the automatic status updates.

My organization has used Wrike for a few months now and are desperately in need of this feature. For us as well, it is not necessary to communicate a change in the status of every task. However, the ability to communicate the outcome of the process and any follow-up information with the ticket submitter is vital. 

@Stephen: Is there a minimum number of comments or votes needed for the Wrike Product Team's attention and action? 

Adding my little piece to this long-awaited functionality.

As for many others, we use public form to receive requests from users that will send us such request only once or twice. No way to lose time adding those end users as collaborators. 

Right now it is almost more efficient to advertise a public email than to use Wrike public form. Which is a pity
(the way I do it right now is to CC wrike@wrike.com when replying, just to record the activity)

What we would need?

When replying in the comment section we should be able to add a "@requester" generic notifier. When doing so, and only in comments where the @requester is present, the comment is sent to the email provided in the public form.

The subject of the email is the subject of the task.

The body of the email is the content of the comment plus...
at the end a copy of the initial request
at the begging, an introduction stating who is replying. Who is replying should be customized either by the Wrike account owner or the Wrike User: it could be the explicit name of the Wrike User commenting, or a Wrike Team generic description

When the end users are replying to the answer they received from Wrike, their answer should go automatically in the comment section of the Wrike task and the follower of the task would be notified (that part is usual behaviour: nothing new to develop)

That way the conversation could be managed entirely from within the comment section.
Right now I have to go to my mailing tool, copy/paste manually the email of the requester, copy/paste the title, the body..., CC to the email of the ask, hope that the requester hit the "Reply All" button to keep the CC included... lots of tricks, just to be able to keep a record of the exchange within Wrike.

@Pascal, thanks so much for your detailed use-case here, it is passed to our Product team 👍

@Damis, once the post reaches 60 upvotes, a Product Feedback status is added to the suggestion. More details in this post. 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

I wholeheartedly agree with the need to have this feature available for external forms.

Right now we get the support ticket submitted by external users, none of which do we need to add as Collaborators. That is a great service and it's helping us keep track of needed course revisions needed in our courses. We give faculty access to their courses 2 weeks prior to semester start and ask them to look through and let our department know if any edits are needed. They've been using the external form we built this past January. But when we complete the ticket, we then have to send an email out to the faculty member where we have to copy their original request and our reply on how we fixed things in their course. This makes for added work on our end and, if we forget to email the Instructor, we get email reminders from them asking whether their support ticket has been taken care of or not. 

So not only do we need to be able to complete a task and have the person who submitted the request be alerted that the task was completed and, based on comments our instructional designers post to the task, how it was completed, but we also want the ability to list in that reply a link to a feedback form they can fill out and tell us how we did.  

Our IT department has this in place. Anytime we submit a support ticket to them, we get a "ticket received" email. Then, when they complete the task, we get a "support ticket closed" email that lists what was done and asks that we rate their service. It would help our online department at our university tremendously to have Wrike offer this same feature. 

This feature is a MUST HAVE for my organization also! We are using Wrike forms to allow departments outside of our Quality and Compliance group to submit different types of requests for my team to complete. The automatic email including the unique number is great so the external departments have a way to reference the request; however, there is no way to alert them to status changes. This lack of status update notification makes it difficult to keep communication centralized.

We are currently using Microsoft Teams to manually add the task so all unique team notifications for requests can be centralized within threads. This is also cumbersome as when updates are turned n within MS Teams, multiple conversation threads appear for each change individually instead inline within the initial. When additional threads are created it makes it impossible for the all parties to know which thread should be used to communicate regarding the request. Having the feature which allows status updates to be emailed back to the initial requester is critical to us saving time and making the most of our Wrike application.

To all the people who are following this thread, let's have it reach the level required to receive a status update.

We should all share it on our own social networks, to invite other Wrike users to upvote it. We are  missing just 9 upvotes

Feel free to use my template

To all #Wrike users around, please help me upvote this very important feature request: Email notifications for external request form submitters https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002787869-Email-notifications-for-external-request-form-submitters
If like us you use @wrike to manage bug reports you need that feature

or just retweet https://twitter.com/pvk/status/1113107569994842113

Still in trial period, but this issue could be a make-or-break for using wrike as ticketing system or handling any other form of requests. Making all internal and external people who send in requests to collaborators is not very comfortable and hard to explain to external why they should sign in to wrike.

An @requester handle as suggested above and configurable email notifications to the requester on status changes would be really helpful.

Configurable email notifications to the requester on status changes, as Steffen Kress suggests, is a feature not only helpful but desperately needed. When requests come in, off of forms we create, they all come with a generic name. It'd be great if the name that showed was what the requester entered under a "name of issue" or, for us, "course name and number". We also desperately need a way to work on a support ticket, mark it complete, and have the requester get an email that the ticket was completed and is now closed. 

At the moment we find that the online form only gets us half way there. Once the requester submits a support ticket and we work to address it, all future back/forth regarding that ticket is handled through emails, because there is no way to get back into the ticket. This makes it so that the history on how the support ticket was handled and finally closed is missing in Wrike, and the requester is left wondering the status of the support ticket.

@Lisa now that this has the required amount of up votes. When can we expect the Status update to be added to the suggestion?

This feature is critical for the extensive use of external forms. Our company's marketing team adopted Wrike a couple of months ago and we're about to deploy 6 forms to our 300+ reps. It would be impossible for us to invite the requesters as collaborators as it would take too much time to onboard that many people. Plus, we tried inviting select reps into our workspace in Basecamp, and it ended up being a major cluster. The chaos was the main reason why we abandoned Basecamp for Wrike, as I was sold on the potential for keeping things organized. 

As things stand right now, we'll be forced to communicate with the reps via email and then report back the feedback in the comments. This is incredibly counter-productive. 

I'm also frustrated that this feature reached the 60-vote threshold, yet I haven't seen a status update yet. Can someone from the community team provide feedback? The thread was started in 2017. Is there pushback from the devs or is it simply not a priority? 

Hi all, we're currently working with our Product Team to better understand the Status for this request and I'll update asap.

For now, I think some people here might be interested in chatting with our Product Team about enhancements we can make for IT Teams using Wrike. This conversation will be about ticketing systems and other items mentioned here.

Choose a date to be interviewed here.

I've added the Backburner status here.

To add a little context, the team have been thinking of the best way to approach this and understand that it's something that can be improved. The team responsible plan to investigate options this year, but not ahead of other essential enhancements already road mapped. I'll update the Status when that investigation happens and perhaps look for further input..

For now, the team gets the most value from your suggestions on Community when you include the following information (and a lot of you here have done this already - thank you!)

• What you're trying the achieve, the goal (not necessarily the feature but what you want to achieve in the end)?
• How you're currently working (working-around) without this solution (this help's our team understand how you use Wrike for this, and it could help a fellow member here in the meantime)?

Understanding what you'd like to achieve, rather than the feature you'd like helps the team understand the unlining need. Please keep voting and we'll keep you updated 👍

Ps. Light reminder on the opportunity to be interviewed for potential enhancements for IT team above in my last comment ☝️

For our company only the marketingdepartment uses the Wrike tool. All other departments enter requests through a different tool. This means a lot of copy/pasting to enter this information into Wrike and back to the tool (which is absolutely not productive). The external request form looks to be the best solution for this, but one of the requirements of our management is requestors have a way to see an overview of all the requests they enter with a status and assignee. 

Weighing in - Our company needs to have a status update automatically emailed from Wrike to an external requester.

Adding them as a collaborator would not work as we have potentially thousands of people who could request. We are working towards an email-free workflow and having to follow up via email completely defeats the purpose of making the request on Wrike.

Please update this!