Private tickets are, for the most part, regular tickets with no public content—all comments are private comments, meaning they appear on the Internal only tab. When a private ticket is created for an end-user:
- The end-user is not notified that a ticket has been created on their behalf.
- Private tickets do not show up in the end-user's My Activities list, or in Help Center searches.
For information about using private tickets, see Creating a private ticket for an end-user.
Some triggers and automations send email when tickets are created. While private comments are never sent out in email notifications, some of these rules may still cause an email to be sent as part of a private ticket. You may want to take some time to prepare your business rules before starting to use this feature. For more information, see Adjusting your business rules to handle private tickets.
To enable or disable private ticket creation
- In Admin Center, click the Objects and rules
icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Settings. - In the
Comments
section of the Settings tab, select or
clear the
Allow
first comment on tickets to be
private
checkbox.Note: This option only appears in accounts created before April 8, 2017.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save tab.
When private ticket creation is enabled, comments on new tickets created by an agent become private comments (internal notes) by default, as do all subsequent comments, until a public reply is made.
If new agent-created tickets do not default private comments, sign out of your account and then sign back in.
24 Comments
Hi, do private tickets included in Insights metrics for the user or organization? If yes, is there a way to exclude them using a filter?
Hi Teena,
Yes, Insights metrics can see private tickets, and there are filters that can exclude private tickets from a report! The filter "public comment" is "true" should exclude private tickets, as they have no public comments. If you have questions about a specific use case, please feel free to call or email our customer service team - they'll be able to assist further.
Thanks for the question!
My agents do not seem to receive notifications when a private comment is made on a ticket. Can you point me in the right direction to rectify this?
Hey Ursh -
Sounds like we need to do some troubleshooting. If your agents are assigned to a ticket or cc'd on it, they should be receiving notifications on private comments.
Are you using the default triggers from Zendesk, or have you customized those? It's possible the trigger to send these notifications was accidentally disabled.
I would start by checking your triggers. In case you need info on the default triggers, here's a helpful article:
About the Zendesk Support default triggers
Take a look and a read, and let us know if that solves it or if other questions come up.
What happens if you merge a public ticket into a private one? Does this automatically make the private ticket public?
Hey Dgriffin! Welcome to the Community!
This is actually a really interesting question - I need to do some testing to find out how that would all pan out. I'll let you know what I find out!
Hi Dgriffin! I finally got a chance to test this out.
I created a ticket with a public first comment, and then another ticket with a private first comment.
I then merged the public ticket into the private ticket. The public comment from the first ticket was added to the private ticket as a public comment, but the existing private comment remained private.
Does that answer your question?
Hello,
I just enabled private tickets. When I create a private ticket my customer still gets notified that a case was created. They do not get the cases subject line or the description... but get an email that a case case created.
The exact subject line they receive is "[Request received] Untitled ticket 1689"
I think they will reply asking what ticked was created on their behalf.
What do I need to change to prevent them getting this update?
Hey Shaun -
Welcome to the Zendesk Community!
Most likely this is happening because of some other business rule that is still sending out a notification. Adjusting your business rules to handle private tickets has some good suggestions and steps to take. Go through that, and let us know if you're still having problems.
@ Shaun - In your Notify Requester of Received Request trigger(s) be sure that add the condition for ticket privacy to only send the notification if a ticket has public comments.
Hope this helps!
Thanks for jumping in, James!
Hi, everyone!
Is there any way to set the 1st comment as private via a triggered action?
I've got this Google Sheet sending row data to create tickets for agents, and the 1st comment is the case data itself for the agent to follow up on the case, so I'd like to make it private by using a trigger.
Is this possible?
Not a big issue, but just to automate things a bit more.
Hey Pedro -
You can change your settings such that all ticket comments are private by default, including the first comment. Or, you could set up a macro.
However, if someone submits a public comment but it’s supposed to be private, there’s no way for a trigger to test for that and change it.
@ Pedro - Can you give some details as to how the Google sheet is being used to create the tickets? Is this via an integration app like Zapier? Or are you using the sheet as a data source for creating tickets via the ZenDesk API directly?
@Nicole
Hi! Thanks for that suggestion, it did cross my mind, but it would cause too much disruption in the entire crew's habits... sigh.
@James
Neither Zapier nor custom made. I had to hurry with this one, so I didn't do any of that... went with a Google Sheets add-on instead ("formMule").
Sorry to hear that, Pedro. I hope you find an answer that works for your team!
Pedro - I assume then that with formMule the end result is just tickets in ZenDesk created via inbound email with a requester email address, subject and initial comment, correct? If so, then I I think there would be no other ticket field property data that gets passed into the ticket that could be used in a trigger? I'm not quite sure how to solve your problem if the above is accurate. You might investigate Zapier or Formstack for integration on ticket creation - there are workarounds and solutions to your problem when using an integration app. This actually ties into a larger ZenDesk issue that plenty of users have noted - that while you can upload user data via csv import, you cannot upload tickets via csv import.
Hey, James! That's correct. I had to speed up this process, so no time for a proper integration (that would be the ideal solution), so I was just wondering if there was any triggerable action to set the first comment as internal.
Thanks for all your help!
Hi, is it also possible to create a ticket through the API with an internal note only?
Edit: Yes it was :-) Just not well described scenario in the documentation.
Hey Sore -
Glad you figured it out!
Hi,
I cannot find this way to enable the option for automatically choosing Internal note as default. My UI does not look like the one you are describing.
We are using ZD for a lot of internal information so we would like to have the option of having Internal as default.
Hey Fredrik!
If you're not seeing this option it's likely that this note from the top of this article is applicable to you:
Please note the setting for private ticket creation does not set the default behavior, that would be the "Agent comments via web are public by default" that is highlighted in your screenshot. You can disable that setting if you wish for your comment type behavior to default to internal.
I don't have this option, and my mails are creating public comments on the tickets....
Hey Ricardo,
You should see this option as shown in the screenshot below:
If you don't, can you provide me with a screenshot of what you see on your end?
Thanks in advance!
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