After you have submitted a ticket, you can change a public comment to private by making it an internal note. Everyone who has access to the ticket, including anyone copied on a ticket, can see public comments but only agents can see private comments.
Agents and admins can change any comments from public to private. When you change a public comment to private, you cannot make it public again. Additionally, the comment will no longer be visible to end users in tickets or the web portal.
To make a public comment private
- Open the ticket that contains the comment you want to change.
- Click Conversation in the comments section, and select Events from the drop-down menu.
The ticket's events and notifications are displayed.
- Under the comment you want to change, click Make this comment an internal note.
- Click Yes, convert to an internal note.
An new event is added to the ticket indicating that the comment was changed from public to private.
35 Comments
I don't see this option ' Make this Comment private'. how do I enable it I am an admin in zendesk.
Hey Shyam!
This functionality doesn't requite being enabled - it's always available. Can you post a screenshot of where you're looking?
Hi Jessie,
One of my colleagues has been asking about this feature. How do ZD users utilize this function? The only example I can think of would be when you submit a comment, but later realize some part of it is inaccurate, so you wish to hide it from future correspondences. Do I have this correct? Are there other use cases?
Hey Zach -
I checked in with a few of our Advocates to see how they use this feature. They said they basically use it when a) someone accidentally makes a public comment that was meant to be private or b) if something is no longer current/goes out of date. Note that this does not recall any email notifications that were sent, but it does prevent the erroneous comment from further being exposed publicly.
I don't see the option either, can you provide screenshots of where exactly it should be?
Hi Rachel!
In order to see this option you need to click on the Conversations drop-down right above your top comment, and select Events. You'll then see the Make this comment an internal note option:
Let us know if you need anything else!
How to make a private note a public reply?
Hi Jennifer!
I'm afraid it's not possible to convert a private not to a public comment. My recommendation would be to copy/paste the private response into a new, public comment.
Can you please explain me what is this feature for? I mean, after submitting a public comment, email notification is sent to the customer, so when the assignee realizes that is should have been a private note it is already too late anyway....
Hi Jiri!
This is absolutely true. However, changing the comment from public to private after the fact ensures that it's not visible in perpetuity to the requester or any CCs when they view their tickets in My Activities in Help Center. It also avoids further confusion inside the ticket from the Agent end of things, because it gives the correct context for the conversation in the ticket.
Hello,
Is there a way we could track changes from public note to private note on Insights?
Hi Melvin,
Can you tell us more about why you need to track this? There's not a direct way, but if you can tell me more maybe we can find a workaround for you.
Hi
There are certain tickets where the "make comment internal" is not present. What options do i then have?
Hello Nicole,
Newer agents at times miss setting the note as private and send out internal information out. This is corrected when observed.
We would like to track this to enable us to coach the new agents better.
Hi Martin!
To the best of my knowledge, that option should be available on all tickets. Can you tell me more about the tickets where you're not seeing this option? Bear in mind that if you're an agent you can only make your own comment internal, while admins can make any comment internal.
Melvin -
I've done some digging around and it sounds like you could pull this data from the API.
I have a similar request to Jennifer above so we could turn a private comment to public in the case of customer email replies that become private comments. I logged my feedback to this thread: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360000894848-How-can-an-end-user-add-an-internal-note-to-a-ticket-?page=1#community_comment_360001586207
Hi,
Is it possible to automatically change a public comment to an internal comment based on who the sender is? i.e.:
We work with calendly to let customers book meetings. We receive a confirmation from calendly the event is booked on support@teamtel.be. Now the customer receives a confirmation email from calendly but also an email from zendesk that turns our calendly confirmation to a ticket with the calendly confirmation for us as the public notes to the customer.
What 'd we 'd want is to create an internal ticket for our support employees with an internal note of the calendly confirmation without the ticket creation to the customer who booked the event. It would just be an internal ticket.
Thanks!
When you change a public comment into an internal comment, then send corrected public comment, will the requester not see the public comment you changed the mode?
Hi Mark! Welcome to the Community!
Once a public ticket comment is changed to private, end-users won't be able to see them if they're viewing their tickets in My Activities in your Help Center. However, if that comment was already sent out to an end-user in an email notification, they will still be able to see it there since it's not possible to change the content of the email after the fact.
Does this include attachments? If a post went out publicly with an attachment and we convert it to a private comment, will that also make the attachment private going forward within the Help Center?
Hi Arnoud!
Did you figure out how to automatically convert comments from specific senders to internal notes?
Best regards,
Anders
Hi Anders,
Do you have a specific use case in mind? I can throw a few potential solutions for a few use cases, but they may not match your end state.
If you never want a specific user to be able to post publicly and they are an internal use case. You can consider making them a light agent. This would allow them to only post privately on tickets. This would also give them access to Zendesk so it's not ideal for customer workflows.
If you are trying to prevent a double email situation like what Arnoud described, you could put a user field on that user that indicates that emails should not be sent out if the ticket updater is that user.
You'd start with a user field - say a checkbox called "Stop Notifications"
Then in your notification triggers you'd put logic in that checks for that checkbox being checked on the user profile.
On any notification trigger add a condition under ALL that says Stop Notifications is Unchecked.
This would only work for the requester of the ticket and not additional commenters on the ticket, but it could be useful to prevent a second email from being sent to a customer in the scenario of a scheduler like Arnoud's example.
Note that this wouldn't make the comment private but it would solve for a use case where you are stopping email.
These might be half solutions for what you really want to do, but they might get you somewhere close to what you are looking for.
"Agents and admins can change any comments from public to private. Admins can change any public comment to private."
I don't understand the difference between the two sentences above.
Also, is it possible to restrict this function in custom roles?
We don't want our agents to use this function at their discretion.
"I don't understand the difference between the two sentences above."
My amazing manager just told me that what these sentences probably mean are that agents can change their OWN comments into internal, but admins can change anyone else's comments into internal.
Hi Dan!
Thanks for replying, I should have described my case from the start.
So our case is that we are a ferry line between Sweden and Denmark, collaborating with other ferry lines for combination tickets. Sometimes when a customer wants to buy a combination ticket, we need to check seating availability with our partners. We do this by first changing the requester of a ticket to the partner. When they reply we convert the answer to an internal note, change the requester back to the customer and answer their ticket.
My question is if it´s possible to create an automation that converts the answer from the partner to an internal note, so that we can skip the step of converting the partner reply to an internal note. It would be really nice to have this possibility, so that we avoid attaching the partner reply to an official comment.
I know about Side conversations but we currently have no plans of investing in that function.
Best regards!
Hey,
I’d advice against swapping the requester since this can lead to confusion for agents and possible gdpr issues.
There is a pretty neat app: Forwarder that takes part of the functionality of light agents but cheaper than the add on.
Another road to explore could be child and parent tickets. You can converse with the client in the main ticket. And with your partner in a linked ticket: https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/linked-ticket/
Anders,
That opens up a few options. I'd agree with Thomas, that workflow is risky and opens up some potential issues related to GDPR and general customer challenges if you run into human error. If you decide to get into more complicated trigger notifications you can also accidentally start sending emails you never intended to in these workflows.
I mentioned Light Agents before, but Light Agents also comes with the Side Conversations feature which could be even better here in that you can still use email notification (or Slack if that made sense) and keep them out of your Zendesk while keeping the context in Zendesk).
In the absence of Light Agents or Side Conversations, I've used a second ticket to track these interactions and paired it with the Linked Ticket app - it adds more steps, but it was what we chose to do in order to minimize risk of accidentally missing the mark with swapping requesters. However, I'd personally avoid this if you didn't have to implement this. It's a huge agent hit for time, but it's an option.
Hi Thomas and Dan.
Thanks for replying. I think you are absolutely right about the GDPR issue, agents should not send out whole conversations to third parties. We'll have to find another way, I'll check out Forwarder and Linked Ticket.
Best regards
Hello,
Would you be able to advise if there's a way in Zendesk Explore to get a report of a tickets in which public comments were changed into to private ones? Is it stored somewhere in "ticket updates" dataset so it can be pulled out?
I tried to construct a query for that but with no luck, I located the update and its ID, the comment type shows as "none" and I'm not sure if such action is marked with some particular detail using which the tickets can be filtered.
I'll appreciate your assistance!
Best regards,
Mateusz
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