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.
43 Comments
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....
How to make a private note a public reply?
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!
I don't see this option ' Make this Comment private'. how do I enable it I am an admin in zendesk.
Hi,
I've seen some questions revolving around the following but no exact resolution for the issue.
I'm using a google form for onboarding process, this results in an email sent to me and showing up on Zendesk as a ticket - customized by a Trigger.
The problem is that I want to use this ticket to correspond with the onboarding applicant, but google sends a message with the first email - and it's public by default.
My question is: can I configure these specific incoming emails to have their first message appear as an internal note by default?
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 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.
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
I've selected Events in the dropdown, but don't have the option "Make this Comment private". Please advise.
"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.
There should be a way to delay notification triggers to give us a moment to mark a comment as private before it gets sent out. I.e., a trigger condition for "elapsed time since submit".
Use case
Albeit clever, using automations to delay sending isn't a good workaround as they don't run often enough.
Desk used to have a simple undo link to click. Any other ideas? Thanks!
Thanks for providing additional information Mateusz!
I've marked this as product feedback and will pass this along to our Explore Product Manager so they're aware. I'll follow-up with you if we have any other questions :)
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!
Melvin -
I've done some digging around and it sounds like you could pull this data from the API.
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 Shyam!
This functionality doesn't requite being enabled - it's always available. Can you post a screenshot of where you're looking?
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.
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.
Was a specific decision taken to not be able to make private comments public? I'm curious because this would be particularly useful where someone not originally CC'd into the ticket responds, which adds the comment as a private note.
Hello Brett,
No worries, thank you too!
I'd only want to ask if it'd be possible to somehow keep me posted if such functionality is added? So I can prepare reports then. Or would there be a way for me to check the updates to see if it appears, i.e. some website where you publish relevant information, or maybe just here in the comments section you'll post this information? :)
Thank you!
Best regards,
Mateusz
Hi Iris Edwards,
Thank you for reaching out!
Do you happen to have a screenshot of the missing option "Make this comment an internal note"?
You are correct that you should click on the "Events" dropdown and above the public comment, you should see this option. One thing to check is your roles and permissions! An agent is limited to only private comments if they are a light agent on the account (Understanding and setting light agent permissions).
Please be sure to try some initial browser troubleshooting steps such as:
If you are still experiencing an issue I would be happy to contact the Zendesk customer support team on your behalf!
Hi Arnoud!
Did you figure out how to automatically convert comments from specific senders to internal notes?
Best regards,
Anders
I don't see the option either, can you provide screenshots of where exactly it should be?
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.
Hello,
Is there a way we could track changes from public note to private note on Insights?
Hey Mateusz,
I see you're new to the Zendesk Community Forum! I just wanted to say welcome on behalf of the Community Team :)
I did some digging on my end and it doesn't look this data is tracked within Explore at this time. What's the reason for tracking this data? I'd be happy to pass this feedback along to our Explore Product Managers so they're aware of this need.
Let me know!
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?
Hello Brett,
Thank you for your reply :)
I'd like to track instances where agents exchanging correspondence with our customers are making mistakes by publishing content which shouldn't be sent to the customers, but should be posted as an internal comment. It's possible that it happens and after the mistake is realized then the public comment is converted into internal. Having a possibility to generate a report based on these changes we'll be able to find cases in which mistake occurred and provide relevant feedback to agents to make sure such situations would be as rare as possible.
Can you advise if it would be possible for such tracking to be implemented?
Thank you!
Best regards,
Mateusz
Hi
There are certain tickets where the "make comment internal" is not present. What options do i then have?
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/
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