Your agents reply to customer tickets by adding comments to them. They can do this either through the Zendesk Support web interface, or by responding to the ticket via email.
You can make these comments either public — in which case they are sent back to the customer — or you can make them private by unchecking the box underneath the comment area. Private comments are great for when you want to discuss the ticket internally with your team, but you don’t want to share that conversation with the customer.
By default, your comments are public — you have to click Internal note if you want your comment to be private. Sometimes you might forget to check it, however, in which case a comment you wanted to keep internal gets shared with the customer.
If this is a situation you don’t want to risk, or if you post a lot of private comments, you can change your comments to be private by default. This means that you have click Public reply above the comment area if you want the comment to be public to your customer.
To do so, click the Admin icon ( 
) in the sidebar, then select Settings > Tickets. There, you’ll have the option to deselect the “Agent comments via web are public by default" as well as "Agent comments via email are public by default."
The option to make ticket comments sent in by email public by default is handy if you want to use the web interface for private conversation, but you want to be able to reply by email to the customer.
Comments
15 comments
Hi,
We have this scenario- Agent A gets notified when Agent B from the same team makes a private comment and cc agent A, then Agent A replies to that e-mail and it is saved as public comment in the ticket and it gets sent to the user.
What we want to happen is agent reply via e-mail should be made public if they are replying to a public comment (from a user or other agents) and it should me made private if they are replying to a private note from agents.
I'm not sure how feasible this is but i hope you have a suggestion or workaround for me :)
Thanks
Indhu
Agents can control the public\ private status of their comments when replying by email. Use the command #public as the first line of the email body for public comments or #note to make the comment private.
See the following article for other commands and examples:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203691006-Updating-ticket-properties-from-your-inbox
Can I make all the email replies send by CC (Agent and non-agent) Internal Notes?
We sometimes add an employe not linked to our zendesk instance in CC to ask them a question ineternaly, but when they reply it is always as a public note, which means that the customer can read that answer befor it is edited by our Agents. That is wy I want to set All CC replies as internal notes to make sure no proprietery info gets out by accident.
Is this possible? And if yes, how?
I see that you're on the Plus plan, so you'd need to switch over Professional for this, but the easiest way to do this would be to get the Light Agents add-on, and add your non-agent employees to that role in your Zendesk. All Light Agent comments are internal automatically.
Disclaimer: I'd recommend going over the differences between Plus and Professional with your account manager or a support advocate before switching, to make sure you know exactly what that change is going to mean.
If you don't want to go that route, I'd recommend putting together a workflow using our Linked Ticket app, or the Project app. Each of these apps allow you to create a brand new ticket that's linked to the original in a parent/child type relationship, but your end user can't see any of the conversation in the child ticket.
Hi Jessie,
Thanks for the suggestion, we are using the project app, but it is not mandatory and creates a big extra load on tickets and mails... and they can still accidentally add someone in CC in the main ticket and have the internal answer mailed to the customer.
Light agents is what we are going to use, but that's a workaround that’s also not fool proof. It means I need to add all our internal users as light agent (a lot of people) and have their normal flow as customer changed to that of an agent... not an Ideal situation... Hence my question to be able to have all CC comments as internal...
PS: Why is a CC different from another requester or user?
Would enabling public by default (in web) also apply to macros when an agent creates a ticket? We have a macro that is supposed to set the comment to private, but when you create a new ticket, the macro applies as public and there is no option to change it to public.
Hey Jeremy!
The first comment when a ticket is created is always public; as of now there's no way to change that. It's not actually related to the public by default setting.
If you need to apply a private macro right off the bat, your best bet would be to tweak your workflow so that the macro is applied after the ticket has been created and submitted (instead of at the same time).
Can I make specific agents not be allowed to make public comments or replies to the customer within the ticket?
Hey Allison!
If you're on the Professional plan or higher, you can purchase the Light Agents add-on. Light Agents are agent roles that are limited in what they're able to do in your Zendesk, and that includes only being able to post private comments on tickets.
If you're on the Enterprise plan or higher, you already have custom roles available. This means that you can edit existing roles or create new roles to have the exact permissions you want.
Hey everyone!
We're really excited to announce that, after a huge effort from our developers and Product team, we're finally live with this feature! You can enable it in your account by clicking the Gear icon, and going to Settings > Tickets > Comments.
Hi,
Would it be possible to have different settings for ZD desktop and for the ZD app. On desktop we prefer by default public comments for our support team. We have another team working remote using the mobile app and they would benefit having the comments as private by default.
thank you!
Hi Ellen -
The desktop and mobile versions both operate via the API, so those can't really be set differently.
Any idea why this setting has no effect on our Zendesk?
Hey Andy! Welcome to the Community, and apologies for the delayed response!
Can you go into more detail about the problem you're experiencing here? We're going to need more information to identify the issue.
Never mind. Looks like the page was cached and by the next day the setting started to work.
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