Once a ticket has been created and is assigned to an agent, it's the agent's job to resolve the support request. To do that, you may need to gather more information from the requester. To communicate with the requester, you add public comments to the ticket. Public comments can be read by anyone who has access to the ticket.
This article includes the following sections:
Related articles:
Commenting basics
- Public comments can be read by anyone who has access to the ticket, including anyone copied on the ticket. When you add a public comment, the requester is notified via an email message (unless the notification trigger is disabled). If the requester responds back to the email notification or comments in the ticket, their response is added as a public comment to the ticket. All of your communication is captured in the ticket.
- Private comments, also known as internal notes, are only visible to agents, not to the ticket requester or any other end-users who might be copied on the ticket. A ticket with only private comments is considered a private ticket. Public comments can be made internal-only, if needed (see Changing a ticket comment from public to private).
Adding a public or private comment to a ticket
You can add public or private (internal) comment to a ticket.
To add a comment to a ticket
- Select a ticket.
- To enter a public comment, click Public reply, or to enter a private comment, click Internal note.
- Enter your comment.
- Click Submit to update the ticket.
You cannot delete a comment after it is added to the ticket.
It's also possible to add a note to more than one ticket at a time by bulk updating tickets. See Managing tickets in bulk.
An additional way to manage ticket responses is through the use of macros. With macros, you can streamline your workflow by applying simple, standard responses to requests. Macros can be created from scratch, or they can be based on existing ticket properties. See Using macros to update tickets for more information.
Adding formatting and images to comments
If your account has rich text formatting enabled for ticket comments, you can add links, inline images, and formatting such as italics, bolding, or bulleted lists. An administrator must enable this setting. For details, see Enabling formatting options for agents.
When rich text formatting is enabled, formatting options are available at the bottom of the comment field.
Adding formatting to ticket comments
You can use the rich text formatting toolbar to apply standard formatting to a ticket comment. Rich text formatting must be enabled (see Enabling formatting options for agents).
To add formatting to your comment
- Click the T at the bottom of the comment field to open the formatting toolbar.
- Select the formatting you want to apply to the text.
Toolbar button Formatting Keyboard shortcuts Increase/decrease heading style Increase: Ctrl + +
⌘ + + (Mac)Decrease: Ctrl + -
⌘ + - (Mac)
Bold Ctrl + B
⌘ + B (Mac)Italicize Ctrl + I
⌘ + I (Mac)Bulleted list Ctrl Shift + 8
⌘ + Shift + 8(Mac)Numbered list Ctrl + Shift + 7
⌘ + Shift + 7 (Mac)Decrease paragraph indentation Ctrl + [
⌘ + [ (Mac)Increase paragraph indentation Ctrl + ]
⌘ + ] (Mac)Block quote Ctrl + Shift + 9
⌘ + Shift + 9 (Mac)Code block Ctrl + Shift + 6
⌘ + Shift + 6 (Mac)Code span Ctrl + Shift + 5
⌘ + Shift + 5 (Mac)Hyperlink Ctrl + K
⌘ + K (Mac)Horizontal line Ctrl + Shift + L
⌘ + Shift + L (Mac)
Adding inline images to a ticket comments
You can add inline images to a ticket comment. Rich text formatting must be enabled (see Enabling formatting options for agents).
To add inline images
- Drag and drop an image from your computer into the comment window, or paste a copied image into the window by right-clicking and selecting Paste or by pressing Ctrl or ⌘ + V.
Adding tables to ticket comments
Although you cannot add tables to your comments using the rich text editor options, you can incorporate tables in two ways:
- Installing and using the Tables app.
- Copying and pasting a table from another editor, such as Excel or Google Sheets.
Note: Pasting tables offers limited functionality. Agents cannot add more columns or rows and they cannot start a table from scratch. These features may be considered for the future.
53 Comments
Is there a way to change the color of the fonts? When we add text to public comments through macro's, we often get different font colors in the comments, especially when a macro draws information from a placeholder, such as a ticket number or ticket description, this information is in a different font color than the surrounding text. How can this be resolved?
Hi Ariel!
Can you be more specific about where you're seeing different colored fonts? Is this in emails or someplace else? Could you send some screenshots?
The section
Adding attachments to ticket comments
doesn't mention the symbol
It looks like
is gone when you enable rich text formatting.
Thanks for the heads up, Kyle! I'll pass that along to our Docs team.
Control + U also appears to underline but that is not documented.
Hi
Can we still use Markdown in macro's when we anabled this future?
Thomas
Is there a way to automatically convert the last public comment made by engineer to Private based on a tag ?
Hi Ravi!
It may be possible to do this via triggers. Does it have to be just the last comment, or should it be all comments by an engineer?
Can you guys make a separate article aimed at teach agents the nuts and bolts of how to do different stuff in the new editor? Like working with links, attachments, images etc.
It would be helpful to be able to reference this to my agents that are new to the editor. This post contains some information but I think a lot of other stuff we mention here like @mentions, public>private, adding a comment etc distracts for agents that just wants to know how to insert a link while typing, as an example.
Hey Joel!
I'll pass this along to our docs team and see what they can do. :)
Would it possible to make a link of a picture with a placeholder as the hyperlink destination with rich text enabled. When i press a picture and the "hyperlink" button, i dont get anything, only a small text in the buttom that says link(länk in swedish)
We would like to make the "like" function look and feel a bit different using this.
Hi Simon!
I did some testing and was able to turn an image in a ticket comment into a link by highlighting the image, and then clicking the link icon and adding the desired URL.
However, I don't think this will work with a placeholder.
What webbrowser are you using? Then i can have another go at it
When content are being pasted in to the text field when text is selected in the field, it's not being replaced.
When pasting text a "space" (" ") is being added in the end of the text. That's a bit bad if your pasting passwords and the user double clicks them and pastes them and they don't work.
Pasting into notepad or the field without Rich text enabled is without the extra "space" in the end.
Anyone else having the same issues?
Hello,
I checked recent ports about adding link to an image. And looks like we also have the same problem. Previously we attached an image and then used [...](...) structure to give a link to it. But now images are attached as embedded object and browser doesn't give a link to it, but a base64 string that can not be used as a link.
Using drag and drop is not convenient, because agent have to keep one more window open. Moreover, some images are pretty huge and placing it inline doesn't look good.
I also noticed that when we paste image to rich edit, it actually has a link that can be used, but again, this is now what we need.
Is it possible to make attached images have a valid link, so we could use it for a text link?
Thank you in advance!
Hey Simon!
I'm using Chrome 52.0.2743.116.
Hi Simon,
Are you talking about the text field when you're replying to a ticket in your Zendesk? Because that should replace any highlighted text when pasting new text. Can you walk me through your process step-by-step or a screenshot or video of what you're seeing?
@Nickolay - It is possible to link to an attached image inline using rich text but it's a little cumbersome.
I know this isn't ideal but it can be done if needed. If you'd like to see a simpler method I'd definitely post a topic to our Product Feedback forum.
If you have any trouble with this method feel free to open up a ticket with us.
Cheers,
Hello Brian,
Thank you for your reply. Yes, this is a bit tricky solution. Is it possible to have for example a picture name with link to it, like it was before?
Thank you in advance.
@Nickolay - At the moment there isn't any other way to get the link for an image attached to the same comment. One alternative you might want to consider is adding your image attachments in a separate private comment. Once a comment has been saved the link to the file is visible. Here's an example:
You can use the link on the file name to add links in subsequent comments.
I'm sure you're not the only one looking for a simper way to link an attached image inline. I'd definitely add a topic to product feedback. I'm sure a feature request would get a lot of votes.
Cheers!
This feature is really great, but there is one really annoying "feature": if you hit tab button, it starts indenting your text right, instead of moving to next element in window. It would not be problem, but it cancels ctrl+tab key combination, what I use for switching between tabs, and works still as indenting, so I have to undo last change and grab mouse and click outside editor area, to get my key combinations working again. Please use any other key combination for indenting, because it drives me crazy in long term :)
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Inline images
…
Any thoughts about removing this restriction?
I posted a suggestion today about allowing us to have secure attachments, but keep in-line images:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000605587-Enable-higher-security-for-attachments-but-still-allow-inline-Images
Is it possible to edit an already existing private comment added by myself? (e.g., add/remove attachments or edit wording)
Thanks!
Matej, no, it's not possible to edit private comments in the context you describe.
You can 'redact' information, meaning you can blank out/destroy text and attachment, using an app like Ticket Redaction app, but you can't use that to edit your comment, just redact portions of it, or attachments.
For public comments, you can usually make them private and make another comment instead, but for private comments, the options are more limited.
Is there a way to either mark a comment in a ticket as a "recommendation" other than in the text of the reply typing out "Recommendation"?
For instance, customer has "settingA" set to 100 but the best practice is to have it set to 150. The support person's comment would be marked as a "recommendation" which can be filtered into a ticket summary or be a search result?
Is there an App in the Marketplace that would add this functionality?
Are there any plans to support end-user formatting in ticket comments? I know you can access this via the 'View original email' option, but it'd be neat if we could just see the formatting in the comment.
Thanks.
Hey Peter!
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by marking the comment...are you looking for some kind of flag or something?
Yes - well, I need to be able to extract comments from tickets that would be defined by our organization as a "recommendation or follow-up" so I can create a follow-up plan.
Story: As a ZenDesk user, I would like to find/see comments within ticket(s) that provide a recommendation to our customers via a search on tickets. I'd also like to extract (export) those comments for a report to follow-up with the customer.
Currently there's no way to delineate this in the ticket. I have to reading through all the comments and extract it manually. If that comment could be marked in some way that lends itself to a search result, that would be great for me as the Customer Success Manager. I could generate a report on recommendations and follow up with my customer.
Does that help?
Hey Peter!
Thanks for clarifying that for me! As you observed, this isn't something that is currently possible but it's a really interesting idea. I'd definitely encourage you to head over to our Product Feedback forum to share this feedback (along with the story you shared here) to make sure our Product Managers see it.
Good morning!
Sorry, I've been having problems with placeholder references to ticket.
I created a trigger to send an e-mail when there is an update on a ticket, following a specific format.
When I reference a private note it does not work:
{{ticket.latest_comment_formatted}}
This one makes the same as {{ticket.latest_comment}}
Private Notes never appear. Is it possible to fix this issue?
Thanks,
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