Redacting ticket content in the Zendesk Agent Workspace

Customers sometimes enter sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, passwords, attachments. or other sensitive information in tickets when they shouldn't. In addition to being visible to anybody with access to the ticket, the sensitive information automatically gets stored in a database with the rest of the ticket.

If you're using the Zendesk Agent Workspace, you can redact, or remove, sensitive information found in ticket comments and attachments so that your account stays secure and compliant. This helps keep confidential information out of Zendesk. Agents must have permission to delete tickets to redact content.

This article contains the following sections:

• About ticket redaction in the Zendesk Agent Workspace
• Redacting ticket content

About ticket redaction in the Zendesk Agent Workspace

Ticket redaction in the Agent Workspace works on:

• Email
• Ended chat conversations from the Agent Workspace
• Public comments
• Internal notes
• Images (attached and inline)
• Attachments
• Content in archived or closed tickets for email, API, and webform channels

Ticket redaction in the Agent Workspace does not work on:

• Social messaging channels enabled through Sunshine Conversations
• Native messaging
• Channel Framework-enabled tickets
• Tickets created from Mobile SDK

Ticket redaction does not currently support redaction of entire tickets. Also, Zendesk recommends redacting content before merging tickets. If you redact content in the original ticket after it has been merged with another ticket, the redacted content will be removed from the original ticket, but not from the merged ticket.

Redaction events are noted in a ticket’s event log so customers can be aware data has been deleted. In addition, when you redact ticket content, a redacted_content tag is automatically added to the ticket. When you redact ticket content, this causes an update to be made on the ticket using the same channel associated with the content that was redacted. For example, redacting a WhatsApp comment from a ticket. This behavior can cause triggers to fire if your trigger conditions are set to look for updates on a specific channel.

Ticket redaction in the Zendesk Agent Workspace provides additional features that the Zendesk Ticket Redaction app doesn’t support. Zendesk recommends uninstalling this app if you’re using native ticket redaction in the agent workspace.

Limitations for ticket redaction

Ticket redaction includes the following limitations:

• As of March 23, 2022, ticket redaction in the Agent Workspace was suspended on native messaging and social messaging tickets. Zendesk is working to relaunch this support in a future update.
• When redacting a ticket, the underlying ticket is not edited on the messaging platform. It is redacted only within Zendesk-controlled systems. This also means that an end user, depending on how they communicate with your agent, may still see unredacted content themselves when accessing a message through different channels. For example, when accessing it first through the web widget, and later through the Sunshine Conversations widget.
• If triggers are configured prior to redaction taking place, redacted content may persist in the channels launched by these triggers. For example, email conversations.
• Ticket redaction for the Chat history may not be instantaneous and may be delayed by up to 10 minutes due to database replication.

Redacting ticket content

Important: Ticket redaction cannot be reversed. Use caution when marking content for redaction. Also, rich text formatting in a message may be lost when redacting.

To redact ticket content

1. Open a ticket and scroll to the conversation thread that contains the content you want to redact.

   You can only redact content in one thread at a time.

2. Hover your mouse over the thread to display the options menu icon ().
3. Click the options menu icon () and choose Redact.

   

   A redaction pane appears.

4. Select the content you want to redact, then click Mark for redaction.

   The content you want to redact is highlighted.

   

5. Continue to select content to redact and Mark it for redaction.

   You can include multiple text strings, attachments, and images as part of the same redaction.

   

   If you mark something for redaction by mistake, click the content and select Unmark for redaction.

   

6. When you’ve finished selecting the content you want to redact, click Redact.

   

   The ticket is updated with the redacted content. Ticket redaction is not reversible.

   

   When you redact ticket content, a redacted_content tag is automatically added to the ticket. You can search for this tag to get a list of redacted tickets.