| Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends |
| July 31, 2023 | July 31, 2023 | August 29, 2023 |
Zendesk is excited to announce a new experience for agents who request tickets that are assigned to private groups.
What's changed?
On Enterprise plans, agents (including light agents) submitting tickets that are assigned to private groups can no longer see private comments and agent-only fields in the ticket. The agent requester won't be able to retrieve the ticket anywhere in the Zendesk Agent Workspace, including views and searches. Instead, they'll access these tickets as an end user, either through email or the help center. To access the ticket via the help center, your Zendesk instance must have Guide enabled with the permission to Enable agents to manage requests from Help Center.
This change in access only applies when the agent is the requester. If the agent requests the ticket on behalf of someone else and the agent's name isn't specified in the Requester field, they will retain typical agent access to the ticket.
Previously, even if the agent was the requester, they preserved agent-like access to the ticket and could see private comments, agent-only fields, and access the ticket within the Agent Workspace.
Why is Zendesk making this change?
By restricting access to private comments and agent-only fields when an agent requests a ticket, internal departments can now collaborate privately within tickets without alerting the requester with all of the details discussed. This ensures more secure conversations between and within departments without requiring the additional overhead of managing more tickets.
What do I need to do?
This change is being rolled out to all Enterprise and Enterprise Plus accounts automatically.
If you have any users in legacy agent roles, they must be assigned to a non-legacy agent role for this new experience to work. Agents in legacy roles will still be able to view public and private comments in tickets they request, even when the ticket is assigned to a private group they aren't a member of.
Request for feedback
Zendesk is seeking feedback on this functionality and how we can improve it to better meet your functional needs. Please provide your feedback in the Community or schedule a user interview for a more in-depth discussion of your feedback.
16 Comments
Will this mean that a light agent can no longer see tickets? As they only can add internal notes?
I too am curious as to what this means for light agents?
Is there a way to customize or circumvent this change? It sounds like legacy roles might allow us to circumvent this change; how do we know what is considered a legacy role?
Any update? Also, I noticed that recently when Zendesk announce a change the rollout is less than a month.
Not all of your customers have a dedicated person just for Zendesk and for the weird changes Zendesk recently makes.
First, the feature to not see any more "original emails" and now this.
I too am curious the impact on light agents??
Alina Wright
This is a nice improvement, which make only sense - at least in our scenario - if Light Agents can see their own comments in the Helpcenter - see our community post:
Light Agents comments to their own tickets via Help Center should be visible in Help Center
Hey everyone,
Light agents will be able to use this feature as well as all other agents. For Light Agents, the flow will be:
If you need to be removed from this roll out, please schedule a user interview with me so I can better understand your needs for future planning AND I will be able to opt you out.
Afton Rupert
Legacy agents are agents who were not assigned a role upon upgrade. You DON'T want to have those types of agents. If you need to opt out of this feature, please schedule a user interview with me so I can better understand your needs.
Schedule a user interview for a more in-depth discussion of your feedback.
I'm pretty sure we are experiencing a bug due to this roll out in the Agent Workspace. My Team members are intermittently getting a pop-up when assigning tickets to another group (which is not marked Private) that they are not part of that group so they won't be seeing messages. My team members are also set up with Roles to be allowed to see all tickets assigned, including to Private groups (which we opt to not set up any of our groups as private). I've already logged a ticket with Zendesk Support but wanted to make others aware in case they notice a similar pop-up
Hello Alina Wright - we currently use side conversation ticket to escalate to internal groups.
Question does this affect side conversation given that one of our internal group is private?
Scenario:
1. Customer facing agent to escalate ticket via side conversation which technically they are the requester of that ticket.
2. New ticket will be created via side conversation and gets assigned to Internal Group (Private).
Question:
1. Will the agent (requester) of the side conversation have a problem with the visibility of the child ticket in the event that internal group (private) respond to the ticket already?
Thank you!
We're experiencing the same issue as Jennifer Gillespie above. We don't use private groups, but are getting these intermittent (private group) errors when attempting to access requested tickets. We are also seeing that all of our agents are unable to view any requested tickets unless the tickets have been assigned directly to their ticket group. This has resulted in the majority of our staff unable to easily view and access most of their requested tickets (that have been assigned to other groups throughout the company). We submitted a ticket to support on August 15 and still don't have a resolution. On August 17th we received a response of "This behavior has been reported by multiple customers and I've escalated this ticket to our dev team." This is having a significant negative impact on our business processes, and it very frustrating for our agents.
It is too bad this also impacts side conversation tickets to private groups; now those too have to accessed from the help center which for the agent does not always make sense. I could see if it was their 'personal' ticket, but since side conversations are also treated as personal tickets this really undermines the experience in support.
Hi all, thank you for your feedback.
If you'd like to me removed from this rollout, please email me directly with your domain name. We are working on enhancements to enable you all to turn this feature on for private groups, private and public, or no groups at all.
The issue with the modal should be fixed, please let me know if you're still experiencing issues.
Hi Zendesk team
I have a issue because my light agents and custom role agents can't view their requests into the private groups.
The function of my custom role agents and light agents is help with the customer issues into the main brand but if they send a request to the secundaries brand (private groups) they can't review the coments about these, for my company it is a serious trouble because the light agents are end-user of the secundary brands and need to view their tickets.
At the moment I created a trigger to add CC to the requester but it is a workaround, I hope you have a other solution for this situation.
Thanks and regards!!
Hello Alina Wright - question for you please given that this is affecting Side Conversation tickets which was raised by an agents to our internal group (private).
They can no longer have the access to view the ticket and getting error message "Access Denied". Hope this changes does not affect the side conversation tickets as it's a major impact on how we do our internal escalations. As a workaround, what we did is to change the permission to them can access all tickets including private groups in which defeats the purpose of making private group.
If we can exclude side conversation tickets on this one without compromising the permission of agents of what tickets they can access. Thank you!
Jahn Bronilla we reported the same issue and it was confirmed it was intended functionality that Side Conversations to Private groups can no longer be updated - even by the requester that opened it.
They are talking with the team as the only options are:
1. To grant them all ticket access (defeats purpose)
2. Grant them access to the group (defeats purpose)
3. Navigate to HELP CENTRE to reply to SC (a change of current process)
4. Open a new SC with the Private group every time they need to reply
For a feature that changes so much of core functionality, this sure wasn't outlined as being a major change in the release notes
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