The redaction suggestions feature automatically highlights certain types of personally identifiable information (PII) within a ticket for agents with appropriate permissions. Agents can then click the highlighted PII and quickly redact it. This helps keep confidential information out of Zendesk.
This feature is similar to the ticket redaction feature. However, redaction suggestions proactively identify PII rather than rely on the agent to identify PII that needs to be redacted.
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About redaction suggestions
The redaction suggestions feature automatically identifies the following types of PII in ticket comments:
- Name
- Email address
- Address
- Credit or debit card number (including last four digits only)
- Password
Identified PII is highlighted in orange. Admins and agents with permission can redact this highlighted information. On plans with custom roles, agents need permission to redact tickets. On plans without custom roles, agents need permission to delete tickets.
Redaction suggestions work on:
- Public comments
- Internal notes
- Content in archived or closed tickets for email, API, and webform channels
- Social messaging channels enabled through Sunshine Conversations
- Ended chat conversations from the Agent Workspace
If you redact a Zendesk message or a message created via the Sunshine Conversations SDK, the Support ticket interface shows the redacted areas of the messaging conversation within the context of the unredacted content. From the customer side, the entire message is deleted.
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 redacted content (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.
Redaction suggestion limitations
Redaction suggestions don’t work on:
- Messages in an active messaging conversation or chat
- Messages stored in the Answer Bot service
- Channel framework-enabled tickets
- Ticket comments created from Mobile SDK, including those submitted through Zendesk's native support apps
- Tickets created from Slack Business Connect
- Slack side conversations
- Content in archived or closed tickets for messaging and live chat channels
Additional limitations include:
- You must have a chat role to redact ticket content in chat conversations.
- When you redact a ticket comment sent from an email channel, Zendesk does not redact the content of the original email in the email provider's channel (such as Gmail or Yahoo). Only the text hosted in Zendesk is redacted.
- When redacting a ticket, the underlying conversation is not edited on the social messaging platform and third-party integrations. 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, in Facebook Messenger or a third-party Chat bot).
- Redaction of messages exchanged between Answer Bot and end users is not supported.
- If triggers are configured before redaction, 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.
- Bulk redaction is supported on a comment level, but not on the ticket level.
Turning redaction suggestions on or off
Admins can turn redaction suggestions on or off in Admin Center. By default, this feature is turned on.
To turn redaction suggestions on or off
- In Admin Center, click Account in the sidebar, then select Security > More settings.
- On the Zendesk Support tab, select or deselect Suggest personally identifiable information (PII) for redaction, depending on whether you want redaction suggestions to be turned on or off.
- Click Save.
Redacting identified PII
Admins and agents with permission can take action on redaction suggestions. You can delete a single piece of identified PII or all PII within a single ticket comment at the same time.
To redact a single piece of identified PII
- Within a ticket, click a redaction suggestion (text highlighted in orange). The menu that appears tells you what type of PII it is (for example, card number).
- Click Redact to redact the highlighted item immediately, or click Open redaction editor to manually select and redact information (including additional content) from the comment. For more information on working with the redaction editor, see Redacting ticket content.
The piece of redacted content is obscured with a black bar.
To redact all identified PII within a single ticket comment
- Find the ticket comment that you want to redact all PII from.
- Click the options menu () on the right side of the ticket.
- Select Redact highlighted text.
All identified PII in the ticket comment is obscured with a black bar.