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Communicating with users about internal comments vs. public comments from email replies



Posted Nov 06, 2018

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360000894848-How-can-an-end-user-add-an-internal-note-to-a-ticket-

 

Please review the thread above.  We need to be able to notify users who submit replies to tickets which end up in internal comments vs. public comments based on the Zendesk security change earlier this year.  This is causing issues with our customers.

 

2 problems: customers do not know their reply was received by Qubole and it does not trip any SLA clock start for next reply SLA's.  The main issue is when the customer adds a cc: to the ticket which is a distribution list, but the person replying is not registered as the requester or cc: in the ticket to their direct email address.

 

We should be able to do one or more of the following:

1. Auto-reply to user that their reply was registered in zendesk as an internal comment since their email address was not registered on as the requester or cc: member of the ticket list

2. Allow agent to be able to change the comment from an internal comment to public comment, thereby allowing other users to see the public comment and the time it was registered.  It should be noted that any SLA's for this could not be "backported to the timestamp of the comment"

3. Allow agent to "hot-add" the person replying to the cc: list so future updates will be public comments


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Adding my post from the other thread as well:

While internal notes from alternate email addresses seems like a step in the right direction for security, we have some fairly big problems with these automatic internal notes.  Many of our customers send us tickets from different email addresses than the one on their account in our system.  Too many emails are getting flagged and made internal notes.  Adding the second email to the CC is not a great solution because it's a pain for us and slows us down having to look up the user's other address, if we even have it.  If we don't, then any part of the thread coming from that address will be lost to the user.  Also, if we do add the second as a CC, the user will now get two emails from us for every response going forward.

Is there any way to turn this feature off or edit any settings around its behavior?  If the system is going to auto-flag any replies coming from the user on a different email address, we need the ability to convert that internal note to a public comment and to flag that email address as valid so that any further replies form the customer are no longer set to internal.

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Touching up this thread to see if the Zendesk product team has any thoughts on this dilemma.

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Not including an internal comment update from a customer seems to be a large gap in the SLA structure to break. Is there any update here or any feedback from a product manager we can receive? Thanks in advance.

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Would be nice to have a quick button we can click on the private comment to automatically add them as a CC / approve the comment.

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

@Greg & @Alexandra - no updates from the product team. 

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+1 to fixing this or making it editable! This is a painful issue when tied to SLAs. 

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+1 to this from me as well!  Having the option to change an internal note to public for these situations would be very helpful.

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+ 1 from our team as well! Is there an update on ETA for resolution? 

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We are having many issues with this as well. Has anyone else experienced where the customer IS CC'd, but their comments still sometimes come through internal? I have seen this happen many times and there is no flag on their comment as to why it is internal either. I haven't seen much benefit to this feature. Having a way to switch their comments to public would be SUPER helpful. 

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yes, we are seeing this as well.  since others on the cc: are not seeing their teammates' cc, then we respond to the internal comment without the others having any perspective, it leads to customer confusion.  would really like to get this worked out in the product :-)

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The other problem with this is that the ticket redaction app (or even the API for that matter) won't remove text from these comments so it's a GDPR concern.

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Zendesk can we please get some comments on this, as it's more and more becoming a bigger problem?

 

The current situation is that any end user who replies to our tickets without specifically being added in CC prior to their reply - forces current logic to mark the ticket as an internal. If I reply to such a ticket, the end user does not see their previous comment - only my replies.

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I did some testing today and I think I found why sometimes CC'd addresses post as internal replies and sometimes they post as public replies. 

 

Conditions: Two registered Zendesk end-user accounts. 

Created a ticket using Account #1, added Account #2 as a CC address to the ticket. 

 

Account #2 tested sending three replies into the ticket via email response, ie replying directly to the email they received when the ticket was opened. All three of these responses posted to the ticket as internal notes. 

Account #2 then signed into the Zendesk user interface, and sent three replies to the ticket accessible under "Requests I'm CC'd on". All three of these responses posted to the ticket as public replies. 

Account #1 tested multiple replies both via email and from the tickets UI, all of which posted as public replies as expected. 

 

It appears any CC addresses replying to a ticket via email specifically will post as an internal comment, regardless of if it's a registered account or if it's actually added as a CC address. 

This is the only consistency I found, hopefully explains why these appear to be intermittent for some of y'all. Looking forward to a resolution soon. 

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It would be very appreciated of the users to change the color for comments of requester which was not part of the conversation. The color is the same like internal notice and this makes agents confusing all the time! They have to click on the small bang on the comment field. This is something that doesn't work when you have to handle up to 4k tickets with 100 agents. 

I already placed this request to our Key Account Manager and to the CX Manager. 

We're located in Germany. 

 

Hopefully the ZD team will find a solution and fix this issue within the next few month.

 

Thank you for your support :)

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Re-adding my request in this thread that we can see some kind of movement in the Zendesk product to address.  At the onset, the need for the security feature was entirely valid in the product, but the customer admins need a method to be able to provide visibility or action for our agents or we risk giving our customers a bad support experience.  It would be great to see some perspective from the Zendesk Community Manager or Product Manager on this topic - with some hope for enhanced functionality for the Zendesk customers.

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Andrew Soderberg

Community Moderator

+1 for us. Need color coding to show comment that is not part of the conversation.

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An option to allow non-CCed people publicly comment on tickets is crucial for us.

Our use case is support internal to our company only, and very frequently a whole distribution list will get CCed on a ticket. When a member of that list replies using their own email, only the agents can see that response and other people on the ticket miss out on a relevant update/comment.

I understand the security concerns of anyone being able to publicly reply to a ticket, but a limitation on domain name would serve to mitigate that. Eg, a global setting which says anyone from @xyz.com can comment on a ticket even if they're not CCed directly.

 

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+1 from my team as well. Seeing as how this has been going on for 2 years it seems like we need to get this brought to someone's attention. Do we have anyone from Zendesk who can offer an escalation path?

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+1. This is creating a frustrating experience for our customers.

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+1 This mostly affects us with SLA since we just started using this function. It would be nice to finally see some feedback on this long standing issue.

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+1 here, this quite heavily affects our use case.

Here is one example:

  1. Travel agency initiated a message to us from a system email address.
  2. Our agent responds and the email is sent to a common mailbox at the travel agency.
  3. An agent at the other end picks up the email and replies to it via his named email address

This leads to incomplete messages in our communication with the agency, we sometimes need to double back to previously received responses from agencies and this makes it harder to reffer to those messages.

Regarding security, to be perfectly frank I think this is over thinking it, if someone out there has recieved the ticket, forwarded or how ever that person should be able to reply to that and we should have the ability to have that reply as part of the conversation. Surely highlightin that this message isn't from the original requestor is a good thing, but excluding it all together without the ability to include it manually is kind of a authoritarianism or perhaps technical inability to handle this.

Hope this can be fixed in the near future.

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+1. Having a different background colour to identify comments from external users / 3rd party that are not part of the original communication would be really useful. Especially as it's not clear that these comments can't be seen by commenter afterwards. 

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Scott Allison

Zendesk Product Manager

Thank you everyone for your feedback, it's very much appreciated.

I do want to highlight a couple of things, before asking if there are still concerns here. 

  1. If your account was created prior to May 2019, you may need to migrate to our new CCs and Followers experience.
  2. There is a setting "Make email comments from CCed end users public (not recommended)".

More information about configuration of settings and permissions for CCs and followers is documented here

Perhaps you're already aware and still have a concern to raise. If that's the case, please comment again here so we can review. 

I also wanted to offer a specific update around SLAs. This year we'll be making it possible to configure how SLA targets are activated and fulfilled. One of the use cases we want to solve for is when a CC'd person replies to the ticket and where you would like that to kick off Next Reply Time. I'll provide a further update as this work gets closer but I did want to acknowledge that this is something we want to solve for.

Thanks again for your feedback.

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Scott Allison

Zendesk Product Manager

I wanted to provide you all with an update here, and point you to a release that we started rolling out today. It allows you to ensure next reply time SLA is started when any end-user replies on a ticket, not just the requester, even if it that reply is added as an internal note. 

 

We're introducing advanced settings to three of the SLA metric types, first reply time, next reply time and periodic update. These new settings are optional, and give you the ability to change the logic for when an SLA metric is activated or fulfilled, on an individual policy basis. Read more in the announcement here:

 

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/7411959450778-Announcing-advanced-SLA-configuration-settings

 

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