Provide a way to add deep or permanent links to specific comments in a Ticket
At our company we're really missing the functionality to directly link to a specific comment in a ticket.
We use solely Zendesk for communication with our customers. While working on complex issues a ticket can easily see 20-30 replies. When pulling in other people throughout our company using GitHub issues we link to the Zendesk ticket for reference, but we can't link directly to the relevant comment. This becomes a time-wasting nuisance for people who have to read through the entire ticket until they reach the part that's relevant for them.
It would be great if Zendesk could create linkable elements within a Ticket that allows people to jump to it directly.
A few examples that illustrate directly linkable responses/comments/post from around the internet:
* http://stackoverflow.com/a/27860061/183622
* https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/yGGEeqJvG0M/9s6HEnnDAQAJ
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Totally agree with this. I'm amazed that this also is something that is missing from such a flexible tool like Zendesk, where it seems to be so common in other service management tools. Surely each ticket is referenced somewhere in the code, with a unique identifier that can be used to then create a hyperlink? I know I'm probably oversimplifying it, however I do agree that when tickets have many comments, its easier to refer the ticket requester, a CC, or another agent to a specific comment within that ticket (and yes, this use case for us is very common).
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Not being able to link to a specific comment is a real pain.
For example, when I escalate to engineering, I have to say something like, "for the best summary of this issue, look for the comment that I left at [timestamp]". And do you know how I have to get that timestamp? I have to dig into the HTML of the page to grab the timestamp because the copy on the page is in relative time (e.g. "9 minutes ago"), which isn't helpful when trying to make an absolute reference.
Relative links that go to specific comments would fix this.
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@Ben thank you for adding this very important use case...
"for the best summary of this issue, look for the comment that I left at [timestamp]"
This is definitely a use case that we have heard a lot before (something that I am personally struggling with at Zendesk). Question: what % of those links would be created for sending someone to a ticket summary?
I am asking because maybe better way to solve this issue is by adding a "ticket summary" functionality so that nobody have to find which comment is the "summary" or figure out if the "summary" comment has changed.
Also, I suspect here that you might write that both a ticket summary and comment links are necessary (I would personally agree with that). If so, would you please specify which one would be most urgent for you between the two? Also, would you please add other specific reasons for linking (beside referring to a ticket summary)
@Michael and Ashish... what are your thoughts about the above?
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@Pierre I work with @Michael, thanks for following up. Direct links to comments are more important. Here are a couple of use cases apart from linking to summaries:
* A customer provides specific information that needs to be shared.
* We want to perform a post-mortem on a long ticket, linking to specific events in the timeline. Timelines are especially difficult because all the events are displayed in client time, so they're different for users in different timezones.
* Give agents the ability to link to previous responses. For example in an internal comment it's useful to say "we [previously told Jim we'd do X](link to comment), we still need to do that" or a public comment "I'm following up on [Jane's previous reply]".
I'm sure that everyone requesting this could think of a few more.
We'd also benefit from a sticky, updatable summary feature though, so both would be great. In fact, being able to link to specific comments in a summary would be useful.
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Thanks for that additional detail Michael!
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@Pierre I would like to see permalinks to specific comments prioritised first. Having a ticket summary would also be useful however for us its quite common that tickets get long and my team have to then ask people to refer back to a comment on <date and time> which in itself can be difficult to find given that:
1. Updates over the recent few days start with a "today / yesterday / Monday" instead of the actual date - you have to hover over the timestamp to reveal the the actual date. This is made more difficult for high priority issues where we're dealing with service providers and copying/pasting in their emails as private notes, and such priority issues often have multiple updates in a day so over the course of 3 days there could be up to 30 updates. Couple this scenario with my team dealing with multiple high priority tickets and updates, they end up spending more time than necessary to first find the update, and then whoever they need to communicate the comment reference to will also spend just as much time trying to find that update during a stressful situation - as you can imagine this is not fun.
2. The text is light gray in color so not always easy to spot when your trawling through endless texts.
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In case it helps, I have written a user script that generates permalinks that can be shared with others who also have the user script installed:
https://openuserjs.org/scripts/holatuwol/ZenDesk_Comment_Permalinks
In many ways, you can think of it as a working prototype of the functionality being requested here.
If you have the freedom to install user scripts at your company (information security teams are often rightfully wary of browser plugins, so make sure you run the idea by them before you install any user scripts or user script managers), feel free to give it a spin.
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I would also like this feature. I have long ticket threads, and sometimes I want to send a permalink to a colleague in G-chat or Jira so they can reference a specific comment.
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I also have very long ticket threads, and a wealth of valuable information and context contained within those threads that is difficult or impossible to reference externally (in GitHub issues, project trackers, root cause analysis reports, etc).
I want to be able to point people to specific ticket comments easily. In most cases the links would be going to people in other parts of my organization, who are not every day users of zendesk. Navigating a weeks or months long thread to get to a few relevant comments is quite painful without deep linking.
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+1 from me. Direct links are more important to me than an issue summary.
- An issue summary would just let me pull out 1 important piece of information, and I'd have to write that manually. A ticket may have multiple important comments, each of which may be relevant to different audiences that I want to deep link separately.
- Deeplinks help preserve the context of when/where/how a piece of information was shared. I don't want to write out (or copy-paste) an issue summary to explain that context - I just want to send someone directly to the relevant piece of contextualised information.
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+1
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@...
Could we get an official Zendesk response for this?
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I'll see if the product manager has any thoughts on this.
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@...
When you get the response, please post it as an official response as it is quite hard to find Zendesk posts in all of the comments.
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Help Scout has this feature and I really miss it after having migrated.
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Agreed that this would be a helpful feature. We often have agents type up summaries in tickets and root causes - these posts are long and often needed in long tickets (with 20+, 50+ posts) so it would be nice to link back to a ticket post rather than cut/paste the contents into another document.
We also have feedback workflows for our agents to identify broken process during a ticket - these posts are often in the middle of a ticket, so a ticket link isn't super helpful in finding a post that exists somewhere in a longer ticket.
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@... what thoughts did the product manager have on this? (Previous comment - yeay, a permalink :D)
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+1
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Definitely need this, it's missing functionality. +1
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Hey Folks - This is a +1 from my team, too.
Tickets are all-but-never 100% clean and sequential - there are assumptions that get wound and unwound, Scope Creep that must be handled, User Cases and Technical Information that must be aggregated and sifted once / twice / thrice - before the ticket expands-to-and-addresses the entire breadth of the issue raised within it.
For example... right now, I'm in the middle of aggregating all of a customer's disparate complaints (ZD, Email, Gong, etc) into one ZD thread, which I will then hatchet down sub-task by sub-task. I am just about to Slack my Customer Success Manager so that she can follow along: My Internal Note in which I aggregated all of their complaints is 5-7 questions down in the thread, already. I want to post a link in the Slack convo which auto-scrolls directly to this Internal Note, since it's the nexus of Current Understanding about this ticket, and will be for another ~12 ZD posts at least.
All that's required to produce this functionality is.... 1) The use or establishment link of some kind of link-safe unique ID for each Thread Tile, 2) A permalink button tastefully displayed in each a/o 2a) the Global Config therefore, and 3) the front-end functionality to Auto-Scroll to this thread post.It would be great if this could get dispatched ASAP. I think this would be high-win for relatively low-effort.
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+1
This is from 2016 and still not available? Isn't it a Anchor in the View?
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We replaced with Zendesk some legacy systems - one of them was Mantis Bugtracker: https://www.mantisbt.org/
This Open Source tool is capable of this feature and many colleagues are missing this feature really hard!
As a software vendor it was extremly useful to bring a certain comment to the attention of another colleague instead of having him finding (= read and scroll the whole article) the specific comment.
This feature is more than a nice-to-have if you need assistance from colleagues of other departments, which are not working full time in Zendesk. -
Hello all,
Our team of 150+ agents at Hopin desperately want this feature as well. Wading through comment history can be very time consuming, especially when an issue is escalated to another group where they need to quickly gather context for a given issue. Could we get an update on where this feature lies in Zendesk's roadmap please and what can we do to promote this request?
Thanks
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Agreed that this would be a helpful feature. We often have agents type up summaries in tickets and root causes - these posts are long and often needed in long tickets (with 20+, 50+ posts) so it would be nice to link back to a ticket post rather than cut/paste the contents into another document.
We also need this for when we escalate Zendesk tickets internally to other teams through Jira, this would be most helpful for those other teams, so they don't have to pour through lengthy tickets.
We also have feedback workflows for our agents to identify broken process during a ticket - these posts are often in the middle of a ticket, so a ticket link isn't super helpful in finding a post that exists somewhere in a longer ticket.
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Jira has permanent links to every comment. And everyone knows how useful that is for 10s of different purposes, I don't think there is more to tell about it.
Interestingly, this has not been put in place in Zendesk for 6 years (since the first comment on this thread).
To be honest, rather than customer feedback to recognize such a demand, following the other products in the market would have already risen the idea.I hope this will be delivered soon.
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Agreed, + 1 for this feature !
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I was a different person in October of 2016: younger, optimistic, having never gone through a global pandemic. Good times.
But the person I was then and the person I am now would still love to have the ability to permalink to comments within Zendesk.
Fingers crossed
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I'm starting a betting pool: reasons why Zendesk hasn't implemented deep links yet:
2/1 — too busy implementing custom features for megacustomers
6/1 — engineering haven't heard of HTML id tags
7/1 — prioritized, then lost in the backlog
12/1 — being held back by a senior engineer who doesn't like permalinks
20/1 — success hasn't told engineering the feature was requested
100/1 — some completely reasonable reason
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Strong upvote!
We recently migrated from Jira Service Desk to Zendesk and not having this feature is a real pain.
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