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"Requester can see this comment" default setting
Posted Jun 28, 2016
Hi,
For us, when merging tickets, the vast majority of use cases do not require the requester to have the ability to see the comment/reply letting them know the ticket was merged.
It would be a huge time saver (and also helpful to avoid human error) if we could have a setting to set this as disabled/unticked by default.
Cheers.
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86 comments
Dave Dyson
Hi Anita Nayob and CJ Johnson –
We recently updated the strings for this setting, from "non-email conversations are public by default", to (as CJ's screenshot shows), to “Agent comments on all tickets are public by default". We made this change because the old name was misleading – we respect this setting for email channels too (not just non-email).
I'll add a note to Giles' comment to help prevent future confusion.
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CJ Johnson
Thanks for the clarification on the name, but can you confirm what this setting should effect in relation to the default settings when merging two tickets? That's the crux of this issue/question here, I've got turned off and I still have to un-click the buttons when merging to prevent the customer from being spammed about the merge. However, the thread is saying that my settings should now *not* require unchecking every time you merge. Am I experiencing a bug, or does this setting have no effect on the default behavior of merging being set to public by default?
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Dave Dyson
I've been able to confirm on my two test accounts (one with Agent Workspace enabled, the other without), that deselecting the "Agent comments on all tickets are public by default" checkbox (when Agent Workspace is enabled) or "Agent comments via web are public by default" (when Agent Workspace is disabled), that the "Requester can see this comment" checkbox when merging tickets is deselected by default as well.
I made sure to scroll to the bottom of the Tickets > Settings page in Admin Center and clicked Save, and then when I returned to Support, I refreshed that tab as well. In both accounts, I'd go to Admin Center, changed the setting there and Save, return to Support and refresh that tab, and when I went to merge tickets the checkbox there would obey whatever I'd set in Admin Center. It sounds like you're seeing something different, but can you verify that you're following the same procedure I listed above?
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CJ Johnson
@... Thanks! I had the setting off, not on. On does do what is described, but I think there's some confusion because the nature of this setting changed pretty drastically over the course of this comment thread. Originally, this setting appears to have only impacted the default public/private status of messaging tickets, not every ticket that comes in, which is what it does now. As a result, I don't really think that this setting delivers at what this feature is asking for, because it impacts tickets pretty heavily in ways unrelated to this request.
I don't want to make all my agents have to manually flip the messaging box to "public comment" every time they reply to a ticket, and I also don't want the checkboxes for merging to be pre-checked. With this setting as it is now, it seems like you can have one or the other, but not both. It's not really desirable for every ticket to pushed into internal mode by default constantly, just for a trade off of merging requiring two less clicks. Either way we set it, we're stuck doing a lot of busy work of un-doing pre-set settings.
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Nick Ryan
Hi Zendesk team. Agent Workspace is also enabled for my company but we also can't see the setting you reference. Would you please provide a solution in this thread for all to view? It would be extremely helpful for my company to have this setting so we can disable it.
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Dave Dyson
Can you verify with your admins that Agent Workspace is enabled on your account? From this end, it doesn't appear to be enabled. See Activating and deactivating the Zendesk Agent Workspace
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CJ Johnson
@... Have there been any updates on this since 2019? This is still one of the first page, most upvoted feature requests for Support.
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Stephen Senez
Would also like to see this implemented but since it's been over 7 years I'm not sure it will happen
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Jane Fleming
I too very much doubt there will ever be any action on this. Zendesk do not appear to have any interest in the matter.
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IVAN KATALINIC
We merge many tickets each day. The current settings make no sense for us.
We would like to set it so that by default, the checkboxes are unchecked and the customer does not receive the notification.
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Melanie Gapany
I have tried disabling both "Agent comments via email are public by default" and "Make email comments from CCed end users public (not recommended)" in my admin panel and I am still prompted to uncheck the box upon merge. Even tried signing in and out, clearing cache, doing a hard reload.
I even looked to see if it is possible to update the ticket trigger for this, but nope, it's an all-or-nothing situation. One of these things need to become an option. Preferably just give us a setting to uncheck this box by default. It is RIDICULOUS to depend on agents to do this, it slows down their workflow, leads to human error, and confuses our customers.
7 years and counting. FIX THIS
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Amon Wong
I just switched to agent workspace as well and this is also a problem for my agents. Can Zendesk please do something about this? Dave Dyson (gmail)
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Jacob the Moderator
I agree that admins should be able to control the default setting here. We can't trust that agents will untick those boxes when merging.
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We never want this merging message sent out, so we added conditions to our "Notify requester and CCs of comment update" trigger, so it would omit sending these updates - not sure if someone already mentioned this.
Unless the agent actively makes the message private afterward (make comment private), however, subsequent messages may still contain that, but I feel that is less of an issue than broadcasting it, to begin with.
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IVAN KATALINIC
Hi Jacob the Moderator,
Can you please rephrase your instructions? Honestly, find the wording hard to grasp and understand whether you've found a solution that works or is this something that you've only tried?
Also, not understanding the second paragraph part about "Unless the agent actively makes the message private..." at all.
Best - Ivan
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Jacob the Moderator
Hi IVAN KATALINIC
I'm sorry if I was unclear, I thought I was being succinct 😃
In an ideal world, as an admin I would want to make the merging messages private by default, but since I currently can't, I have updated the trigger that sends email notifications to Requesters and CC's when public messages are added to a ticket.
The addition of the condition I mentioned previously makes sure that we don't send emails when a merge happens. I'm unsure if this message is always in English or if there are language variants!
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This is a working solution or workaround that we have in production.
Here is an example of how the condition and action part of the trigger could look:
If your email notifications only send the most recent message (not the entire comment thread), then this should be good enough to ensure that the merge message will never become exposed to the requester.
However, if your notifications do contain a thread of the ticket conversation (like the orange highlight above), it is possible that the merge message will be exposed in subsequent public messages - I'm not too concerned with this, but I recognize that some may wish to completely avoid this.
If an agent notices that they forgot to untick the public merge tickets message, they can still prevent it from being sent as part of future messages by making the merge message private - this option is revealed after the ticket event log is ticket on.
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Amon Wong
Hello everyone, our team devised a solution for this by utilizing the TamperMonkey Google Chrome Extension. This script will automatically deselect the checkbox.
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Nicole Saunders
Just a note from the Zendesk Community Team: we've checked the links Amon shared and they are legit and safe to click. :)
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IVAN KATALINIC
Hi Jacob the Moderator and apologies for a delay in my reply.
Appreciate you expanding on the point in detail, the options are now perfectly clear :)
All the best! - Ivan
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Mary Dimitrova
Guys, seriously. It's a default option, you must be able to change it easily - not referring us to external apps and extensions...
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Danielle
We un-check the 'requester is notified of merge' 100% of the time. We do not have any use cases for notifying a requester that their ticket is merged.
Upvoting that this is needed! We would like the default to be that this box is un-checked.
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Sarah Hirsch
My team's SOP is to uncheck the boxes. We never let customers know we are merging tickets - can't wait to have this be a default option!
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Shawna James
Hey everyone, thank you for taking the time to provide us with this product feedback. We apologize for the delay on our end in providing you with a response to the feature request.
I work in managing our customer product feedback forums and have been in communication with the product team that owns this area. They noted the following: this is a great feature request and we have added it to the backlog for future consideration. This means that we will think about adding it as a priority later in our planning cycle. We are going to leave this post open for comment to allow others to provide their feedback and use cases, however please note as is stated in our Community Guidelines that we can not commit to prioritizing any one piece of feedback we receive in the community.
If you are interested in learning more about this and other features being built please make sure to check out and follow our Community events, What’s New Community Topic, and Zendesk Updates. Again, we apologize for our delay and appreciate you being a valuable Zendesk Community member.
Thank you again for your feedback and for being a valuable customer with Zendesk.
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Sydney Neubauer
+1 to this feature - this is an absolute must. We just had a close call. We had a huge bulk merge and the setting was not disabled so 90+ people got an email and had no idea why.
We need to either be able to turn off bulk merges, set a default setting or remove the option to change the default. This is an absolute must as this can have such a huge human error rate.
We are looking for 3 changes in behavior:
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Steven Granner
We never want customers to know that their tickets have been merged. We'd love to see these checkboxes in the merge interface disabled by default or configurable to never be an option for agents.
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Nicole Geosits
Nicole at Acuity Scheduling here! Appreciate this being considered for this year as mentioned in Shawna's post back in May.
Removing this as a default at a minimum would be an efficiency gain for those of us that need to manually merge tickets as well as create a clearer customer experience. For my that don't normally merge tickets un-clicking BOTH tick boxes can be missed and the customer ends up reaching out confused and frustrated.
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Lucy Husband
I have read the entire thread of comments and agree with all - I have held off using this feature for the sole purpose that we cannot take the risk of the customer being informed - we merge tickets that contain sensitive data and it is vital we do not cause any confusion for our customer. Please consider this for development, it seems like this will be a welcome update for all!
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