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Tip: How to add a warning on emails that contain internal notes



Posted Dec 07, 2020

It's handy to collaborate or refer tickets to other teams by assigning tickets over or using the @mention feature, however some workflows may require the entire ticket history to be included in an email, using the ticket.comments_formatted placeholder.

This is especially useful if you are working with light agents, or with agents who prefer to read the full history in a single email and reply rather than logging in to Zendesk to review the history before replying to the email. 

But on the other hand, with this placeholder comes a risk that the latest note may not be an internal note and the entire thread could be forwarded on (including any internal discussions) to clients or customers who should not see the internal notes.

This can most likely happen where an agent or light agent is copied on a ticket for information and wants to chip in or forward an interesting public update without realising that the top update is not the only one included in the email.

Solution: Add a warning to the top of the emails

The easiest way to warn agents of this potential pitfall is to add a big red warning across the top of the email whenever the ticket contains any internal notes:

This will make all agents pause before sending any ticket history outside of the organisation.

How do I do this?

To add this warning, you can leverage the liquid logic to check for any internal notes and add the warning if so.

In your automation/trigger/CC text which includes the ticket.comments_formatted placeholder, simply prepend the email body with the following block (removing the whitespace, which has been added here for clarity):

{% for comment in ticket.comments %}
{% unless comment.is_public %}
<p style="border:1px; border-style:solid; border-color: #FFCACA; background-color: #FFCACA; padding: 1em;">
<span style=font-size:12.0pt;color:black;>
<b>THIS EMAIL CONTAINS INTERNAL NOTES WHICH SHOULD NOT BE FORWARDED TO CLIENTS</b>
</span>
</p>
{% break %}
{% endunless %}
{% endfor %}

{{ticket.comments_formatted}}

ie. as below -

And that's it!

Once you have added this block before all instances of the comments_formated placeholder, you can be assured that there is an obvious warning included on all emails which could contain internal discussions which should not be forwarded.


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3 comments

image avatar

Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

Thanks so much for sharing this tip Dan! This is extremely useful :)

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This is a really useful tool, but how do you make sure End Users do not see this in the email thread as well as agents?

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Hi Lacey, great question!

This example uses the tickets.comments_formatted placeholder to display the ticket comments. That placeholder will only include private comments when the email is being sent to an agent. So an end-user will only see the public comments, which won't "trigger" (pun slightly intended) Dan's Liquid Markup logic that adds the warning message.

For more information on ticket comment placeholders and what they contain, see the Zendesk Support placeholders reference

Hope that helps clarify things!

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