Light Agents comments to their own tickets via Help Center should be visible in Help Center
Feature Request Summary:
Comments by Light Agents via Help Center to their own tickets (= where they are the requester) should be visble (= public and not internal).
Description/Use Cases:
We have been a satisfied Zendesk customer for almost a year now and use multiple brands in Zendesk to handle technical product support for our customers and partners.
We had several successful GoLives with different brands (= product families) in the last months.
One of the last GoLives is the migration of our in-house IT Helpdesk to our Zendesk instance.
During the final acceptance tests we now see a showstopper shortly before the GoLive.
All employees of our company are defined as light agents in our Zendesk instance - besides the support staff, who are of course full agents - because almost every department (R&D, Sales, Professional Services,...) has to support at some point in the course of our different support cases.
For the in-house IT helpdesk, we have created a separate brand to which only agents have access - works fine so far.
Employees, from the CEO to the trainee, who are light agents as mentioned above, can send their requests to the IT helpdesk via the help center of this brand.
Their (own) requests are visible in the Help Center as soon as they are sent.
However, as soon as they respond to a question, their own comments are not visible in the Help Center, because - as we have learned very, very painfully - comments from light agents are never public - not even if they make them to tickets where they themselves are the requester.
The result is that colleagues try over and over again to answer questions via comments in the Help Center. It ends up that the colleagues usually make comments several times and then report to the admins with the assumption of a bug.
What are the possible solutions for this scenario where you want to cover external and internal support within one Zendesk instance for various reasons?
It is particularly frustrating for us that we were not made aware of this limitation during the design phase of the Enterprise Launch package, which we went through directly with Zendesk Professional Services.
Business impact of limitation or missing feature:
We will of course no longer migrate our customer support away from Zendesk, but our IT department whose favored solution from a competitor (at a lower price) would have been preferred is now very unsure if the GoLive can take place. If this were to happen, the IT colleagues would not need full Zendesk licenses.
Especially in larger companies we would still find it very exciting that internal and external support is mapped in one solution to avoid an application zoo and to use existing know-how multiple times.
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Official comment
Hi Josef Prandstetter, Stephen and Malcolm Walker
Thank you for your feedback! I understand the pain and completely agree that "Light Agents are not acting as Light Agents, they are acting as End Users".
We chose to release the capability for agents (and light agents) to use the request interface with the limitation for light agents as described here, because the feature added value to a significant group of customers dispite the limitation.
I agree it is an anoying limitation and I will see what I can do to get a solution prioritised.
I don't know if that would be a viable option for us, as I presume this would have an additional cost? Perhaps that is a question for my account manager.
Yes, it will have an additional cost to have your users be Agents instead of Light agents. Your account manager is the person to talk to about the exact impact.
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Thanks for this detailed feedback, Josef!
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In this scenario, the people who are Light Agents are not acting as Light Agents, they are acting as End Users. They're making a request for themselves, not for someone else. So, they should be entitled to see their own communication.
Perhaps there should be the option to set if a ticket being created by a Light Agent is for themselves? Or, if the ticket organization is the organization of the agent, then they can now see their own comments on the ticket, regardless of public or private?
Think of it like an email being read by the same person. If they get an email notification from a private comment, they will see that! But we want to encourage users to refer back to the ticket view as their source of truth, and for this ticket flow, light agents will be using Guide.
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Hi,
+1 for this feature request. We are literally seeing the same limitation reported in this thread - we are using Zendesk successfully for 2 product brands and now bringing in our IT Helpdesk team. I have warned them about this limitation and as such, they will likely use email only Support through Zendesk.
@... - would you happen to have any suggestions to get around this in the interim?
Best regards,
Stephen -
Hi everyone,
I think the best workaround for this would be to split off your IT or other internal-facing team into their own separate Zendesk instance(s). That way your co-workers can be treated as end-users in those instances, and they'll be able to see their own comments in their tickets there. That's actually what we do here at Zendesk. I realize that may not be what you want to hear, but I don't know of any other way around the limitation that Light Agents can only make internal comments.
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Hi Dave,
I appreciate this feedback.
I don't know if that would be a viable option for us, as I presume this would have an additional cost? Perhaps that is a question for my account manager.
Ideally, I would love in the future to see a feature described such as the one Josef added in his initial post.
Best regards,
Stephen -
I think the best workaround for this would be to split off your IT or other internal-facing team into their own separate Zendesk instance(s). That way your co-workers can be treated as end-users in those instances, and they'll be able to see their own comments in their tickets there.
We have a separate IT instance and our IT team are all Full Agents. We also have a number of Light Agents who need to perform reporting tasks within the system.
The Light Agents need this level of access to perform their job, but it comes at the expense of them being unable to open support tickets via the HC. As our company is remote, our team rely on the ability to reach out to IT and being unable to raise tickets in the HC due to the Light Agent restrictions has become a pain point.We do have a separate AI bot in Slack that can be used by these team members to open support tickets, but it's not for everyone.
Ideally, Light Agents can use the HC to raise their own support tickets and be treated as end-users.
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