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

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

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.

+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. 

+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.

+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.

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

+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?

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.

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

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.