Hiding An Agent's Identity
Administrators should follow a few steps to hide agent identities from customers.
- Disable personal email replies
- Remove photo from email template
- Remove personal agent signatures
- Use Agent Alias (Professional and Enterprise)
- Update request page template photo
- Remove assignee names
Disable personal email replies
Under Admin>Channels>Email>Personalised Email Replies, deactivate the option.
The effect is to change the header in support addresses.
With personalised email replies checked:
And with the option disabled:
Remove photo from email template
Under Admin>Channels>Email>Email templates, deactivate the 'Show user photo in email' option.
Remove personal agent signatures
Signatures are added to all Agent public ticket comments.
Under Admin>Settings>Agents>Signature, remove the {{agent.signature}} placeholder.
You can either leave the signature box blank, or insert a new global signature.
Use Agent Alias (Professional and Enterprise)
Each agent can enter an alias in their profile.
The alias displays in the Help Centre:
Update request page template photo
Agent photos will continue to display to customers in the Help Centre. Remove photos by editing the Request Page HTML.
Look for the {{author.avatar_url}} placeholder.
Change the HTML output where the author is an agent.
The customer's photo will continue to display, but the agent photo will not.
Instead of removing the agent photo, your company logo can replace the image
To give:
Remove assignee names
Non Enterprise customers can edit the 'Request Page' to completely remove the assignee name.
Professional and Enterprise customers may consider this step to hide the identity of Agents with no alias.
On the Request Page, search for the {{assignee.name}} placeholder.
Either remove the placeholder or replace it with text as below:
Which shows in the Help Centre as:
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Love it! Thanks, Graeme! :)
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Thanks for another great tip, Graeme. I especially love the pictures. :)
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Excellent tip, Graeme!
I have given some thought to how agent identities and Aliases works too, so I'll just add my finding to the thoroughness of this article.
Some areas where agents identity are still revealed
Here are some situations.
If you are using satisfaction reasons
When the end-user follow the satisfaction link (at least on my account), you see the assignee's profile picture.
Some suggestions if you need a workaround:
- Adding a global JavaScript widget that hides the picture. These 'widgets' is the old HC 'apps' and still seems to work here. But I'm no expert as I have always been on the new HC. So some other user have to comment on that. I suspect such a solution may also be circumvented by a visitor, if they has JavaScript disabled or in other ways. I'm not sure I'd recommend it.
- Don't send out surveys for tickets handled by the Aliased agents.
- Wait for Zendesk to move this part to the new HC (nudge nudge).
On email notifications received by agents/light agents
The agents real name is revealed on all email notifications reaching agents and light agents. This may not be an issue, but such notifications could end up being read by an end-user, e.g. if an agent forwards or CC:s their notification via email, so just be aware of this. Also be aware the Alias is not hinted to the agent either in the email notification.
Some suggestions if you need a workaround:
- Replace the default {{ticket.comments_formatted}} that you use in your email notification triggers, and replace with your own liquid based notifications (see this article). Then, if you do something like {% for comment in ticket.comments %}..., the {{comment.author.name}} placeholders always holds the Alias, even for email notifications sent to agents.
- Actually change the agents name in Zendesk (on a permanent basis, see my note on the effects of temporarily name switching).
In Zendesk, when using an Alias
Just in case you hadn't noticed. But be aware of this: you cannot see your colleague's Alias (or even if he uses one) in the ticket view inside Zendesk. I believe only administrators can actually see an agent's Alias, and this only by visiting the agent's profile.
Here is a scenario where this may create a situation:
An agent Aliased as 'Agent X' is home sick. His real name is 'Peter Pepper'. Another agent jumps in on a ticket, and explains away 'since Peter is away today, I will be taking over this ticket'. Oops!
If you have a setup where only some agents are Aliased, this is something to consider.
Some suggestions if you need a workaround:
- I'm not really sure how the thinking went here, to me it seems agents should be able to see which other agents are Aliased as (next to the real name).
Final tip: be careful if you are thinking of disguising an agent by temporarily switching their name or Alias
While we're on the topic of how agent's identities are exposed, I'm sure many of us has had this thought at some time: 'lets temporarily change the agents name, work some tickets, then switch back'.
Turns out this is a bad idea.
The commenter's name + Alias are not fixed at the time the comment is created - it's always updated to reflect the current value of the comment's name / Alias.
What this means that if an agent handle many tickets under an Alias or name A, and then the agent's Alias is removed, or the name is changed to B, this will impact all your previous tickets filed under that name or Alias, which will now show all comments as made by B, not A. This seems to affect all contact points, e.g. My Activities in Help Center, and outgoing email notifications. It doesn't matter here if the Alias/name was changed after ticket was Closed. Even if you accept this, thinking maybe because you provide email support only without the Help Center, this is fine, just consider any long interval automations you have set up, as those many of us use to notify requester's that hasn't responded on tickets with Pending status - these may fire out notifications long after your 'temporary' name switch, and those will then show the comments as authored by B, not A.
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Joel, thanks for you contribution. Those are excellent points.
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Wow, Joel is a rockstar too! Thanks so much, Joel.
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I was following this guide to be able to hide agent's identity and the step that reads "Remove assignee names" I was unable to figure out where to find it. Have browsed all over the admin pages and still can't find it. Can you please help me understand how to find it?
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Paulo
The help centre has changed a lot since this tip was created. But if you go to Guide, and then edit the code for your theme, you should find a template for request_page. In there search for {{assignee.name}}
Similar to above, remove this text to suppress the agent’s name from appearing.
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