Dave Koston

Beyond this, I'm curious as to why Internal Notes and Public Reply are even in the same part of the UI. Its like ZenDesk wants our agents to mistakenly send internal notes to customers. Seriously, please move notes to a different part of the UI. Perhaps make a “Internal Note” button and then have that expand a separate section to write notes in. There's no need to make some complex engineering solution to save drafts here, just separate out the input textfields to prevent mistakes and you get the ability to send notes and replies for free. 

Nicole, et al. I'm pretty sure that OP has the same issue that all your customers do:

Making the “Internal Note” and “Public Reply” text areas in the same place is a BAD design. Its too easy to accidentally send an internal note to a customer. I cannot understand why you do this instead of moving “Internal Note” to a button and showing a separate text area. To add insult to injury, you clear out the already written text when someone switches from Internal Note to Public Reply.