Agent Workspace: Keep content from internal note if changing to public reply

Hello All, thanks for engaging. We are currently working on improving this experience and looks like we'll be able to release an enhancement in a couple of months. I'll provide more updates as we get closer to the release.

Dear Amisha, 

Any updates on this improvement experience stretch?? Are we still 1X month out from a fix for this issue.

We were just forced to make switch to the new Agent workspace and this has been a major pain point for my team. 

Like other businesses mentioned above... our business valued the ability to compose a message in draft and then revert to "Public Response" . 

We would accept a feature like you suggested in your April 6th post.

2. How about we introduce a button in internal notes composer that lets you either move content to the public email composer or directly send your content to the end user?

-Luke

Unfortunately, we haven't been able to work on this project this quarter due to taking up a higher priority project to improve the overall stability of the ticket UI. We plan to work on this project early next year. Thanks for your patience.

@amisha11

Really hope this is something that can be implemented very soon!!

As others have mentioned, we tend to use Internal Reply to draft out a response and then convert to Public Reply once ready to send.

This is a massive bugbear for us to have lost this functionality after enabling the Agent Workspace.

+1 to this thread — the old Zendesk functionality (maintaining the drafted message between Internal and Public replies) was much easier to use for all of the reasons mentioned above by other users.

Hopefully this thread is a reminder to Zendesk PMs to conduct a modicum of user research before making clumsy changes to common workflows.

+1 to this request. 

Having recently updated to Suite and Agent Workspace to be able to utilize other features not available in Legacy, this change significantly impacts our agents' workflow.

I think a button as proposed in #2 (above) could be a valuable option.

"2. How about we introduce a button in internal notes composer that lets you either move content to the public email composer or directly send your content to the end user?"

Would it be possible to (re-)implement this feature as a setting to be toggled on and off, like defaulting to internal vs. public?

+1 We have always encouraged our agents to draft any responses using Internal Notes before sending, although now we have switched to Agent Workspace, this is creating additional steps for us

I've added notes on other threads, but our team has shared that this is their biggest frustration with Agent Workspace that they've been testing before we upgrade next week. 

This is the fourth company I've been a Zendesk admin for. At all of these companies, the standard practice has been to start a draft in Internal notes and, when it's ready, switch over to public comment before submitting your response.

Hello all,

I'm coming here with an update. We're currently exploring the best solution and have prioritized to start working on this project in Q2 this year. I understand the frustration with engaging on this post for a long time without getting any commitments. But, we appreciate your patience and are excited to bring a solution to you in the next few months. Thanks!

Hallelujah! Thanks for the update Amisha... would love to help beta test if needed. 

-Luke

Thank you for the update, @amisha11! Same as Luke above, we'd be glad to beta test.

Hello Everyone,

We're currently actively working on exploring the best solution for this pain point and have prioritized working on this start of Q2. We're here to collect some more feedback from you so that we make sure to handle all the different use cases -

1. Are there ever situations where you need to compose a messaging or chat response on internal notes? Would you like to carry drafts over from internal notes to messaging or chat composer as well? Or the only use case is to carry drafts to email composer?

2. If we provide a setting to turn on carry over of drafts, would you prefer to select the channels it can carry the drafts over to? Example: You can select to carry over to only email or only messaging or both?

Please note that the setting will be an admin level setting. Thanks for engaging!

Hey @amisha11

In relation to your pinned comment, and the functionality to come:

1. To us it makes sense making it available on all channel, to carry over drafts from private to public.

2. To us it would be all channels - however, having the option to select channels, would be neat.

We only use this feature for email, and we wouldn't need the option to turn it on or off for individual channels.  However, it's important to us that a "drafts" feature would allow the agent to choose after entering text to post as either an internal note or a public reply.

This is interesting. This is the first change in the new Agent Workspace that I've seen that seems like it might have an improvement to offer, although it conflicts with a lot of existing workflows. I absolutely value drafting a public reply in private, but I can also see value in doing both public and private updates at once. I wonder if there's a way to do both.

Hey Dave Rooney - If you turn off the draft carry over setting, nothing would change for you, you'll be able to let each channel treat its own draft. If you turn on the setting, you will be able to choose if you want drafts to carry across all channels or only email or only messaging. 

@amisha11

Thank you very much for these updates!

In response to your pinned comment from February 1st:

1. Ideally, we'd like this to apply across all channels. We encourage our agents to draft all messages internally before converting them to public reply.

2. To streamline the agent experience, we'd probably apply it across all channels.

Hi @amisha11! Thank you for soliciting feedback on this. One of our largest businesses came forward and advised that the clearing of comment when switching from internal note to public reply is causing inefficiencies in their workflow. They are a high volume contact center, so small inefficiencies can greatly impact their metrics.

I asked them to summarize and they provided the following:

We typically write our emails in the internal notes field, to ensure emails don’t get sent uncompleted and then we move it to public reply. In the old version, the entire email, including attachments would “roll over” and we could just send. Now, we have to copy and paste it in the public reply area.

When they state 'new version', what they are referring to is that we recently upgraded them to Agent Workspace.

I can't speak to other channels, as this is an email-only business.

Please let us know if we can provide any additional details.

+1 on this - we haven't migrated yet but this may be a big reason why

Hi,

Our use-case is same as for the Trudy.

Answering also to questions from Amisha:

> Are there ever situations where you need to compose a messaging or chat response on internal notes? Would you like to carry drafts over from internal notes to messaging or chat composer as well? Or the only use case is to carry drafts to email composer?

I'd say it is true for the email composer only. 

2. If we provide a setting to turn on carry over of drafts, would you prefer to select the channels it can carry the drafts over to? Example: You can select to carry over to only email or only messaging or both?

Currently we don't use Zendesk messaging, but I'd like to have a flexibility just in case.

+1 to this thread.
In my team, we used to enter text in private comments and then switch to public comments when completed before sending it to the customer.
The same applies to attachments. Now, even if we attach a file in private comments, if I switch to public comments and copy and paste the file, the file is not attached. It is very difficult to use.
Also, using the drop-down to switch between private and public comments is not good. (need More clicks).
I would like it to switch with one click like before.

Hello everyone, we're excited to announce the release of draft mode in the composer to solve the pain point discussed in this thread. Please provide your feedback here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/5706421005978-Draft-mode-in-composer-We-want-your-feedback- 

Thanks!

Hi @amisha11,

Thank you very much for this update, however, I'm not exactly sure this addresses the concerns expressed here:

1) I'm not seeing that Draft Mode can be set as the default (to where the agent has to manually switch to Public Reply) like Internal Notes could.

2) There isn't an obvious visual indication that you're in Draft Mode.

Chiming in just to say its annoying that if I forget to change to the correct mode at the beginning, then all my text is lost once I switch modes.

I see what you are trying to accomplish and I like it, but the only problem is that sometimes I write something in the Public Reply only to remember I need to send it as an Internal Note. Previously, I could switch to Internal Note and my message would remain in the text box that is now yellow. But with the update, it does not and I have to copy and paste it if I want to accomplish this. Not a big issue but annoying and time-consuming.