Feature Request: Triggers - Action: Add Internal Note as a trigger action

Satia

While comments cannot be added as part of the built in trigger actions, you can use a target. See Phil's tip here:

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Hi Satia,

It sounds like you're mainly trying to assist agents with next steps, is that correct? Just want to make sure I understand your use case. We don't have any plans to add the ability to add comments via triggers, but we are interested in exploring the problem space of additional, automated guidance for agents.

Best,
Erin

Hi Erin,

Thanks for following up. Reading through the threads, it seems we have the same use case as was stated by other customers: 

• We add a private comment to the ticket if there is information about the user or Organisation that the agent should be aware of. We were finding it too easy to miss those notes and detail fields unless it’s within the body of the comment. Seeing the information within the private comment means the agents never miss the info.

For our second use case, being able to add an internal note via trigger would speed up response time. For example, an account manager submits an inquiry without the customer on thread. A trigger could populate an internal note reminding them that the customer must be included for reporting purposes. The account manager updates the ticket, and then the support agent responds. 

Currently there is a manual exchange between the agent and account manager, which wastes time. 

Thanks,

Satia

We have a similar need.  Our current need is that customers have certain requests or requirements that are unique to them in how we support them.  For example, when we test in their instance we have to test with a certain population, etc.  These unique requirements are very difficult to manage and are easily missed when in a notes field on the organization, but if we could have the internal note put this information right in front of our agents it would greatly improve our ability to support effectively and accurately according to our customers requirements, thus improving customer satisfaction and reducing escalations and angry calls to our customer managers.

Hello!

We also have a similar request. Right now, we use automations to send agents an email as a reminder that a ticket has been untouched for a certain amount of time and that action is required. Ideally, the support agent does not have to check their email to stay on top of their Zendesk queues. An internal note would cause a Zendesk app notification to go out. This is the main reason why this would be helpful for us. 

Thanks!

+1 on this!  Would love to be able to add an internal note depending on the "Organization" name.

Any update on this? I would like the agents not to miss out any important information for the client

We are also looking for this functionality. Would love to hear if and when this would be implemented

+1 for this, we need a way to notify the agent that there's something about the organization that separates the workflow of all tickets coming in from them compared to other organizations.

Though I wouldn't mind if there was some other way to do this (say, highlighting the Organization button in the top-left of the ticket).

I would prefer this wasn't an app, because often our agents will hide the apps bar because they work on laptops and it takes up too much screen real estate.

+1 Same need. Thank you.

Same need here

The comments from Zendesk staff about this feature request are pretty hard to believe! 

"No plans to support this feature" , etc.  

Clearly a feature to allow actions to update an internal comment as a part of a trigger is in demand based on the existence of multiple threads with users scrambling to configure their own setup through the API as well as requesting this feature. 

What is even more interesting is some of these threads have been around for a long time with inter-linking between mostly dead-end, unhelpful threads that pertain to this issue. 

Please Zendesk help support the needs of your clients by adding this feature formally and rolling it our to our accounts.  

We wish we could do this natively but found the Target workaround very helpful as Graeme mentioned above:

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+1 for this feature.  Thanks!

Hello everyone,

We actually tried to develop this feature in our Zendesk Support product.  The creation of a ticket comment (note or public) will make your triggers start again (so while triggers are running, we restart all the triggers again... this leads to what engineers call a race condition).  In fact, during our testing phase, we discovered that we may convert trigger-based private notes in public comments... which would break all trust you have in Zendesk.

Instead of developing that specific feature, we would like to understand why you need this feature (because there are probably better ways to address your underlying issues)

From having talked to customers and read this thread, we know that automatically posting a comment (note or public) solve any of the following issues:

1- Explain to other agents/admins why a ticket was silently solved/closed

2- Provide the agents with an easy way to see in the ticket audit trail what workflow-based message the end-user has received 

3- Provide a troubleshooting notes for the agent who will next be assigned to the ticket (i.e. "hey this ticket is about XYZ and you want to be mindful about A, B, or C”)… something that Satia, Eric Paul, Gary Jackson, Patrick Harland-Lee, Vijayendra…

4- Send an app notification to an agent (instead of just an email notification) that a ticket needs attention… something outlined by Lucy

5- Send a notification to the people CCed on a ticket when you solve a ticket without adding any public comment.

Would you please let us know why you need this feature (feel free to add other reasons not listed in #1-5) and also the impact it has on your team?

This would be a great feature, I sent out automated message to customers to help keep tickets moving that have been in pending status at 2 and on the 4th  day. I would like to make a note in the case letting the agent know that the system performed a custom action so they do not duplicate the message and on the 5th day they can resolve the case. 

Right now there is no way for the agent to know in the case that the system performed any action. 

Aaron

Just in case you are not aware. When looking at a ticket, changing the drop down from 'Conversation' to 'Events' will display all the actions taken on a ticket including triggers and automations.

This allows Agents to check for system performed actions.

But I totally agree that allowing an internal comment would allow greater visibility to these important actions.

Thanks Graeme that is a good workaround but with other trigger and events that can get cumbersome. 

I would also like to have this feature within Zendesk.  We send automated followups every few days and it would be nice to be able to track them in the ticket (date/time sent) with an internal only update.  We also have other automatic updates that happen as well and again it would be great to be able to have an internal update to the ticket stating "Hey, this automation happened".

I understand that this could be done via a manual update to the ticket, but doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of an automation altogether?

Hi,

Just stepping in here.

Our use case for this feature would be that we have different SOP's for some customers. We ship spare parts internationally and sometimes we need to make sure that certain documents are prepared for customs purposes or that there is a specific setting in the order that needs to be taken into account before the order is submitted in the system. Forgetting to do so may have financial implications for our/the customers' business 

We do take notes in the user/organization profile and use the "user date" app to remind our agents, though an internal comment or similar feature would be a better safety measure in our case.

Thanks for the details, Maurits. 

We have a case where the data from users in the ticket forms are editable by agents. Since we only have 8-10 employees most of us are admins for convenience. We therefore need a copy of the ticket fields added as text in the ticket for documentation purposes. A trigger with placeholders that spits out a comment with all the information added in the ticket form is needed for us to use the ticket forms at all for the brand.

Our use case is that we share a lot of tickets between our various Zendesk accounts (still using the Hub and Spoke over here), and we need the user's email address to appear in the ticket in the Hub. Because it doesn't come as part of the ticket, we want to have it as an internal comment. In our case, our agents can't help our customers without their email address about 90% of the time - so we'd take the email address any way it comes over, but we definitely need it.

This has been stated by others, but getting in on this vote:

• We add a private comment to the ticket if there is information about the user or Organisation that the agent should be aware of. We were finding it too easy to miss those notes and detail fields unless it’s within the body of the comment. Seeing the information within the private comment means the agents never miss the info.

Life in Software Support is insanely busy and you're going a million miles an hour. Relying on an Agent to go to the Organization tab to view important details about a client or rely on seeing the slew of tags that get added to the case just isn't feasible.

We store very important information on the org tab (ex: who has permission to request and approve configuration changes to their applications) that is easily overlooked. Please, please, please think outside the box on how we can get this accomplished. 

THANK YOU!

Huh, my clients really need this pretty basic feature :/