Reply to a Private Note should be recorded as a Private Note

Agreed!  This is problematic especially for new agents or ones that work mobile and respond to tickets via e-mail.

Hi Guys

Agents can use the Email commands option and use the Action:note option to send the reply as Private Note.

regards

vijay

Hi Vijay, that is not obvious in anything that I've seen when an email is sent. Maybe it would be helpful to include that kind of information in the body of the emails sent to the Agents?

This should be enforceable from the admin.  Email commands leave too much room for error on all the agents.

I agree, there should be an option to change the default behavior from the admin panel.

We are working on a solution for this. We will let you know more when it is implemented.

this workaround is non-obvious and impractical. Need an easy way to indicate that an update is "private"

Is there any update to any implementation of this functionality. It has already caused my organization some slight embarrassment and the work around described in this topic is never really going to work for most users.

Simplest options of implementation include:

- defaulting all email responses to be private notes so that the freshdesk agents can manually make public (or not)

- disabling email responses altogether

This will soon become a major obstacle to using Freshdesk, so any update would be good to hear.

Replying to the note as a private note from within Freshdesk is something that can be dealt with from an agent education perspective.

The problem comes from replies to the email that is generated by a private note.  An emailed reply is posted as a public note - with the contents of the private note within it.

This is problematic.  A process could be implemented whereby agents are to only reply to private notes via the interface but that is not efficient at all.  Ideally if an agent (most of mine are in the field 8x5) receives an email alert about a note, for the sake of time management and efficiency, it would be nice if they could just reply to the email and have the system recognize that it is a reply to a private note and set it as such as the message is processed.

We experienced the same issue. It makes no sense to have this public - when agent will like it public (I suppose that in more than 80% of cases not), he can make it public afterwards. This is washing of the laundry in front of the client, we are not happy about it.

Moreover there is another probably related issue we recently experienced. We are working the way that we are supporting other offices from our company and they are in touch with their clients. And in these offices sometimes the requester is also an agent. The issue is that when the agent forwards an email from a client (from email address with a different domain), Freshdesk changes the requester to the person from which the agent was forwarding it. This is another example of non-obvious and not always wanted mechanism in Freshdesk. I created a topic for this here, so please hit there "like this idea" if you agree: https://support.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/301612

Has there been any work to address this? I would think that the safer route would be to make email responses from an Agent private by default if the system cannot determine whether the email was in reply to something public or private accurately. Making a slip in this area has potentially very damaging consequences to client relations.

https://support.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/18815

I agree that this is a pain point that we need to address. We are looking into this. This is no easy solution for this unfortunately. Give us some time while we figure out how we can fix this.

Abishek, it seems that a solution to this would be setting an admin option that says "Replies to private comments stay private" vs "Current".  This would prevent the issues that I forsee my team having from coming (quoted from the above discussion topic)

I'd agree that this is something that seems as though it should be pretty straight forward.  The fact is that an internal person replying back to an internal email request should not be a public comment out to the customer by default.  If you have multiple back and forth email discussions from a support individual to, for example, a developer or SME, you don't want that conversation threaded to the customer. You want to make sure that your support team can aggregate the discussion into something that's logical, concise and clear for the customer without confusing the issue significantly.

Same problem here, please fix this.  It's a big issue for us, I can't use it for notify my agents without add. "please don't reply this email from your email client but use freshdesk portal" 

This has caused us some issues and feel there should be some sort of top level setting that states all replies are private and then manually change to public if required.

This was originally reported over 2 years ago and no resolution yet??

I appreciate there are commands but these are not enforceable. I would prefer all notes to be private and use commands to make those individual ones public.

Same here, just recently I replied to a customer but I did not notice an other agent had forwarded, to someone in sales (not an agent), without copying the requester (sensitive information) which created a public note. Sure enough, my reply included the previous "privately forwarded" public note causing an embarrassing situation with me being the instigator... Not a warm fuzzy feeling, to say the least! Please fix this...

I believe that there should be an option to "Treat an email from this agent as an email from any other customer" (either globally for any agent or ideally for specifically for each agent). There are a lot of issues/bugs when an agent is forwarding an email to Freshdesk, we struggle with this for months and I have been promised to sort this out multiple times, hence sadly still no solution.

I choose Freshdesk for our company as in the reviews I've read that Freshdesk is actively solving client's problems and reflecting the requests. But now it looks like every issue takes years to be solved, which is very alarming. Especially when our clients are being affected by these bugs. Frankly, if that won't be fixed, we may be forced to move to the competition as our consultants are very unhappy to face this.

@Tomas We are building a feature which will allow you to retain Agent as the Requester when an email is forwarded to the helpdesk by the Agent. This can be turned off - on and the settings will be applied to all Agents. We will be including this in our product in a couple of weeks max. I'll send you another personal note once it is live.

@Everyone

As for recording reply to private notes as private, we have nailed down the approach to take for storing unique values for private notes and recognising replies to those. As soon as we figure out the scalability aspect, we'll proceed with solution.

I'll keep this thread updated with our progress.

Thank you very much, Janani.

Any advancement on this feature? This is a serious problem for us...

I just want to re-iterate what "Adrien" posted just a few lines up. This behavior is almost guaranteed to cause a huge embarrassment to users (agents) of freshesk at some point.

Consider the following...

1. a freshdesk agent forwards an issue to bob in sales (bob is NOT a freshdesk agent) from a rather needy but smaller customer
2. bob sends a sensitive reply-all (perhaps something about this being a smaller customer and not on his radar) and adds the CEO for his/her input
3. the reply bob sent is private since bob is not an agent (so far so good)
4. the CEO now replies-all (so both bob and the responsible freshdesk agent are on the same page) that while all customers are important, he acknowledges that this customer is "not as important" as the others due to the small deal size and advises not too much effort put on solving the issue
   
5. the kicker is that the CEO is an "agent" in Freshdesk since he/she likes to be very hands on and keep tabs on issues
   
6. the reply from the CEO is not only PUBLIC but is EMAILED to the customer (since after all it is a ticket update) eliminating ANY chance of maybe spotting the snafu and removing the public comment

Forward:

- reply by a non-agent keeps it private (ok)
- reply by an agent by email makes it public (NOT DESIRED, especiallty when the agent managing the ticket just wants to forward the ticket to both agents and non agents to initiate an email conversation)

3 years.  That's how long ago this issue was brought to Freshdesks attention.  

Quite sick of having to coach new agents in how to properly/cautiously utilize the note feature.

Considering switching to another product before this glaring issue causes even bigger issues for us.

Can we get an update on this feature, please?