Automated ticket redaction via triggers in Zendesk
Zendesk’s new trigger-based redaction automates the removal of personal data, solving the privacy risks of manual oversight. Combined with Redaction Suggestions from the ADPP add-on, this update enables safer workflows, fewer manual steps, and smarter data hygiene for customer support teams.
Teams that want to give support to customers or employees often have to walk that fine line between privacy and transparency.
In order to identify you're talking to the right person you need some personal identifiers. To update or create an account you might need a date of birth or an address. You might need a social security number, bank account number or a drivers' license number in order to properly handle a customers' inquiry.
Storing this kind of data turns your Zendesk environment into a goldmine of personal information. While it’s often essential for resolving a ticket, once the issue is handled, there’s usually no reason to keep that data around.
That’s where Redaction comes in. Zendesk offers powerful tools to remove sensitive information from tickets—but they come with two big caveats: someone has to remember to use them, and they only work if every piece of sensitive data is actually caught and removed.
Redaction suggestions
Every Zendesk customer has the ability to manually redact items in tickets. This is available via a small context menu next to each ticket comments.
Agents can highlight text and redact it. This replaces the actual words with ███████.
But that process is not easy. Agents need to read and parse the text to look for items to redact. In long emails these items might not be easy to find, and it's just as easy to miss some.
This is where the Redaction Suggestions, part of Zendesk's ADPP (Advanced Data Privacy and Protection) add-on, comes in. By enabling Redaction Suggestions the platform will read every message and highlight personal identifiers within a tickets text.
By highlighting the text we assist agents twofold. For one, it makes redaction a lot easier. In essence they just need to hunt for orange text and they can redact if needed.
Additionally, these highlighted items are also the items they need to provide context. Similar to the highlighted Entities in Intelligent Triage, they can provide context at a glance. Key items like a name, address or date of birth are clearly visible at a glance, making it easier for the agent to find, copy and use this data.
If you want to know more about the Redaction suggestions, I wrote a full overview of the feature earlier:
Thomas Verschoren
Triggers
Earlier, we pointed out two key caveats to using Redaction effectively. Redaction suggestions help solve the first—identifying what needs to be removed. But the second issue remains: someone still has to follow through and actually redact the data. And that’s where things can slip through the cracks.
A process that relies on purely human action can go wrong. And when it comes to privacy, wrong means danger.
The new Redaction triggers in Zendesk are here to fix this second problem.
