Zendesk's Advanced Data Privacy and Protection add-on – or ADPP in short – might be one of the more unknown packages Zendesk sells. It takes the native security features in Zendesk and turns them to eleven.

• Access Log lives along side the existing Audit Log. Where audit log shows you who made changes, access log shows you who accesses what data
• Advanced data retention policies allow you to create multiple deletion schedules in your Zendesk instance as compared to the single one you get by default
• Redaction suggestions automates the redaction process agents have to do manually
• Advanced Encryption allows you to bring your own key to encrypt your Zendesk data

In this article we'll talk a look at the Redaction suggestions that automate the process of removing personal information from your tickets.

Entity Detection

Zendesk has been gradually expanding their use of AI, and especially entity detection across their platform.

Within the Ultimate Bot you can use Entities to detect if a customers' message contains a valid email address, matches the format of your loyalty cards, or if a date is properly formatted.

Similar the new Entity detection (EAP) for Advanced AI parses every comment in your Zendesk instance and highlights matches entities like product types, locations, colors and the like.

These kind of entity detection processes are useful to make sure the data provided by customers is correct (preventing needless back and forth to collect the right data), or to automate the routing and processes for specific ticket types (a ticket that matches Paris in a Hotel chain ticket might route to the French Hospitaly team for example).

Zendesk Entity Detection for Intelligent Triage (EAP)

The new Entity detection for Zendesk Intelligent Triage allows you to now not only know why customers are contacting you, but also know what they are talking about.

Internal NoteThomas Verschoren

But this kind of entity detection is also useful for scenarios where privacy and security are key. A customer might email you their full credit card number — where you only really need the last four characters. Or they send you their original password while complaining they can't login.

In more legit scenario's you might require them to forward you their social security number and date of birth for identification purposes.

But either way, receiving this data, and especially keeping this data in your Zendesk instance is dangerous and unnecessary once you've used the data for its purposes. Zendesk itself might be built with security in mind, and elements like multi-factor authentication or automatic deletion of older tickets e.a. are all good ways to further reduce risk.

Even so, the best way to secure this kind of Personal identifiable information (PII) is just asking for it, and in case you do receive it, to redact is as soon as possible.