Light agents emails to tickets appear as internal comments

@Marc Dufour I have a partial workaround. While this example does not get you the ability to have a specific custom message sent to the requester from the Sales person, It does allow the light agent to send an email to the requester to let them know that the Sales person is aware of the ticket and helping to work towards a resolution.

Create a set of macros (one for each Salesperson) where each macro has a multiple choice set of titles to preset responses that can be sent to the requester. When the sales person uses the macro, a unique text string is put into a private comment.

Triggers are created, one for each response type (looking for those unique text strings as the trigger) for each salesperson. The trigger sees the unique text string in the private comment and can then cause an email to be sent to the requester with a much more detailed preset message from the sales person. Each trigger's email can be customized to the type of reply the sales person wants to send the requestor. The email content can even be 'signed' by the sales person.

The email the requester gets lets them know that the sales person is aware of the ticket and is taking some action (that you define).

If needed, the sales person can then follow up directly with the customer via text, phone, email, etc. (outside of Zendesk) for any personal attention required.

You could create many types of prepared responses that while 'canned', helps the customer know that their salesperson is actively involved.

With this same basic formula, a light agent can also affect change and workflow in the ticket by using pre-created macros and triggers designed to change the settings of custom drop-down fields in the ticket.

I hope this helps. With creative uses like this, it gives our light agents more capabilities than just a private comment. We call this Light Agents Plus (about half way between the default capability of a light agent and that of a full agent).

If you need an actual macro & trigger example of how to do this, let me know.

Andrew

While I appreciate the above workarounds, that's a whole lot of work and micro management for what should just be Light Agents sending an email.

Was fully considering this commercial add-on but if it doesn't allow Light Agents to even communicate with customers, then it doesn't provide enough value. Sales persons occasionally don a support hat or sometimes issues are handed off to them, e.g. if it's more of an implementation issue than something more technical.

What about Side Conversations, do those allow communication between Light Agents and customers?

I have another use case. We have account managers or other customer-facing technical resources who want to chime in on a ticket. Their response never gets delivered to end-users which defeats the purpose of having light agents. Ideally, if a light agent replies from their inbox, the response should be public, no matter what. And if a light agent wants to add an internal comment, he/she should log on to the Zendesk portal and type an internal comment. 

Hi Aran, 

You got that right! Officially, light agents should not be able to create public comments. More context here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020374434-Understanding-when-email-replies-become-public-or-private-comments#topic_bhg_qzk_fhb 

I trust this confirms! 

Hello, 

If an agent replies from their email the comment is public but if a light agent replies via their email the comment is private! 

Did zendesk publish an update or new settings to allow light agents' email replies to be public? 

If a coworker replies from their email to a ticket, the comment is public.
If this same coworker is a light agent and replies via their email the comment is private

What's the logic here? I really don't understand

Hello Romain, 

This article may answer your question: Understanding and setting light agent permissions

As mentioned there:

Light agents have limited permissions but can stay informed about tickets and, when needed, provide subject matter expertise and advice by adding private comments to the ticket. All ticket comments by light agents are private, including the first comment of any tickets they create

Hi Zsa,

Thank you but I did read all articles related to this and my opinion is unchanged. When a LightAgent answers through regular Email, the comment should be public.

With the existing system, LightAgent have fewer permissions than regular users because they can't add a public note through regular email.

I fully echo what Romain said. We have many departments that contributes to tickets such as our engineering department and these fellows are not agents and never will be. They however do need to offer in put when it's an engineering related issue and a technical answer is required.

We sometimes have dealers (our clients) asking to speak to an engineer to get a more detailed explanation.

What is silly here is that they can send these response before they are light agents but the moment you flip the switch that ability goes away. I get that agents are the main source of revenue but in this case, this whole setup defeats the purpose of having light agents versus contributors and ultimately this creates extra steps and work for my agents for something that could be solved by a simple reply all from our light agent's mailbox.

I hope the power that be can re-consider this decision as it's impactful to the way we are capable to conduct our business on a day to day basis with regards to supporting our customers.

Hope the comment makes sense, please take some time to consider.

Kind Regards!

Thanks, @sam51! 
I don't understand their logic, and I'll be looking at other ticketing solutions if Zendesk continues this non-sense.

Good luck :)

I'm fairly new to Zendesk as the Admin and I'm finding the same frustration. I want to be able to add some of my product owners as followers to a ticket but occasionally they also need to respond. I upgraded their license to Lite Agent and now I'm playing the middle man to turn their private comments into public comments, which slows down the entire support SLA.

Desired Functionality: If a Lite Agent logs in, then they should only create private notes. If a Lite Agent receives an email, then their response should be public.

I tried to talk to our sales rep about this and all I got from that is a "well you really should buy more agent seats". (let's just say I was very impressed (sarcasm) by that response...)

This seems like a waste of money when you think about it because they're just answering once every couple of months, can't justify the $99/month cost for a couple response a year. 

I get their business model but as someone pointed out before, other solutions allow this and this just makes so little sense. 

Right now we managed to work around this annoying issue by making a trigger that sends an email to their inbox (PO) and they have to manually respond OUTSIDE of ZD, manually add the requester email address (because ZD strips that out out of the box on a trigger) while keeping our support address in the "to" to get ZD to capture their answer as an internal note but give them a chance to reply. Super annoying extra steps and I'm getting complaints and the truth is this doesn't need to be like this. 

That's a lot of extra steps to take for something that could be solved by this simple solution: make it work...don't be greedy in trying to getting folks to buy extra agent seats when they are not needed. This just overcomplicates things...

+1 Zendesk should be able to tell when a response comes from an email vrs updating the ticket within the Zendesk UI. As such, when you update the ticket from within Zendesk, it is an internal note but email should be public.

An example would be: Managers do not handle tickets but they need to review tickets regular. When there is an issue, they report it via a ticket but because they are a light agent, it isn't a public comment but it should be

@marc13 your link isn't available (https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/226467267?page=1#comment_360004003594)

Guys, I'd appreciate some help here. 
I DON'T want light agents to add public comments in the tickets. That's the whole idea of paying for a seat, and I believe if you need an employee to interact with customers through Zendesk, you need a full agent and that's it.
Now, what I need is to provide support to my light agents. It is common for our support team to receive email requests from other departments in the company. I.e, sales or billing team need technical support and email support directly, or they are messaged by a customer who should have emailed support directly, so they reply to the customer from their own email inbox and CC our support team.

In both these scenarios, what we get in our Zendesk end is a ticket containing only internal comments, which doesn't allow for SLAs to apply.

It doesn't matter who requested the ticket or if it is private or public in privacy of comments, unless there is an intended exception to SLA, we need to fulfill the same expectations.

What I realize is: when I, a full agent, email our support from my own corporate gmail inbox (same email as my full agent zendesk user), the ticket is created with a public comment. So the issue is exclusive to light agents.

What happens is, as I see, the purpose of having a light agent is allowing members of your team to see tickets and search for customer history, but that doesn't change in any way their needs as internal clients to the support staff.

Is there any way I can make a ticket in these conditions be considered public, even with a workaround that will generate a public comment somehow automatically, just so I can get my SLAs running properly?
The conditions are: a ticket is created, channel is email, requester role is light agent, regardless of having an end-user CCd or not.

Hi all, thanks for your feedback here around making light agent comments. This is not currently planned for our roadmap because Light Agent access and permissions only allow for Light Agents to make private comments but please continue to engage and upvote this thread. Thank you!

Considering how many comments have already been made on this topic, with no change by Zendesk, I'm not sure my added comment will be the one to tip the scales but I'll have a go at it.

We have a quality department, and a few sales reps, that need light access to Zendesk in the form of reporting in Explore and searching tickets for supporting data/information.  

When they are included in an email, such as a sales rep having to chime in on an issue with a customer, their reply becomes a private comment.  We receive no notification there has been a response.  

I agree with others; if the reply was received from their email address it should be a public reply.  If they are logged into Zendesk and working they are limited to Private Comments.

+1 - email communications being public is pretty critical for our Zendesk use. There are a lot of higher-ups that have light agent access to monitor process tickets. This is causing communication to crumble on tickets as this is effectively now siloing management communications and is getting in the way of ticket resolutions.

Would be great if Zendesk reconsidered this fix, it doesnt make sense to offer a solution that fixes one issue but causes another.

+100 Support for this, we have 26 agents and 700+ subject matter experts (light agents) there is absolutely no way we are getting them all a full license. But every one of them needs to be able to reply publicly via email.  
PM's feel free to see my support ticket 13514658 for more context. 

See this feature request:

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/8945428352666-Feature-Request-Enhanced-Role-Based-Communication-for-Light-Agents