Calls from Suspended Users Do Not Generate Tickets, Resulting in Loss of Audit Trail and Interaction Records

Thank you for the response.

Respectfully, I do not believe blocking the caller's phone number addresses the concern outlined in this feedback.

The issue is not how to prevent a suspended user from calling. The issue is that Zendesk currently allows a suspended user to successfully place and complete a call, while simultaneously preventing the creation of any auditable interaction record.

As described in the feedback and confirmed by Zendesk Support:

• Suspended users can successfully call Zendesk phone lines.
• Agents can answer and handle those calls.
• No ticket is created.
• No call recording is retained.
• No standard interaction history is available for review.

The core concern remains unanswered:

How are organizations expected to review, audit, investigate, or evidence a customer interaction that Zendesk allowed to occur but does not retain through standard ticketing and recording mechanisms?

This is particularly important in regulated industries where organizations may be required to:

• Demonstrate a complete history of customer interactions.
• Investigate disputes and complaints.
• Support internal compliance reviews and audits.
• Respond to legal or regulatory requests.
• Retain records in accordance with corporate governance requirements.

In our example, an 88-minute customer interaction successfully took place. However, there was no ticket, no recording, and no standard audit trail available afterward.

Blocking a caller may reduce the likelihood of a future occurrence, but it does not resolve the underlying product limitation that customer interactions can occur without any recoverable record being created.

I would appreciate feedback from the Product team on the governance, compliance, and auditability concerns raised in the original enhancement request, rather than guidance on blocking callers, which addresses a different problem entirely.

Hio ​@Elena11

Blocking a caller may reduce the likelihood of a future occurrence, but it does not resolve the underlying product limitation that customer interactions can occur without any recoverable record being created.

We disagree. Blocking a caller will 100% prevent this problem from occurring. If someone can't call, no ticket will ever be created. 

Although we concede that this is not the most practical solution, it will fully resolve the issue you described unless you want to prevent users from creating tickets via email or messaging but not by phone; but we can't see how this would be useful. Would you like to elaborate on that?

Hi Widson,

Thank you for the reply.

I believe we are discussing two different issues.

Your response focuses on how to prevent a future call from occurring by blocking a phone number. While that may be a mitigation for a known caller, it does not address the concern raised in this feedback.

The concern is not whether a suspended user should be able to call.

The concern is what happens when Zendesk allows that call to occur.

In our case, a suspended user successfully completed an 88-minute call with one of our agents. The call took place, customer information was discussed, agent actions were performed, and the interaction became relevant to an ongoing legal matter.

After the interaction concluded:

• No ticket was created.
• No call recording was retained.
• No standard audit trail was available.
• No reviewable interaction record existed within Zendesk.

The statement that blocking a caller "fully resolves the issue" is difficult for us to reconcile with the fact that the interaction had already occurred and left little to no evidence behind it.

The core question remains:

If Zendesk permits a customer interaction to take place, what is the expected mechanism for organisations to review, investigate, audit, or evidence that interaction afterwards?

From an operational perspective, the risk is not the existence of the call itself. The risk is the absence of a recoverable record once the call has occurred.

For organisations operating in regulated environments, auditability and traceability are often more important than prevention. A customer interaction that can occur but cannot subsequently be reviewed presents a governance gap regardless of whether the caller could theoretically have been blocked beforehand.

Could you please clarify Zendesk's position on the auditability of completed calls from suspended users and explain how organisations are expected to handle legal, compliance, regulatory, or customer dispute scenarios where evidence of the interaction is required?

I believe this is the concern that the original feedback is trying to address.

Hi ​@Elena11 

Sorry if I haven't made myself clear.

You initially phrased the problem as:

Currently, a suspended user can successfully place and complete a phone call through Zendesk Voice, but no corresponding ticket is created. 

That is absolutely true. However, we offered a workaround: in addition to suspending a user, block their phone number. If the suspended user who placed the 88-minute call also had their number blocked when they were suspended, the call would never have taken place in the first place. And if you can apply this workaround going forward, you will never have another call from a suspended user.

We understand this workaround is not perfect and relies on your agents being disciplined about blocking users after suspending them. We take your feedback and agree that, ideally, we should have a more integrated and automated way of addressing this issue.

With that said, I understand you have a few calls made by suspended users, but you don't have any record of those interactions (because the users weren't blocked). If you reach out to our Support with the call ID (which you can retrieve from Analytics) or at least the phone number and time of the call, our engineers can try to provide the call recording for you. 

Hi Wilson, 

Thank you for the clarification.

I understand the prevention aspect of the workaround, however I believe it does not address the core concern. The issue is not whether a caller could have been blocked, but what happens when Zendesk allows a suspended user interaction to occur.

Today, if a suspended user sends an email, Zendesk creates a ticket and routes it to Suspended Tickets. The interaction is retained, auditable, and available for future review. Voice interactions behave differently. A suspended user can successfully place a call, speak with an agent, and complete the interaction, yet no corresponding ticket is created and no equivalent audit trail is available through standard Zendesk workflows.

We also have legitimate business cases where there is approval to suspend a customer account, but not to block their phone number. Suspension and phone number blocking serve different purposes and should not be treated as interchangeable actions.

In our case, a suspended user completed an approximately 88-minute call with one of our agents, and that interaction is now relevant to a legal matter. Whether the call could have been prevented beforehand does not change the fact that Zendesk allowed the interaction to take place.

The question therefore remains: why are communications from suspended users retained and auditable in Email, but not in Voice? From a governance, compliance, and evidentiary perspective, we would expect the same principle to apply across channels—if Zendesk permits an interaction to occur, there should be a retained and discoverable record of that interaction.

Your comment that Engineering may be able to recover recordings is helpful, but it also reinforces the concern. If records exist and can potentially be retrieved manually, why is there no accessible audit trail available to administrators through standard Zendesk workflows?

Could you help explain the rationale behind this inconsistency and whether Product has considered aligning Voice with the existing Suspended Tickets model?

Hi ​@Elena11 

I think we are getting there. Your question is:

… Why are communications from suspended users retained and auditable in Email, but not in Voice? … Could you help explain the rationale behind this inconsistency and whether Product has considered aligning Voice with the existing Suspended Tickets model?

The answer is that calls and emails are fundamentally different channels. When you suspend a user, they can still reach out to you by email, but their emails are not routed to an agent; they remain in a separate bucket for later triage. This is, after all, the purpose of suspending users: to prevent abusive users and potential scammers from taking up your agents' valuable time.

Voice differs in that a ticket is created only after the call has been routed and answered by an agent (unless you are using OCR).

Voice could do better by still creating a suspended ticket for calls placed by suspended users. But we think that allowing a suspended user to call your agents and take their availability would completely defeat the purpose of suspending them in the first place (thus, the workaround suggested above).

Rest assured, we will carefully evaluate this decision, taking your feedback into account.

Hi ​@Widson Reis 

Thank you for the update and for outlining the available workaround.

While we appreciate the suggested approach, we would like to reiterate that the primary concern is not whether a workaround exists, but the lack of audibility when a suspended user successfully initiates a call.

In our view, the key issue is that an interaction can take place without any corresponding ticket, call record, or audit trail being created within Zendesk. This creates a visibility and compliance gap, particularly for organisations operating in regulated environments where retaining records of customer interactions is critical.

We fully understand the recommendation to prevent suspended users from reaching Talk destinations through external controls. However, we would appreciate consideration of any additional measures that could be implemented within the Zendesk environment itself to ensure that these interactions remain auditable, even if the call is ultimately blocked or terminated.

Our goal is to ensure that no customer interaction can occur without an appropriate record being retained in Zendesk, as the auditability aspect is the main concern behind this feedback.

Thank you for continuing to review the request.