I have been trying to jump into the Deletion Schedules pool this week and have found some extreme things lacking. Hopefully I can build a case for these 4(ish) suggested features:
1) Out of the box, there are only two conditions you can set (unless you buy an advanced package) to control what is included. The first is hard coded. It shouldn't be hard coded. Let us have two conditions that we choose please. Zendesk has selected “Last Updated”. That's not a bad selection, but when you look at the previewed results, you don't even see that field. The field you see with a date is “Last active”. This is confusing. (A preview, by the way, should at minimum also include the Ticket ID, pretty please?). I was hoping for some way to identify tickets in my case that were created from 0 to July 31, 2022. There's no way to do that. Or, alternately, to be able to set a condition by the Solved date. That would be nice.
2) Why can't we have a condition with a date range? Why do I have to go to https://timeanddate.com to figure out the calculation of July 31 to (today) and have to enter the exact number of days into the condition builder? That's great if you're doing a rolling deletion, but if you're trying to do a one off purge, this is not helpful at all. There should at best be an option to choose a date range OR the existing # days,months,weeks,years that exists now.
3) Enhance the Preview Results feature. As suggested in (1) above, this needs to have the Ticket ID in it. I want to be able to spot check that ticket to know it's the right ticket to get deleted. I could have any number of dozens to hundreds of tickets with exact subjects. This is not reassuring. Most importantly is the subject of DATA INTEGRITY. How, for example, can I know for sure what tickets are going to be deleted? This seems like a silly question because yes, I set a query above, so those are the tickets that get deleted. But is it? I created reports in Explore to try to find out how many I should be expecting.
Here's a use case (and I'm just making these numbers small and simple for example, as my numbers were way, way bigger…):
-- I configured the Deletion Schedule to the number of days between July 31 and (today) and set the Form to the form I wanted to identify the tickets to delete with. I got a preview of 96 tickets. I set up a report in the Update History dataset in Explore for the same conditions: Tickets that were closed and that were last updated between 0 and July 31,2022. My results in the Explore query was 100. Where are the other 4 tickets that should be deleted? AND… how can I be absolutely sure that the 96 in the preview are a subset of the 100 in the Explore report? If preview gave me 96 and Explore gave me 96, I'd probably not think anything of it, move on, and set the deletion schedule. Since these are tickets that have been closed since 2022, I can't imagine I'm working with an issue where Explore hasn't updated the dataset. This is old stuff.
What we need are two things:
a) An Explore recipe for showing EXACTLY what to expect in a Deletion Schedule, and
b) An EXPORT feature in the Deletion Schedule. There needs to be a “modeller”: A function that would model the deletion, not actually perform it, but create an .cvs or .xls output of the files (again… please… with Ticket ID number) so I could run a compare between what Zendesk's Deletion Schedules say will be deleted vs what I should expect via an Explore report will be deleted.
If I get two different numbers from the Preview and from Explore it could mean a few things:
a) There is something going on ‘under the hood’ in what Deletion Schedules considers “Viable” for deletion that is not readily apparent and visible, and/or
b) There is something else than what is apparent in the Deletion Schedules that I need to be configuring an Explore report so that I get the same matches. Again, an Explore recipe that matches exactly how a basic 2 condition deletion schedule works would be really fantastic.
This is a big issue to us as we are nearing (95%) of our data storage and should not have to buy more storage when we've identified hundreds of thousands of tickets we can easily delete. I just need to know WHAT I am deleting and that it's the correct data and deletion is a bit of a severe action to take, of course.
4) A way to delete not just users or tickets, but ATTACHMENTS via this interface. Sometimes, it might be useful just to have the attachments removed to save space. Outside of painful API calls, I don't have a way to do that. This interface would be the perfect place to embed this feature right into the Admin Center.
