Feature Request: Tag, Search, and Report on Individual Private Comments

Feature Request: Tag, Search, and Report on Individual Private Comments

Zoho Desk Team,

First, I want to say that we are extensive users of Zoho Desk and it is a core part of our support operations. We rely heavily on the private comments feature for internal communication, knowledge sharing, and maintaining a clear history of ticket handling.

Our Current Challenge:

In every single one of our tickets, our agents leave very specific and critical internal notes as Private Comments. For example, we document detailed technical findings, steps for escalations, or important account context.

To manage this, we've adopted a manual workaround of starting these comments with a hashtag, like #technotes. While this helps visually when scanning a thread, this system has significant limitations:

  1. Lack of Visibility: The #technotes comment is still buried within a potentially long thread of other internal notes and agent replies. Finding the critical piece of information requires manually scrolling and searching within the ticket.

  2. No Reporting: We cannot run any reports to analyze this data. We have no way to track how many tickets have technical notes, who is adding them, or review the quality of these notes across the help desk.

  3. API Limitations: It is not possible to fetch only the comments tagged with #technotes via the API. We have to pull all comments for a ticket and then do the parsing on our end, which is inefficient and cumbersome.

  4. No UI Distinction: There is no way to make these specific, important comments stand out from a regular internal comment, which slows down agents who need to find key information quickly.

The Proposed Solution: Categorized Private Comments

We propose the introduction of a feature that allows agents to add a category or tag to an individual private comment.

Imagine when an agent goes to write an internal note, they have an optional dropdown or tag input where they can classify that specific comment as a "Tech Note," "Account Summary," "Action Item," or any other custom category we define.

This would unlock several powerful capabilities:

  • UI Enhancements: Comments with a specific category could have a different background color or a unique icon. This would solve the visibility problem instantly.

  • Advanced Search: We could then search for all tickets that contain a private comment with the category "Tech Note" that was added in the last 30 days.

  • Powerful Reporting: This data would be a goldmine. We could create reports on the volume and content of specific comment types, which is invaluable for quality assurance, training, and identifying knowledge gaps.

  • Granular API Access: The API should allow filtering for comments based on this category. A call like GET /api/v1/tickets/{ticket_id}/comments?category=tech_note would be transformative for our custom integrations and data analysis.

A Clear Opportunity for Innovation

We understand that feature development is complex. However, this isn't just about adding a small feature; it's about fundamentally improving internal knowledge management within the help desk.

Many platforms, including your competitors, have robust ticket-level tagging but lack this granular, comment-level categorization. Implementing this would not be just following the market—it would be a novel and powerful differentiator that addresses a real-world, daily pain point for support teams.

Thank you for your consideration. We believe this feature would be a massive value-add for Zoho Desk and are eager to see the platform continue to evolve.

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