How to Automate Zendesk Redaction for Text and Support Tickets
- Neal Travis
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Managing sensitive customer data needs to be a priority for any support organization.
Whether it’s personally identifiable information (PII), payment data, or private communication, keeping customer data secure and compliant with regulations like GDPR or HIPAA is critical.
This is where redaction comes into play.
Zendesk provides some built-in functionality for redacting sensitive content from tickets, and with the help of tools like Swifteq’s Auto Remove Attachments and Ticket Parser Autofill, you can take redaction to the next level—fully automated, efficient, and scalable.
Here’s how you can make Zendesk redaction easy and automatic.
What Is Redaction in Zendesk?
Redaction in Zendesk refers to the process of permanently removing sensitive information from support tickets. This can include customer names, addresses, credit card numbers, email addresses, and attachments.
Redaction is irreversible and ensures that the removed data is deleted from all Zendesk systems, including logs and search indexes.
There are various contexts where redaction is important:
To comply with privacy regulations.
To ensure internal data hygiene.
To reduce risk in the case of data breaches.
For example, I think we’ve all had that one customer that included their full credit card number in a ticket comment.
Manually finding and redacting that comment can be missed when agents are focused on quickly working the ticket queue.
However, it’s critically important to keep that information out of our systems to avoid breaches, loss of trust, and reputational harm.
Zendesk offers manual and automatic redaction options for different use cases.
What Is Zendesk’s Automatic Redaction?
Zendesk’s automatic redaction is currently limited to one primary feature: the automatic redaction of credit card numbers using the Luhn algorithm.
When enabled, Zendesk scans incoming ticket content and automatically redacts credit card numbers to mask sensitive digits.
How to enable automatic ticket redaction in Zendesk:
Go to Admin Center > Security > More settings.
Enable Redact credit card numbers.
This feature only applies to new ticket comments and doesn't affect existing tickets or suspended tickets. It also can't detect all types of sensitive information.
If you’re using Zendesk APIs, Zendesk also recently released several new endpoints in its Ticket Comments API. These endpoints function like a Zendesk Redaction API, allowing you to redact comments from closed tickets, archived tickets, chat comments, and more.
For anything beyond credit card numbers, you'll need to rely on manual redaction or third-party tools to automate the redaction process.
Redacting ticket comments and content manually in Zendesk
Zendesk allows agents to manually redact ticket content. This includes:
Ticket comments.
Side conversation messages.
Attachments.
Redaction is performed via the Agent Workspace interface, where agents can hover over text and select Mark text for redaction. After confirmation, the content is permanently removed from Zendesk’s records.
Use cases include:
Removing email addresses or phone numbers.
Scrubbing PII shared in chat logs or emails.
A "redacted_content" tag is also added automatically to redacted tickets, which can be useful for filtering and reporting.
Manual redaction in ticket comments is straightforward but labor-intensive:
Open a ticket.
Hover over the message text.
Click the three-dot menu.
Select Mark text for redaction.
Confirm redaction.
This approach works well for one-off cases, but doesn't scale for high-volume customer service environments. Agents must locate the data manually and redact each snippet individually, making it time-consuming and prone to human error.
Process execution and manual monitoring of this information is not something that you want to leave to chance, especially if you are in a compliance-focused industry that carries liability for breaches.
Redacting content in ticket Side Conversations
Zendesk also allows redaction in Side Conversations. These often contain sensitive internal or customer-facing information passed between departments.
Steps are similar:
Go to the side conversation panel within the ticket.
Hover over the content.
Select and redact the necessary parts.
However, redaction in Side Conversations does not always propagate immediately. For example, if the conversation is synced with an email system, the redacted content may already exist in external mailboxes.
As a best practice, always verify where else that content may live so you can fully redact it from all of your systems.
Limitations of Native Zendesk Redaction Features
While Zendesk's redaction tools are helpful, they come with important limitations that customer service teams need to be aware of:
Not Retrospective: Automatic credit card redaction only works on new tickets; it doesn’t clean up old data (the API can redact closed tickets, but it requires more technical setup
Attachments: Zendesk does not natively support automatic attachment redaction.
Manual Workload: Requires agents to identify and redact data themselves.
Audit Gaps: No comprehensive redaction logging dashboard to track activity across the helpdesk.
That’s where Zendesk apps like Swifteq step in to solve the problem.
Attachments Redaction with Swifteq
If you’re regularly using Zendesk’s ticket redaction features and find they’re falling short, you should check out Swifteq’s Auto Remove Attachments and Ticket Parser Autofill.
They’re easy to set up, and they make automatic Zendesk redaction a far more reliable process.
The Auto Remove Attachments app allows you to automate attachment removal from tickets using customizable rules:
Auto-redact attachments with sensitive information based on ticket status, tags, or ticket age.
Apply file-type rules: Keep only images, or remove PDFs after 30 days.
Add retention policies: Automatically clean up old attachments on closed or solved tickets.
Comment tagging: Automatically leave a note in the ticket when redaction occurs.
This is perfect for cleaning up large volumes of tickets and staying compliant without requiring significant agent effort.
While not a redaction tool in the classic sense, Ticket Parser Autofill supports secure data handling:
Parses structured or unstructured ticket content to extract values like order numbers, addresses, or sensitive phrases.
Automatically fills ticket fields so that private data doesn’t stay in comment threads.
Supports AI and regex parsing to suit every use case.
Combined, these apps build off Zendesk’s ticket redaction functionality to improve accuracy and reduce the likelihood of exposing sensitive content in agent replies.
Redact Automatically Sensitive Information
For redacting broader categories of sensitive data, Zendesk offers an additional paid add-on called the Advanced Data Privacy and Protection (ADPP) package.
With ADPP you can:
Automatically detect and highlight PII (emails, phone numbers, names, etc.).
Allow agents to confirm redaction with a single click.
However, this add-on is expensive ($50 per agent per month) and requires configuration.
Also, you cannot use it concurrently with Zendesk’s automatic credit card redaction - you must choose one.
For most teams, ADPP is a partial solution. Combining Zendesk tools with Swifteq apps gives the most comprehensive, flexible automated ticket redaction process.
Tips to Automate and Improve Zendesk Ticket Redaction
If your team is dealing with a lot of sensitive information, here are some best practices to automate and streamline redaction:
Use tags and triggers: Automatically apply a "please_redact" tag when certain keywords are found, and let Swifteq handle the cleanup.
Set retention rules: Use Swifteq’s Auto Remove Attachments to delete files from tickets after a set number of days.
Parse automatically Use Swifteq’s Ticket Parser Autofill to extract sensitive data from customer comments and populate it into secure fields.
Leverage comments: When you redact something from a ticket, add a private comment noting what was redacted and why (without specifying the sensitive info) to aid auditing.
Train your agents: Provide short training on redaction best practices and tool usage. While redaction can feel like a pain, emphasize how important it is for compliance and for keeping trust with your customers
Monitor and report: Use analytics to see how often redaction happens and where you might be storing unnecessary data.
Scale Zendesk ticket redaction and build trust
Redacting sensitive information in Zendesk is not just a compliance checkbox. It's a core part of maintaining trust with your customers and delivering a quality customer experience.
Zendesk offers solid redaction features, but they are mostly manual and limited in scope. With apps like Auto Remove Attachments and Ticket Parser Autofill, you can automate, scale, and future-proof your redaction workflows.
Learn more about Swifteq’s Apps to get started today! Or alternatively ask for a demo to see them in action.
Written by Neal Travis
Curious learner and builder of customer experiences in scale-ups. He is the Head of Customer Experience at the Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) and Host of Growth Support.