Public and Private Threads in Tickets

A ticket is a digital record of a customer's issue or query. When ongoing communication occurs between the customer, support agents, consultants, or other stakeholders within the ticket, it forms a ticket thread. This thread contains the full conversation through emails and helps maintain context throughout the resolution process.

Agents can choose to send emails either as public or private.

Availability

Permission Required
Users with the admin profile can enable private thread.                                                                   
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 Public thread 

While replying to a ticket, when the recipient of the response matches either the primary or secondary contact associated with the ticket, the thread is automatically marked as public. This ensures that these parts of the conversation are visible to the recipient in the Help Center.

For example, a customer purchases a gift from an online store and raises a ticket to track the delivery status. Upon creating the ticket, the customer is listed as the primary contact, and adds the gift recipient as a secondary contact (Cc user).

When the support agent replies with an update on the shipment, as the email is addressed to both the contacts, the reply is automatically marked as a public thread. This means both the customer and gift receiver (Cc user) can view the update in their respective Help Centers.

 

Private thread 

If an agent replies to or forwards a ticket to someone who is not the ticket’s primary or secondary contact, agents can manually mark the reply as private. Also, any ticket that is forwarded, regardless of who receives it, is always treated as a private thread.

Private threads are not visible to the ticket contact in the Help Center and no notification is triggered to the contact.

This option is useful when the agent wants to collaborate with someone outside the ticket conversation for advice, approval, or follow-up, such as a consultant or a peer.

For example, a customer raises a ticket about a discrepancy in his credit card billing. The support agent has to consult with an internal fraud investigation team to review transaction logs and verify potential issues, if any.

Since the fraud investigation team is not the primary or secondary contact on the ticket, the agent forwards the ticket details to the team using a private thread. This ensures that the discussion between the support agent and the fraud investigation team remains confidential and is not visible to the customer or secondary contacts in the Help Center, while still being documented within the ticket.

Note

1. Threads that are not sent to the primary or secondary contact will be marked as private by default if the configuration is enabled. Check the how-to below for guidance.  
   
2. All forwarded conversations are marked as private by default.
   
3. Workflow can be triggered for private conversations.
   
4. Private conversations are considered for response time calculations.
   

 

To enable private thread configuration

1. Navigate to Setup > Channels > Email
   
2. Click Advanced Configuration.
   
3. On the Email-Advanced Configuration page, enable Automatically set Ticket threads as private, if requestor is not the recipient.
   

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