Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Somebody asks what you hold about them, or asks you to delete it. What Zendesk does is more specific than the question is, including what happens in the 30 days after a deletion.
The steps
- Verify who is asking. This comes first, always.
- Find everything: their user record, their tickets, tickets where they are CC'd, and any attachments.
- Decide what the request covers and what you are obliged to keep.
- Export, redact or delete accordingly. A user cannot be deleted while they are the requester on any ticket that is not closed, so solve those first and wait for them to close. That waiting is part of your deadline.
- Record what was asked, when, how identity was verified, what was removed and what was kept and why.
Verify first
A request arriving by email is a request from an email address, nothing more. Acting on it without verification is how you hand somebody's data to whoever asked for it, and it is the step that gets skipped under time pressure.
What the tools do
| Redaction | An agent redacts a string in a ticket conversation and the characters are replaced with a replacement character. The ticket survives, so your history and reporting survive with it. |
| Ticket deletion | Delete in the ticket options menu, for agents and admins with the permission. |
| User deletion | Delete in the user options menu, for end users and agents alike. |
| Full JSON Export | A JSON file of all users, for access requests. It has to be switched on for the account first: ask pluscloud support to arrange it before you need it. |
A deleted user is not gone for 30 days
Deletion happens in two stages. The user is soft deleted and stays in the Zendesk database for 30 days, after which Zendesk permanently deletes them automatically. During that month the record remains reachable on a limited basis by Zendesk employees with database privileges, so be precise when you tell somebody their data is gone.
Say that plainly when you confirm a deletion, because "deleted" and "permanently deleted" are a month apart and somebody will eventually ask which one you meant.
Afterwards, ticket fields taken from the user's profile, such as the requester's name, show the placeholder Permanently Deleted User. The tickets themselves stay.
Searching is the hard part
People appear under several addresses, in tickets they did not raise, inside attachments and in the text of other people's tickets. Searching their address finds the obvious cases and not all of them.
The Advanced Data Privacy and Protection add-on helps here: it adds redaction suggestions that highlight personal data automatically, and multiple ticket deletion schedules. If you handle these requests regularly it is worth asking us whether it fits.
Deletion is not always the answer
You may be obliged to keep records for tax, contractual or legal reasons, so deleting everything on request can breach a different obligation. Redaction is often the better tool: the personal data goes, the ticket stays.
Where obligations conflict, that is a question for whoever owns compliance in your organisation, not one to settle in the ticket.
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