PII Redaction for Past Tickets

Turn on PII redaction so credit card numbers, names, addresses and other personal details are removed from past tickets before eesel stores or indexes them.

Turn on PII redaction to remove credit card numbers, SSNs, names, addresses, and more from past helpdesk tickets before they're persisted or indexed.

What it does

When PII redaction is enabled, every past ticket your agent syncs is run through an AI-based detector before anything is written to the database or sent to the search index. Personally identifiable information is replaced with a typed mask like [REDACTED:CC] or [REDACTED:EMAIL].

This means:

• Your agent cannot see the original PII when retrieving from past tickets

• Your stored ticket history does not contain the original PII

• The search index does not contain the original PII

The masked content still has plenty of context for the agent to learn from, only the sensitive substrings are removed.

What gets redacted

The detector looks for fifteen categories of PII:

Category	Examples
Credit cards	4532-1234-5678-9010
Social Security Numbers	123-45-6789
Date of birth	"DOB: 1984-07-19"
Bank account / IBAN	GB82 WEST 1234 5698 7654 32
API keys & secrets	AWS keys, Stripe sk_live_*, OpenAI sk-*, GitHub ghp_*, etc.
JSON Web Tokens	eyJhbGciOi…
Email addresses	[e-mail]
Phone numbers	[phone], [phone]
Person names	"John Smith called…"
Physical addresses	"742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield, IL 62701"
IP addresses	IPv4 and IPv6
Passport numbers	6–9 alphanumeric
Driver's licence numbers
National IDs	Aadhaar, NHS number, etc.
Tax IDs	EIN, VAT, etc.

The detector knows to ignore well-known non-PII lookalikes, including:

• Product, brand, or company names (Salesforce, Stripe, Acme Co.)

• Test card numbers (4242 4242 4242 4242, 5555 5555 5555 4444, etc.)

• Order numbers, invoice IDs, ticket IDs

• Dates that aren't introduced as birth dates

Where it applies

PII redaction runs on past helpdesk tickets that are synced into your agent's knowledge for training. It is opt-in per integration.

Surface	Redaction applies?
Past tickets synced from your helpdesk	Yes, when enabled
Help Center articles, macros, knowledge base pages	No
Files uploaded to your workspace	No
Conversations the agent has at runtime	No
Tickets that were indexed before you enabled the toggle	No (see below)

Turning redaction on or off

Today the toggle lives on the Zendesk Tickets path-settings page. Other helpdesks run the same redactor on their past-ticket syncs and follow your workspace's default; they just don't have their own switch yet.

1. In your agent's platform view, open the connected Zendesk integration

2. Click Tickets in the integration's sub-menu, then open its settings

3. Scroll to the Redact PII before indexing toggle

4. Flip it on (or off) and click Save Settings

Check the toggle rather than assuming it's on. Redaction is off by default for workspaces created recently. Older workspaces have it on by default. Either way, whatever you explicitly set always wins, so if you want it on, turn it on and save.

Once it's on, the next past-tickets sync (whether you trigger it manually or it runs after a settings change) puts incoming tickets through the redactor.

What this doesn't do

• Existing indexed tickets are not retroactively redacted. Flipping the toggle only affects tickets ingested from now on. To re-redact older tickets, trigger a fresh past-tickets sync.

• Runtime tool calls aren't affected. When the agent fetches a Zendesk ticket live (e.g., to draft a reply), the raw ticket content reaches the model. Redaction only runs on the persistent training corpus.

• Non-helpdesk knowledge sources aren't affected. Articles, files, and other sources are not run through the redactor.

• The toggle only appears on Zendesk. Other helpdesks follow your workspace's setting when they sync past tickets, but they don't have their own switch yet.

FAQ

How accurate is it?

Detection runs on a fast, modern LLM (Gemini 3 Flash) with a tuned prompt and a deny-list of common false positives. In our benchmarks against synthetic support tickets the redactor catches the vast majority of obvious PII without flagging things like product names or test card numbers.

That said, no automated detector is perfect:

• A new or unusual PII format may slip through

• A name that's also a common noun may be missed

• Very long tickets may have lower recall than short ones

If you're indexing tickets that contain especially sensitive data (e.g., regulated health information), pair this feature with the usual access controls and consider clearing especially sensitive tickets from your helpdesk before sync.

Does redaction slow down ticket sync?

There's an additional ~1-2 seconds per ticket for the LLM call. Past-ticket sync is a background job, so this doesn't affect interactive operations.

What happens if the redactor's AI service is unavailable?

The sync fails closed: tickets that can't be redacted are skipped rather than indexed in their raw form, and retried on the next sync.

Can I see what was redacted from each ticket?

Not in the UI today. The number and types of redactions per ticket are logged on our side so support can investigate specific cases on request.

Do you store the original ticket content anywhere after redaction?

No. The redacted version replaces the original before anything is persisted in our database or sent to the search index.

Does redaction work on Intercom, Freshdesk, Gorgias, and HubSpot?

Yes. The same detector runs when those integrations sync past tickets, following your workspace's default (or a setting saved for that integration). What they don't have yet is their own toggle in the UI, so if you want to be certain of the state on a non-Zendesk helpdesk, ask us in the support chat.

For privacy questions about redaction, start a conversation in the support chat under Help and support in your dashboard, or email [e-mail].