Is there a way to make user notes mandatory? (communications > user note > new note) Some of our CSRs are not putting notes in customer's orders. Can there be something created that would make them have to insert a note before going to another order?

You could probably use a workflow to either trigger the confirm or show message actions

not positive, but i imagine you could do a search to count the Notes on an order, then a field that stores that number on the record, then a WF that sees that field is empty and throws an error or the like