The ACCOUNT tab is available for account owner only. It contains menus for account management and configuration, including subscription and billing.

Personalize your help desk

From this page you can perform some of the basic personalization of the help desk:

Help desk name

This is the name that is displayed in the header of your help desk and in all email communication.

Welcome message

Text that appears on the home page of your help desk. 

Time zone

Time zone for your help desk. There’s only one time zone for the entire help desk. All time stamps in the help desk will be set in this time zone.

Home logo

Optional logo for the home page just above the welcome message. Always on a white background. If the uploaded logo is wider than 180 pixels, it will be scaled proportionally down.

Header logo

The logo in the header of your help desk. The backgroud color for your logo will be defined below. If the uploaded logo is higher than 50 pixels, it will be scaled proportionally down.

Header color

The background color for the header of your help desk. You can type in a hex-color value or use the color picker. HTML colors can be defined as a hexadecimal notation for the combination of Red, Green, and Blue color values (RGB). The lowest value that can be given to one light source is 0 (hex #00) and the highest value is 255 (hex #FF), thus black is hex #000000 and white is #FFFFFF. Color values for the tabs and menus will be calculated to match the header color. Default color is value #98C332.

Background color

This is the background color around the page content. Default is grey #333333.

Mails and domains

Email reply address

This is your help desk’s official support email address and the from-address of all email notification sent from your help desk. You can change the address to en email address in your own domain, e.g. support@mycompany.com, but you must ensure that emails to that address gets routed to Zendesk at support@accountname.zendesk.com.

Host mapping

This is the web address of your help desk. It's the address endusers and agents must visit to access your help desk, and that will be used in links in email notifications. You can change the address to an address in your own domain, e.g. http://support.mycompany.com, but you must subsequently create a CNAME DNS record that points support.mycompany.com to accountname.zendesk.com. Your system administrator or domain provider knows how to do this.

Special notice regarding login and host mappings: When a user accesses the login-page on a mapped domain, e.g. http://support.mycompany.com, the login action is sent to the SSL encrypted site https://accountname.zendesk.com and if successful the user is sent back to http://support.mycompany.com. Most users won’t notice and the direct only appears to ensure SSL encryption of the login process.

Enable SSL

All logins are SSL encrypted, but by default all other traffic is unencrypted, unless you enable SSL here. Please notice that SSL encryption will disable host mapping functionality. If a user logs in using the mapped domain, he will be redirected to https://accountname.zendesk.com.

HTML email template

Zendesk employs multipart mails, meaning that both a plain-text as well as an html version of the email is sent. What you see depends on your mail client (and settings). Most mail clients are capable of reading html mails, which most people therefore will see. The html template used for this purpose is customizable. 

Please notice the following placeholders in the template:

{{delimiter}}	The string Zendesk looks for when parsing new comments in mail replies. (Cannot be deleted)
{{header}}	The header of the email, typically identical to the mail subject, and defined in a trigger or an automation. Contains link to the relevant ticket in your help desk.
{{content}}	The content of the mail. Typically defined in a trigger or an automation. (Cannot be deleted).
{{footer}}	The footer content. Static text (This email is a service from...). Contains link to your help desk.

User Admission

This menu describes how you want your users to access and register for your help desk. It’s defined from the following settings:

Open help desk

By enabling this feature, everybody can send in requests via email and have them submitted as tickets without registering. Users are identified by their email address and their names extracted (if possible) from the email header. Users cannot access the help desk web site without registering, but they can self-register.

Ask users to register

When this feature is enabled a user that sends in a support request via email, receives a welcome mail asking him to register before his support request is being processed. If he fails to do so, his support request will be ignored. 

Domain white list

When you have an open help desk, whether you ask users to register or not, you can limit that access to certain domains. Say for example that the help desk is for a campus, then you can create a very open help desk but only for those within the domain (has the white list domain in their email address: e.g. @campus.edu).  You can set up as many white list domains as you please.

Text for user welcome email

This is the email users will be met by if you have enabled "Ask users to register". Users that self-register on the web site, and users that are manually created by agents or admins, receive the same email. The latter can be disabled by disabling "Also send welcome email when a new user is created by an agent or admin". In that case users will only receive the welcome mail if they access the help desk web site and registers on their own initiative.

The email contains a link that the user need to click in order to verify his email address.

Public Forums

By enabling this option you allow anybody to access your help desk web site and read your forum posts, without requiring any form of registration. Public users will not be able to post to forums or access forums available only for agents.

Allow users to sign in via OpenID

You may allow your users to sign in to your Zendesk account using OpenID. A user must be registered in advance, so it doesn’t replace the built-in registration process. But when first registered, users can sign in using their OpenID login, provided that their OpenID is registered in their profile. OpenID is the internet’s best take at a single sign-on strategy. Read more about OpenID here: http://simonwillison.net/2006/openid-screencast/.

Ticket properties

Use this menu to define the following ticket parameters.

Ticket type

There’s currently four different ticket types in Zendesk. Questions, Incidents and Problems. Ticket types follow ITIL best practices.

Question: A request for service or information (service request)

Incident: An interruptive event

Problem: A condition resulting in incidents

Task: Something that must be taken care of. Carries a due date (deadline).

Incidents can link to problems. Only agents and admins can set a ticket’s type.

Ticket type definitions come from ITIL best practices. Incidents are used to describe interruptive events "I can't get this thing to work as expected". Questions can cover anything from a request for service to a simple query "Can you tell me more about...". Problems are used by the help desk agents to describe conditions that can result in incidents, e.g. a memory problem on a Exchange server resulting in Outlook client incidents. Incidents can be linked to a Problem and will inherit the problem's comments and status when being set to solved: "The Exchange server has been fixed and all Outlook issues should stop now. If not please...".

Ticket types can be used as conditions for ticket views, SLA service targets and other business rules. Your reporting can also be split into ticket types. A task's due date is also available for business rules.

You can choose to work without types. So that a ticket is merely a ticket. Technically all tickets are then defaulted to incidents.

Ticket priority

The full set of ticket priorities are defined as follows:

Low: Service may be degraded

Normal: Service is degraded but operations are not impacted

High: Service is severely degraded and operations may be impacted

Urgent: Critical service is unusable and operations are impacted

Priorities are used for setting up business rules, SLA service targets, for reporting and for calculating ticket scores.

Via this setting you can limit yourself to a simple set (Normal and High).

Automatic tagging

Zendesk automatically suggests tags for all new tickets. They're suggested from a built-in dictionary and the climate of your help desk. The more often a tag is employed the higher rank it achieves. The higher the rank, the higher the probability of the tag being suggested. New tags that you manually assign to tickets in your help desk are automatically appended to the dictionary. 

Tags are available for business rules and ticket views.

By disabling automatic tagging, Zendesk will no longer suggest tags for new tickets, but you can still manually assign tags to tickets and use them in business rules and views.

Widgets

Widgets make part of Zendesk's framework to extend and integrate with legacy systems and 3rd party systems. You can embed your own html and javascript code on Zendesk's home page and ticket page by pasting it into the forms displayed on the Widgets page. Use widgets to customize and/or integrate data from outside the help desk. Furthermore, you can access all of the data in your help desk via JSON, mashup with outside data and even replace existing elements in the help desk layout. Read more about Widgets in the Zendesk API documentation.

Your contact information

This is the formal contact information of the company who has entered into agreement with Zendesk and agreed to Zendesk's TOS and Privacy Policy. Please keep this information updated for security and legal reasons. Furthermore your contact information will be printed on all invoices from Zendesk.

Payment and billing

This menu will only be available if you're on a 30 day trial or on paid plan. 

Account owner

You can set any admin to account owner for your help desk. Please remember that only account owner has access to the Account tab. If you change account owner you will immediately be met by a page saying "Access denied", and only the new account owner will be capable of changing it back. 

VAT

Zendesk is a company registered in Denmark, a member of the EU, and are bound to collect the Danish VAT rate of 25% in select cases:

• When you're a Danish company with a VAT number.
  
• When you're a private person in Denmark or the rest of the EU without a VAT number.
  
• When you're a company within the EU that cannot provide a valid VAT number.

Credit card data

If you're on a 30 day trial, you will need to fill out the credit card form before the 30th day to avoid your account being downgraded to a Free plan. 

Please keep your credit data updated at all times.

Please notice that due to local regulations we cannot charge our American Express customers in US dollars. We have to charge AmEx customers in our local currency (DKK, Danish Crowns). The currency conversion will take place at the time of billing, and all invoices will carry a link to today's exchange rate. 

Payments

If you have decided to stay with Zendesk after your 30 day trial by providing your credit card data, your paid and pending payments will be listed here. Invoices are also emailed to account owner at time of invoice. If you choose to cancel your Zendesk account all pending payments will be deferred.

Upgrade, downgrade or cancel account

This is the interface for upgrading or downgrading your account. Simply pick a plan of your choice and click the respective "Downgrade" or "Upgrade" link. The new plan will come into effect immediately.

Within your 30 day free trial you can upgrade and downgrade freely.

If you're past your 30 day free trial and already on a paid plan you will be charged the new rate for your new plan with your next billing cycle.

If you're past your 30 day free trial and on a free plan and upgrade to a paid plan, you will be asked to provide your credit card details and your billing cycle will commence immediately. 

When downgrading, please be aware that surplus agents and admins, according to the new plan, will loose all privileges. If the new plan has a lower cap on end-users than the current plan, excess end-users will have all their tickets locked, and new users will be rejected.