The MANAGE tab is available for administrators only. It contains menus for setting up users and configuring your business rules.

Users

From this page you can look up a user or create a new user. When looking up an existing user you can filter on role or on organization.

Roles are:

• End-user. The people you provide support to.
  
• Report viewer. A specific role for accessing reports solely.
  
• Agent. People you can assign tickets to. Also known as operators.
  
• Admin. Agents that also can configure the help desk with regard to users, business rules, forums and more.

Organizations are end-user groups defined by yourself. They can only consist of end-users.

Search-result lists for users display users’ name, photo and email address. Users that aren’t verified have “(unregistered)” displayed. This means that a user has submitted a support request via email but haven’t registered his email address on the actual web site. If the user is an agent or admin his group memberships (if any) are also displayed. If the user is an end-user his organization affiliation (if any) is displayed next to the name.

From the list you can see a user’s profile by clicking the name, edit a user (via the Edit link) or assume the user (via the assume link). Editing a user results in a page similar to the Add User page. Assuming a user means that you temporarily login as that user, allowing you to experience the help desk from that user’s perspective and/or act on behalf of that user. You exit an assumed role by clicking on the “Revert identity” link in top right corner of the header.

User Profile

The user profile page displays all profile information for a specific user. This page is accessible for the end-user himself, for agents and for admins.

Admins (and the end-user himself) can edit the profile and change password.

In the right-hand text box, there's access to figures relevant for the current user. For end-users it’s how many tickets they have requested and their latest activity. For agents and admins it’s a list of assigned tickets, solved tickets and links to lately updated tickets.

Add User

A user is created with the following details:

• Name (for users created via email, name is extracted from mail-header)
  
• Email (used for login)
  
• Phone number (optional). Will be displayed with tickets.
  
• Photo (optional). Will be displayed in a ticket’s event log and in forums. The photo is scaled to 80x80 pixels
  
• Detailed information (optional). Will be displayed with tickets. 
  
• Notes. Can be edited from the context of a ticket by all agents.
• Roles (end-user, report viewer, agent, admin)
  
• Group-relations (agents and admins only)
  
• Organization-affiliations (end-users only)

Organizations

Organizations are end-users’ equivalent to agents’ groups. It’s a method of grouping your end-users. End-user organizations are also referred to as multitenancy. It gives you the ability to service several different customer or end-user organizations individually. You can group your end-users by internal department, by customer, by client type or whatever organization type that makes sense for your business.

Organizations can be made subject to Zendesk's business rules. You can group your tickets by organization. You can define views for specific organizations only. You can auto-assign tickets from certain organizations to selected groups. You can create specific triggers that notifies executives if a certain organization submits urgent tickets and so on.

Organization affiliation can manually be set from the user profile. You cannot manually affiliate users to organizations from the organization administration page.

An organization’s attributes are:

• Name
  
• Detailed information. Will be displayed with tickets from organization affiliates.
• Notes. Can be edited from the context of a ticket by all agents.
• Map users to organization. If your end-user organizations are separate enterprises with individual e-mail domains you can configure Zendesk to automatically assign new users to an organization based on the user's e-mail address. Please notice that mappings doesn’t affect current users in your system. Only new users. Already registered users must be assigned to a newly created organization manually.
  
• Map organization to group. If selected all incoming tickets from users affiliated with the organization will be assigned to the selected group.
  
• Shared organization. A shared organization allows all users in the organization to view tickets from other users in the same organization.

Organizations are currently not available for setting up SLA service targets.

Remember that when employing business rules for tickets, that a ticket doesn’t belong to a organization. It’s the ticket requester that belongs to a organization.

Groups

Groups is the concept used to group your agents. Tickets can be assigned to a group without being assigned to an agent. It’s then the responsibility of the group members to assign it to an individual. The rationalization is that it cannot be the responsibility of the assigner to identify an assignee for the ticket, but only to assign it to a group of people with the right skills. Then they must decide the assignee.

When a ticket has been assigned to an individual in a group, the ticket can not be changed back to unassigned within the same group. 

The only attribute for a group is its name besides its members. There must always be at least one group in the system, and an agent must always be member of at least one group. The default group for a vanilla Zendesk help desk is “support”. When only one group is present all tickets are automatically assigned to that group, and the group name is not displayed anywhere. Same goes if you only have one agent in the system (as Free and Solo plans have per se) then tickets are assigned to the default group and to the only agent in that group be default. In a one-group-one-agent setup, tickets can not live without an assigned group or an assignee.

Views

Ticket views are like smart folders or inbox filters for your tickets. They're easy to configure and can act on any ticket parameter.

Views can be set to active or inactive. Only active views are available through the VIEWS tab. Click “Deactivate” to make an active view inactive, and “Activate” to make an inactive view active. 

Active views can be reordered (Click “reorder views” then drag your views to the desired positions) and this will affect the order they’re listed in the VIEWS tab.

Add view

Clicking the “Add view” link takes you to a page similar to the “Edit view” page for listed views. Attributes for a view are:

• Title. 
  
• Conditions. These are the requirements that a ticket must live up to in order to be made part of the view. All basic ticket properties are available such as priority, type, assignee and so on.
  
  • Tags also serves as conditions and you can set up a view that only displays tickets tagged with e.g. Outlook, SAP, portal etc.
    
  • Conditions can also be related to time. E.g. “hours since created”, “hours since assigned” and so on. This allows you to create views that only display ticket of a certain age or ticket that has been lying still for a while.
    
  • You can add as many conditions to a view as desired (by clicking the green button with a plus-sign). Conditions are deleted by clicking the red button with the minus-sign.
    
• Formatting. The default format a view is presented in. Can be table, list or tag cloud.
  
  • Tables are customizable data grids with condensed content.
    • When table formatting is chosen you can decide which columns are included in the view and which aren’t. To add a new column to your table simply drag the relevant column title from “Columns not included in table”-list to the “Columns included in table”-list. And vice-versa.
    • You can group your table by a ticket property. If for example you choose to group your table by “status” all urgent tickets will be grouped followed by all high priority tickets and so on
    • You can choose a ticket property to order by too. Say, you’ve grouped by status, then all tickets within the Urgent grouping can be sorted by e.g. request date.
  • Lists are more detailed and carry longer title and the latest comment available. There’s no customization available for lists. Only sorting. 
    
  • Tag clouds display the 100 most used tags for the matching tickets as a tag cloud.
    
• Availability. Lets admins define whether this is a private vies or a view for all agents. Agents can access, add and define private view from their profile page.

Macros

Macros are like ticket templates (also known as quick cases or canned replies) that can be applied to your current ticket operation. When working on a ticket, you can apply a macro to the ticket and all relevant fields are populated with the content you had recorded in your macro.

All affected fields are marked with green text, so that you know what the macro has changed. But you are free to alter the fields and you won't be able to see from the event log that a macro has been employed.

When editing or adding a macro it holds the following attributes:

• Title
  
• Actions. These are the tickets fields you want to change when applying a macro. E.g.:
  
  •  “Status” - “Solved”
    
  • “Priority” - “Normal”
    
  • You can also change the description or current comment for a ticket, and this comment can include placeholders such as ticket ID, assignee and similar. But be aware that such placeholder might not be available when applying the macro. If for example the macro is applied for a new ticket, neither ticket ID or assignee has been set yet.
    
• Availability. Lets admins define whether this is a private macro or a macro for all agents. Agents can access, add and define private macros from their profile page.

Forums

Forums are where you can post announcements and service information, and involve your endusers and invite to knowledge sharing. Forums can be accessed from the Home page.

The forum list displays all forums in your help desk. Below the forum name it is stated how many topics (or threads) have been started in that forum, and how many posts they carry. A forum configured for agents or admins only are marked with "Private" in bold.

Clicking the edit-link for a forum brings you to a page similar to the Add Forum page.

Add forum

Attributes for a forum are:

• Title
• Description. Will be displayed next to the forum on its front page.
• Access rights. Agents (private) or everybody.
  • Restrict access to end-users affiliated with a certain organization.
  • Write access. Agents or logged-in users.

Triggers

Triggers are performed on the request of changes and updates to tickets. You define ticket state changes as conditions (as when defining views) and tie in with relevant actions. 

Triggers can be set to active or inactive. Only active triggers will be performed when tickets are updated. Click “Deactivate” to make an active trigger inactive, and “Activate” to make an inactive trigger active. 

Active triggers can be reordered (Click “reorder triggers” then drag your triggers to the desired positions) and this will affect the order they’re performed in. Be aware that triggers cascade which can result in infinite loops. Say one trigger changes all pending tickets to solved and another all solved tickets to pending. These two triggers will run indefinitely.

Add trigger

Clicking the “Add trigger” link takes you to a page similar to the “Edit trigger” page for listed triggers. Attributes for a trigger are:

• Title
  
• Conditions. Very similar to conditions for views (see above) except for:
  
  • “Ticket is...” which can either be “created” or “updated” to differentiate triggers that should only be applied when tickets are either created or updated.
    
  • “Ticket origin is...” for when a ticket's origin is email. By setting up a trigger that qualifies the recipient address, you can for example assign that ticket to a specific group and add relevant tags based on that. All addresses @account.zendesk.com works out of the box.
    
• Actions. Very similar to actions for macros (see above) except for:
  • Notify user. This action lets you send out an email to relevant assignee, requester or to any agent or admin in the system. The mail body can contain placeholders such as ticket ID, assignee and similar (toggle the available placeholders by clicking the “View available placeholders »” link below the mail body field).
    
  • Notify group. Does exactly the same as “notify user” but to all members of the selected group.

Automations

Automations are performed from time-driven conditions. Suitable for escalations and other time-related condition-driven actions. Automations run once every hour and doesn’t cascade, i.e. the order of your automations can be important. 

Automations can be set to active or inactive. Only active automations will be performed hourly. Click “Deactivate” to make an active automation inactive, and “Activate” to make an inactive automation active. 

An automation can result in an action that activates another automation, provided that they are performed in the right order. Automations can be reordered (Click “reorder views” then drag your views to the desired positions) and this will affect the order they’re performed in.

Add automation

Clicking the “Add automation” link takes you to a page similar to the “Edit automation” page for listed automations. Attributes for an automation are:

• Title
  
• Conditions. Identical to conditions for views (see above).
  
• Actions. Identical to actions for triggers (see above).

SLA Service Targets

Service targets make part of an SLA, Service Level Agreement. Service targets define how fast you target to address and solve various ticket types. SLA compliance reports display your service target compliance and tickets that threaten your service targets are accentuated in separate system-generated ticket views.

Service targets can be set to active or inactive. Only active service targets spawns reports and ticket view. Click “Deactivate” to make an SLA service target inactive, and “Activate” to make an inactive target active. 

Add SLA service target

Clicking the “Add SLA service target” link takes you to a page similar to the “Edit” page for listed service targets. Attributes for SLA service targets are first of all a fulfillment target: Percentage (0-100%) of tickets that according to your SLA must comply with the following conditions:

Tickets: 

of any ticket type or only questions or incidents or problems 

with a priority: 

equal to or less than or greater than: 

any priority or a specific priority

must be assigned to an agent: 

immediately or within X hours

and solved within: 

X hours or days

Defining an SLA service target with the above conditions set will then result in a target saying e.g.: 90% of tickets must be assigned to an agent within 4 hours and solved within 24 hours. Your ability to comply to this service target is available as a report from the REPORTS tab, and all tickets that are overdue with regard to the conditions are displayed in specific views in the VIEW tab under the heading “SLA service targets”. Each service target spawns two views: One for tickets that are overdue with regard to assignment, another for tickets that are overdue with regard to resolution.