Question
How are ticket channels defined across Zendesk?
Answer
Below are a couple of tables to help you identify the various ticket channels across Support. The Tickets column helps you identify what the submission channel is on a given ticket within the agent interface.
| Support channels | Tickets | Ticket channels in triggers, automations, and views |
| By email to [support address] | Email
Closed ticket (follow-up tickets) |
|
| Help Center | From Help Center | Web form (through Help Center) Help Center post |
| Chat | For completed chats, Zopim-Zendesk Integration v2 For offline messages and missed chats, |
Chat |
| Talk | Not present under events log, but all phone call tickets will be preceded with an internal note including call details | Voicemail
Phone call (incoming) Phone call (outgoing) Text |
| Web Widget | Not explicitly present under events log, but includes a small link at the bottom of the first comment indicating where it was submitted, like this: Submitted from: https://z3n-bananas.zendesk.com/hc/en-us Additionally at the top of the page beneath the Subject field it indicates that the ticket was submitted [via Web Widget] |
Web Widget |
| API | Web service (API) | Web service (API)
CTI voicemail CTI phonecall (incoming) CTI phonecall (outgoing) Ticket Sharing Get Satisfaction Satisfaction prediction |
| Support Mobile SDK | Will display as Zendesk-SDK in addition to some device information (iOS or Android) like so:
Zendesk-SDK/1.9.0.1 iOS/10.2 Env/Development |
Mobile SDK |
| Chat Mobile SDK | The Mobile Chat SDK will read the same as above in the events log, however the User Agent string that comes in as an internal note with chat information will include ChatMobile-SDK in addition to some app and device information (iOS or Android) |
Chat |
| Mobile |
At the bottom of the ticket Zendesk will display as Zendesk for, in addition to some device information (iOS or Android) like so: Zendesk for iPhone 1.5.1 (5674) |
Mobile |
| At the bottom of the ticket will be the following:
[timestamp] via [Twitter handle] These are hyperlinked to the original post in Twitter |
Twitter
Twitter DM (direct message) Twitter Like |
|
| At the bottom will be the following:
[timestamp] via [Facebook post or message] These are hyperlinked to the original post in Facebook |
Facebook post
Facebook private message |
|
| Support UI | From Zendesk Support |
Web form Automation |
43 Comments
There are no 'channel integration' channels. Why and how can we see the statistics for the tickets that have been created via a channel integration app?
Hey Kiryl,
Channel Integrations are handled a little bit differently in Business Rules. From a triggers/automations standpoint, you would want to use the "Ticket: Integration account" option in your conditions, rather than just "Ticket: Channel". Per our documentation here:
This condition checks the integration account that the ticket came from, such as a specific Facebook page, Twitter handle, or other channel integration account, like GooglePlay. Select one of your configured integration accounts from the drop-down menu.
If you're looking to report on this with a tool like Insights, there's a lot of different ways to track Channel Integration tickets. If you haven't seen it already, I'd recommend checking out this other doc about how various channel-related metrics are populated in Insights here.
Dear Claire,
"Sample Interactive Ticket" comes under which type ?
Thank you,
Prasanth Sai
Hi Prasanth!
I'm afraid I don't understand your question...what sample ticket are you referring to?
When I'm setting the Channel as a criteria in a trigger, I see the option of "Web form". What is that? and why is it not on this list?
Hi Jessie,
In the Via field, I see "Sample Interactive Ticket" type. What is it actually ?
Thank you.
Hi Britton!
The "web form" option actually is on the list in this article, in the Help Center section. This refers to tickets created either by a form in your Help Center or by an agent in the agent interface.
Hey Prasanth,
Can you provide a screenshot of where you're seeing this? I'm not familiar with what you're describing so I need more information to be able to help you.
Why doesn't Zendesk provide the "Channel" as a pre-defined field in the Ticket Form layout? It's important to know the source of a ticket, and the only way I have figured around this is to create a custom field, and associate Triggers to assign values to that field based on the ticket channel.
Example: Ticket Channel = Email, then Source = Email.
Hey Tony!
You can see where a specific ticket came from at the very top of the ticket, right under the subject line. It's not formatted exactly the way that you're describing, but it shows the email address, phone number, Twitter handle, etc that the requester used to send it in. Is there something else you need to do with this information that requires a field?
Hi Jessie. When a user submits a ticket via something other than email (such as the Widget or the Help Center Ticket Form) Zendesk doesn't show that source anywhere. It is trackable in reporting under the "ticket via" field, but there is no way for an agent to know that a customer submitted the ticket via the Help Center Ticket form, for example. It simply shows the user's email address.
Here is a screenshot showing this conundrum:
In fact, the only way I was able to divine that it came from the Help Center form is that Zendesk showed this handy little piece of information:
Hey Tony!
If you need that information handy for your agents, I think you custom field solution is going to be the best option.
HI Jessie
Is there nowhere on the ticket that shows the Channel?
Hi Kim!
From inside the ticket itself, you can go to the Events log and scroll all the way to the bottom. The channel will appear there.
Otherwise, within a view, you can add "Channel" as a column so you can see it there as well.
Hello everyone,
I've run into a bit of an issue creating a workflow that meets our needs. Essentially, we would like to create a trigger that applies to tickets initiated by customers, and a separate trigger that applies to tickets initiated by agents. As far as I can tell, there isn't any way to differentiate tickets created by users through the webform and tickets created on behalf of users in the agent UI. Note that in both cases the requester will be the customer, but we want different actions to happen.
Is there any way of working around this? It would be very useful if these two "webform" channels were listed separately in Zendesk triggers, e.g.
Hey Luca,
When setting up your trigger you should be able to use the **Current User > is > Agent/End-user** condition.
That should hopefully get you the results you're looking for. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Cheers!
Thanks Brett, that's a good idea. I hadn't thought of that.
We have a "Web" channel. What exactly is this referring to? I am not seeing it in this article.
"Web" (Ticket Via) refers to the web widget form. Also check out How are ticket channels defined in Insights?
Thanks for jumping in, Pedro!
I saw that the API has a "via" field for tickets. What are the possible values of it? Does it contain values like "By email to xxx" or "Email", "Helpcenter", "Chat" ?
Hey Thomas,
The API would show what channel the ticket was created from as mentioned here: Tickets API
There's the Via key that will show how the ticket is created.
Hope this helps!
Hi @Brett,
Thanks for your reply, however this not really helped. I would be interested in the possible values, that could be given in the VIA field. Such as its documented for type:
type: Possible values: problem, incident, question, task
Or Status: possible values: new, open, pending, hold, solved, closed
For "VIA" the possible values are missing in the documentation (https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/support/tickets#content)
Thanks,
Thomas
Hmm, these don't match what's actually available. What is plain "Web"? This is what I see from "Ticket Via".
Hey Celia,
The "web" channel in Insights refers both to tickets created through the agent interface and through a ticket form in your Help Center.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Cheers!
Hello,
Just noticed that one specific macro turned from "web" to "api" channel somewhere between 7th and 13th of August this year. It's quite simple and used mostly to fire some triggers. The problem is the macro hasn't been changed for a long time (just like triggers) and the channel of this macro/trigger update is quite important.
Can someone give me an advice where to look for the root of the issue?
Hey Valeriy,
Any chance you could provide a screenshot of where this API channel is displaying on your end? Additionally, the agent manually applied this macro to a ticket correct from the agent interface, correct?
Let me know!
Hello Brett,
In an event from ticket created on 7th of August this row is not present at all, only user agent, IP address and country.
Yep, is was done manually.
I got this from the person who's responsible for macros
Also I've found the same info when checking audits via API.
For ticket created on 7th of August via's object channel is "web", for ticket created on 14th of August it's "api". All the other things - metadata, author_id, etc. are the same for both audits.
Thanks for the additional information Valeriy!
I'm going to create a ticket on your behalf so our Customer Advocacy team can dig into this further.
They'll most likely need to take a look at specific ticket examples to determine why this is different.
You'll receive an email shortly stating your ticket has been created.
Cheers!
How can I get the ticket channel data in liquid? It seems there is only ticket.via which is the support channel.
What I want to do is the following:
We have a view "Social Media Tickets". There are Twitter, Facebook, other Zendesk Apps but also Notification tickets that were created with Integromat and Zapier. For example to inform our agents about new comments on reddit.
However, all those notification tickets show up as API only. Also it's not possible to group the view for the ticket channel, only for the support channel.
Now the thought was to create a custom text field that will be filled with the sources. By using liquid it should be possible to divide the API tickets, because of keywords in the ticket description. But for "Twitter" it's not possible to know if it was a DM or like.
How can this be solved?
There might be a workaround by using a dropdownbox instead a text value and creating 3 trigger for twitter, 2 for facebook and a couple of trigger for reddit and other "API" channel tickets. But that sounds like a big overload.
So how to access this data in liquid with the zendesk placeholders?
The custom field will be filled by misusing the Zendesk API with notify target in a trigger.
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