| Suite | Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus |
| Support with | Guide Professional or Enterprise |
A user segment is a collection of end users and agents, defined by a specific set of attributes and used to determine access to help center content. User segments are the building blocks for both viewing and management user permissions.
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Viewing permissions: You can apply:
- One user segment to each help center and community topic to define viewing access for those resources. Users must belong to the specified user segment in order to have access.
- Up to 10 user segments to each article in your knowledge base. Any user who belongs to at least one of the applied user segments will be able to view that article.
- Management permissions: You can apply user segments when building management permissions for articles. After they're built, you can apply management permissions to knowledge base articles to define who has permission to edit and publish those articles.
There are two built-in user segments by default:
- Signed-in users, includes users who are signed-in to your help center
- Agents and admins, includes all agents (including light agents) and admins
You can create custom user segments to further refine those groups of users as follows:
- Signed-in users (internal and external). These segments are created in Admin Center and can be based on tags, organizations, individual users, or all of them combined.
- Staff (internal). These segments are created in Admin Center and are based on tags, groups, individual users, or all of them combined.
Guide admins have access to all content, regardless of any user segments they belong to. Because Guide admins have access to all content, their user profiles will display all custom user segments. You must be a Guide admin to create user segments.
Understanding access restrictions for user segments
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Signed-in users can be restricted by tags, organizations, individual users, or a combination of all three. Tags must be on the user or an organization they belong to.
When you create a user segment based on tags for signed-in users, you can require that all specified tags match for the agent to be included and/or you can require that at least one of the specified tags match for the user to be included. For organizations, the user must belong to at least one of the specified organizations.
Signed-in agents must have any required tags, agents do not have to belong to any of the specified organizations to be included in the user segment, so the organization is ignored for agents.
Individual users do not need to meet any filters to be included in a user segment, in fact if only individual users are in a user segment, the segment will contain only those users.
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Staff (agents and admins), can be restricted by tags, groups, individual users, or a combination of all three.
When you create a user segment based on tags for staff, you can require that all specified tags match for the agent to be included or you can require that at least one of the specified tags match for the agent to be included. For groups, the agent must belong to at least one of the specified groups.
Guide admins have access to all content, regardless of the user segments that they belong to.
Individual users do not need to meet any filters to be included in the user segment, and if only individual users are in a user segment, the segment will contain only those users.
To define user segments, refer to the following table
| User role | Restrict by tags
(users need all tags) |
Restrict by tags
(users need any of the tags) |
Restrict by organizations
(users need at least one org) |
Restrict by groups
(users need at least one group) |
Restrict by individual users |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Signed-in users | YES | YES | YES
(ignored for agents) |
NO | YES |
| Staff | YES | YES | NO | YES | YES |
Creating user segments
The two access types for user segments are: signed-in users and staff. You can create custom user segments to further refine those two groups of users as follows:
- Signed-in users (internal and external), are created in Admin Center. These segments are based on tags, organizations, individual users, or a combination of all three.
- Staff (internal), are created in Admin Center. These segments are based on tags, groups, individual users, or a combination of all three.
You can create as many as 200 user segments per account. If you have multiple brands in your account, then your user segments are shared across all brands.
Guide admins have access to all content, regardless of the user segments they belong to.
- In Knowledge admin, click User permissions (
) in the sidebar. - On the User Segments page, click Add new.
If you receive an error message, that means you have reached the maximum number of 200 user segments. You can delete some user segments if you want to continue.
- Enter a Name for this user segment.
- Select a User type as the base of your user segment.
- Signed-in users - includes internal and external users who create an account and sign in to your help center.
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Staff - is for internal users only, including agents and Guide admins.
- Click Filter by tag.
Then click the drop down menu to select a tag:
- Users and organizations matching ALL of these tags: all of the tags must be on the user or org to be included in the user segment.
- Users and organizations matching ANY of these tags: one or more of the tags must be on the user or org to be included in the user segment.
You can add up to 50 tags each in Users and organizations matching ALL of these tags and Users and organizations matching any of these tags. Not all available tags appear on the list, so use search or scroll to find the tags that you are looking for. You can choose any tag that is applied to existing users or organizations. The tags can be on the user profile or, in the case of end-users, inherited through an organization.
A list of matching users appears to your right. Agents do not appear on the list of matching users. If there are more than 30 matching users, click View all matching users, then you will see the full list.
Note: You must have user tags enabled to create a user segment based on tags. For more information, see Enabling user and organization tagging. - (Optional) You can further refine your user segment by doing one of the following:
- For signed-in users - if you want to restrict by organization, then select an organization from the drop down menu, and click Filter by organizations.
- For staff members - if you want to restrict by group, then select a group from the drop down menu, and click Filter by groups.
The user must belong to at least one of the organizations or groups to be included in the user segment. You can add up to 50 organizations or groups to a user segment. The exception is that organization is ignored for signed-in agents. Agents do not need to belong to any of the organizations to be included in the user segment.
The list of matching users will update accordingly.
- To add users to a new user segment, click Add individual users.
You can add up to 50 additional individual users, regardless of the number of users in the group, tag, or organization filters you've specified. As you add users, the list of matching users updates.Note: If you add individual users, they are added to the user segment regardless of any group, tag, or organization filters that you may have already set.
- Click Create segment.
See the following topics for more information on how you can apply user segments:
53 comments
Vishnu
Is there a way to remove the user limit for user segments?
We need to create different user segments for different knowledge base articles in Zendesk where each segment can contain hundreds of users. Is this possible?
0
Arianne Batiles
To ensure we can address your concern, I've gone ahead and opened a support ticket for you. We may continue our conversation in the ticket and collaborate on resolving the issue. Please keep an eye on your email inbox for further communications and updates from me. Thank you!
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Chris Todd
I tried this on another user, and the user segment was removed after 5 - 10 min. Unfortunately for this first example, the user segment is still on the user's account.
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Chris Todd
1263082103229 See prior post. Can you help? Recap below.
(see screenshot above)
How come the user segment isn't removed from the user record? What step have I missed?
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Chris Todd
I have 2 User segments defined for Signed-in users, each are based on having ANY of 2 different tags.
I added the appropriate Tags to my User record in Zendesk, and in a short time, the 2 User segments showed on my User record, as expected.
I've since removed those tags, and it has been over 24 hrs, yet the User segments aren't removed from my User record. I checked the Matching users within each of the 2 segments, and I'm no longer listed. I queried the User Segment API for my ID, and I also am returned with those 2 User segments.
How do I get the User segments to drop from my User record?
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Christine Diego
Thank you for sharing your feedback about our help center articles! I will make sure to pass this along to our internal team for review.
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jonathan.mendoza
Is it possible to restrict access to articles by a user's domain as shown in their email address? That is, I'd like everyone whose login address has the @acme qualifier. So next time someone with an email address such as joe@acme.com creates a login, this person is automatically granted access to the restricted content.
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Colleen Hoetjes
Reviewing your help desk articles on a Macbook Pro (Sonoma 14.4.1) and the various styles appear in Chrome very differently than they do in Safari. I generally use Chrome and the font sizes/styles are inconsistent in size and appearance as compared to Safari - see attached example. Chrome is just plain odd while Safari is what I expected to see. Just wanted to make a note of it for the tech writing team or whomever controls the CSS/styles for your site.
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Ronald
Nana Puccetti An approach you could explore would be using javascript to hide articles rather than permissioning the content with the proper user segment memberships.
You could add a custom Organization field (checkbox) called something like "hide content". When the checkbox is checked it would set a tag like hide_content on the Organization. Or set a user tag but it would probably be easier to do this at the Org level if possible.
Then you'd add a function to the script.js file of your help center. The function would check the HelpCenter object looking for the specified Org tag (or user tag) hide_content. If it finds that tag in the current user's HelpCenter object you can then hide the URL of the articles based on a partial string match of the article URL using jQuery hide method.
Here's an article that goes into some of this in more detail: https://www.screensteps.com/articles/customizing-your-help-center-with-javascript
It's a bit more of a workaround than a proper solution but it works and once it's setup it's really not very hard to maintain.
Edit - I just realized that article is quite old but I've successfully used this approach in Zendesks for the past 10 years in various forms. I don't think this configuration is "officially supported" by Zendesk but sometimes it has been the only way to accomplish certain things.
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Nana Puccetti
I am in the same situation as Kreg Sherbine. I have an article that should be visible to any logged-in person who is not in one of the specific TAGs. Ideally, there should be the possibility to define segments with logic for exclusion and inclusion of TAGs, organizations, and users
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