All customers are important, but every business has their VIPs. Maybe it’s a big account, maybe it’s the paid users on your freemium product, or maybe you just want to make sure tickets from some people get a bit more visibility.
One of the most powerful things that Zendesk empowers you to do with tickets is to use triggers to route them to the right people and groups as they come in. User and Organization tagging is an invaluable tool for doing this better, and one that you should definitely consider using if you aren’t already!
Turning it on Tags on users and organizations
To get started, go to Settings > End-Users or Manage icon (
) > Settings > Customers in Lotus, scroll down, select the Tags on users and organizations and click Save Tab.
Tagging a user
Now that you’ve turned this on, let’s start by tagging a user. Go to Manage > People or Manage icon () > Manage > People in Lotus and click Edit next to any of your end-users. You’ll see a new Tags field. Take a look at the example below, I’ve gone ahead and tagged this test user as a VIP:
Tagging a bunch of users
Tagging one user at a time is all well and good but it's not necessarily scalable. That’s where Organization tagging really shines. If you go to Manage > People or Manage icon () > Manage > People in Lotus and click Organizations under the search bar then click Edit next to the organization of your choice, you’ll see the same new Tags field. Want to make sure that all tickets from your premium users are tagged? Put them in the same organization and entering the tag here will do the trick! If you’ve already sorted your customers into organizations and you have more than one VIP organization, no problem, you can add the same tags to any number of organizations you want.
You can also add tags when bulk importing/updating users and organizations!
Taking advantage of User/Organization tags
In Zendesk, there are any number of things you can do with tags. You can limit access to forums, you can do more accurate ticket searches, you can create views, or you can create conditions based on those tags in your Automations and Triggers. For a full breakdown, check out our User/Organization tagging documentation.
That said, I did want to highlight one really common use case here, which is using a tag in a trigger to automatically assign ticket properties. Let’s say I want to make sure that all of my VIP tickets go to my Premium Support Group. Take a look at the trigger I’ve created by going to Manage > Triggers & Mail Notifications or Manage icon () > Business Rules > Triggers in Lotus. This trigger looks for tickets created with the ‘vip’ tag, assigns them to the right group, bumps the priority to High, and sends an email notification to that group to make sure they know it’s time to get to work!
Tagging your users and organizations is an extremely useful feature, and one I really hope you’ll consider taking advantage of for your Zendesk site. Of course, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop us a line at support@zendesk.com!
best practice question: Tags or Custom fields. Using this same scenario you could use a custom field (on the organization or user level) to accomplish the same thing. Which is considered best practice?
Hi Rusty!
There are a couple caveats to consider when working with custom fields.
The first one is that only drop-downs and check boxes generate tags, so you would be limited to those two options. The other is that, with drop-downs, you can't make multiple selections. So if you want users in an Org to have multiple tags associated with them, if you change your drop-down selection the first tag will be removed and replaced with the new tag.
So while you could sort of accomplish the same thing using custom User or Org fields, for the scenario we're talking abou there you're going to be better off sticking with tags. Of course, your mileage may vary based on your individual use case.
Hope that helps!
Hello,
The title says automation, but I can see only manual tagging. Is there a way to add tags based on the users profile retrieved from a 3rd part API? We'll use SSO where a user logs in on our side, so we can see the users profile and subscription attributes.
So, we want to make sure that when a free user registers he's tagged as free and thus cannot submit tickets, while a paid one will register with a tag premium and can contact support.
Thanks
Hi Eugene,
You mentioned that these "free" users will login via SSO. You can include tags on your SSO script and, these tags will replace any other tags that may exist in the user's profile.
Information on this can be seen here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203663816-Setting-up-single-sign-on-with-JWT-JSON-Web-Token-
From there, you can create triggers that will filter incoming tickets that include the tag "free". And since you mentioned that free users will not be able to submit a ticket, you can automatically close there submitted tickets if the tag "free" is present for them.
Another option is using Javascript to prevent these free users from accessing your submit request page. Simply use the Javascript object "HelpCenter.user['tags']" to get a logged in users tags. From there create your script that will restrict ticket submission for them.