You can add custom fields to tickets and they can be visible to agents only or to both agents and end-users. You can include custom fields to your support request form by adding them as editable and visible.
After you create your custom ticket field, you can use it in triggers, automations, macros, and views. OnSuite Professional and above, you can report on custom ticket fields in Explore.
You must be an administrator to create custom ticket fields.
Topics covered in this article:
- How custom ticket fields work
- Adding a custom ticket field for agents and end-users
- Understanding the persistence of custom field data
Related articles:
How custom ticket fields work
Custom ticket fields are typically used to gather more information about the support issue or product or service. You can add custom fields to your tickets for agents and you can also add them to your Help Center Submit a Request form if you want end-users to see the custom field. Custom ticket fields can be required or optional.
- Drop-down
- Multi-select
- Text
- Multi-line
- Numeric
- Decimal
- Checkbox
- Date
- Regex
The drop-down list, multi-select, and checkbox custom fields generate tags that can also be used in automations, macros, triggers, reports, and views (see Understanding custom ticket fields, tags, and business rules). All custom fields can be referenced as placeholders (see Placeholders for custom fields).
Adding a custom ticket field for agents and end-users
You can add custom fields to tickets, and decide if they should be visible to agents only or to both agents and end-users. You can permit end-users to view the custom field in their Zendesk Support ticket by making the field visible, or you can add the custom field to the Support Request form by making the field both visible and editable.
Before you begin, see Optimizing your ticket form to understand ticket fields and do some planning to build an optimal ticket form.
You must be an administrator to create custom ticket fields.
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Manage > Ticket Fields.
- Click the Add field button.
- Click in the New Field at the top of the page, and enter a title for the field.
- Select the type of custom field you want to create.
Hover over the info icon (
) to view information about each field type. Also, see About custom field types.
During custom field creation, you can change the selected field type at any time, but you cannot change the field type after the new field has been saved.
- In Description, enter an optional description for the field, visible only to administrators.
- Under Permissions, select an option:
- Agent only: Only signed-in agents can view or edit the field. The field will appear in tickets for agents only.
- Editable for end-users: Agents and end-users can view or edit the field. The field will appear in tickets and in the support request form in Help Center.
- Read-only for end-users: Signed-in agents can view or edit the field; end-users can view the field. The field will appear in tickets.
If you have a single ticket form, the new field will automatically appear in your ticket form according to your settings here. If you have multiple ticket forms, you need to add the ticket field to any ticket forms where you want it to appear. You can do so in the last step of this procedure.
- Enter a Title shown to agent and a Title shown to end-users.
The title for end-users is not editable if you configured the field for agents only in the previous step.
- Select Required to solve a ticket if the field must be filled out by an agent before solving the ticket.
Note: When agents merge a ticket, they do not need to fill in required fields as merged tickets bypass Solved and go directly to Closed. This setting is also bypassed if a business rule changes the ticket to Solved, because a system process is solving the ticket rather than an agent.
- Select Required to submit a request if the field must be filled out by an end-user before submitting a ticket.
- Enter an optional Description shown to end-users if your field is configured for end-users.
This field is not editable if you configured the field for agents only above.
- Depending on the type of field you're creating, you may have the following settings to configure:
- Field values (drop-down and multi-select fields only):
- Enter a Field option to include in the list, then click in the next value field to enter another option, and repeat as needed. You can bulk import field values if you have a large number to add. Click the X to remove a value.
- Click Show tags to view and edit the tags generated by each option.
- Click Order alphabetically to display the options in alphabetical order or use the drag-and-drop handle (
) to manually reorder.
- Delete a field value by clicking the X to the right of the value.
- To choose a default value for a drop-down field, hover over the value, then click Make default.
Note: The default value in a drop-down list only applies to new tickets that are created by agents through the Support interface or created by users wherever the ticket form is displayed. If you change an existing ticket form to one with a drop-down list with a default option, the default option is not displayed and is shown as blank.
- Field option (checkbox fields only, optional): Enter a tag to apply to a ticket when the ticket field checkbox is selected.
- Field validation (regex fields only): Enter a Ruby regular expression to create an input mask to validate entry.
- Field values (drop-down and multi-select fields only):
- Click Preview to see how your custom field will appear to both agents and end-users.
You can enter or select options to see how the field functions. Click Close to return to the custom field screen.
- Click Save or, if you want to create another custom field, click the drop-down icon and select Save and add another.
The ticket field automatically appears in your ticket form if you have a single ticket form. If you have multiple ticket forms (Enterprise plans only), you need to manually add the ticket field to your ticket forms in the next step.
- (Enterprise plans only) To add the new field to multiple ticket forms, edit the ticket form where you want the custom field to appear, drag the new ticket field from the right onto the ticket form, then click Save.
You can repeat this step as needed for multiple ticket forms.
If your custom ticket field does not appear on a new ticket, you might need to restart your browser to see it. If a ticket field that you previously configured as required is not displayed on the ticket form, it does not need to be entered.
After you create your custom ticket field, you can use it in triggers, automations, macros, and views (see Using custom ticket fields in business rules). However, text or numeric custom ticket fields can only be used in views.
On Suite Professional and above, you can report on custom ticket fields in Explore (see Reporting with custom fields).
Understanding the persistence of custom field data
If you delete a custom field, the data from the custom field is not preserved in existing tickets, including closed tickets. The data is preserved only if the custom field also adds a tag to a ticket. The three custom fields that add tags are the drop-down list, the checkbox, and multi-select fields. If you delete one of these custom fields, then the data in tickets persist as tags.
For example, suppose you have a drop-down list in your ticket form to associate tickets with different product names. After a while, a decision is made to stop providing support for one of the products. If you remove the product from the drop-down list, the product name persists in existing tickets as a tag. If however you use a text field to record a product ID and you delete the text field, the product ID is not preserved in your tickets.
162 Comments
Hello,
I have added custom ticket form fields but when I test it via the submit a request form, they do not come through into the Zendesk ticket. Can you please assist?
Hey Kristin!
I'd be glad to assist here. This looks like it would be best suited if we discussed further via ticket. I'll go ahead and create one on your behalf to get this started. Talk to you soon!
Dear Zendesk team, is there a way for the end-user to edit the custom field value after the ticket submission? We have added a custom field "Requested publish to live date" to indicate when the content must be released but the end-user can only specify it when creating a ticket and can not change it after submitting it while for many of our customers this date can change several times. Any idea how this can be solved? Many thanks in advance!
Hi Mascha,
Currently, custom field values cannot be edited by end users after submission.
You may be interested in upvoting, commenting on, and following this conversation in the Support Product Feedback topic where other users are discussing a similar need:
We need custom fields to remain editable for end-users after initial submission
Is there a way to organize the order the ticket fields appear in the ticket view?
I have the Trello extension installed. It uses a custom ticket field, but it is flagged as "Trello", similar to how system fields are tagged as "System Field".
This doesn't show up as an option for creating a custom view, where every other custom ticket field does. Any thoughts on why, or on how to customize around this?
What I'm trying to do is push tickets that will be handled by our project teams into Trello. Then, once this is done, hide it from our service desk's view (i.e. I want filters that only show where Ticket.Trello_Card_ID = blank).
Note: I've worked around the above by a trigger that looks for Ticket.Trello_Card_ID is present and add an in_trello tag. And another that looks to see if it is not present and removes said tag.
This seems like an extra, non-value add step.
And, I don't see a way to create an automation related to this though, so it'll be lots of manually updating tickets.
I'm pretty new to this system and have had to do things like this multiple times already.A question to the users out there... is this level clunkiness the norm throughout ZenDesk?
@Brian McGinley: Go to Admin, then Ticket Forms. You can re-order there.
@Doug Kyle
OMG, I thought I was in that menu and I was in the Fields... Thank you for pointing out my error.
Hi All,
I noticed that as an Admin or Agent, I am able to type in and search for an Organization that I've have inputted into the Multi-Select Ticket Field and the field would populate similar characters.
However, if I attempt to Submit a ticket through the Help Center as an End User, I am unable to search through the Multi-Select field.
Would anyone have an idea to allow End-Users to type into the Multi-Select field through the Help Center?
Thanks.
Hi Chee,
Unfortunately, there is not a way to make the multi-select field searchable for end-users at this time. The only option they would currently have is to scroll through the selections to find one. However, I do think this would be a great addition to our platform. Therefore, I recommend going to our product feedback page to submit a request. Product feedback is the best way our customers' voices can be heard regarding feature requests and product changes.
I apologize I don't have an immediate resolve to your request. Let us know if you have any other questions.
Hey guys, does anybody know if a custom field can be shown in the list of tickets (like Subject, Requester, Priority etc), so that we can sort the tickets by this field's value?
If yes, how can we do it? The plan is Esssentials.
Thanks,
Art
Hi Art!
On the Essential plan it's not possible to modify existing Views or create new Views, which means it won't be possible to do what you're describing. However, it is possible to do it if you're on the Team plan or higher.
Can I have a "Select All" field in a Multi Select? If yes, how?
Thanks,
Albert
Hi Albert -
There is not a "Select All" option for multi-select fields.
Good day
i want to send a ticket for my twitter account,How do i do it?
Hi Lindokuhle,
Are you trying to set up Twitter on your Support account to generate tickets?
If so, I would recommend taking a look at the following article: Setting up your Twitter channel
Let me know if you run into any issues or have any other questions!
Hi ZD,
Is it possible to have one custom field (e.g. category) that can further be divided into multiple drop-down sub-categories? For instance:
1. One custom (main/root) field named "category";
2. -> drop-down -> sub-"category" named "network" -> drop down again so that agent can select specific issue -> network card, etc.;
3. -> drop-down -> sub-"category" named "software" -> drop down again so that agent can select specific issue -> Windows, MS office, etc.
Thanks,
Ivan.
Hi Ivan,
If I'm understanding you correctly you should be able to nest your drop-down options by using "::" in the title. For example: Category::Network::Network Card
Let me know if the above is not the solution you're looking for :)
Hi Brett,
That's exactly what I was looking for!
Thanks a lot!
@Ivan - Brett gave a great answer, and we use this too -- I would just note that when you use Zendesk's nesting as he's laid out above, your reporting will only be able to pull on the lowest level selection, because it only generates one tag.
Something I've been looking into is setting up Conditional fields and using one field per level. This way we can report on each level. The drawback with this approach is that you need one field for each sub category and then one field for each set of sub-sub category selections for that sub category.
I guess there's pros and cons to everything!
Is it possible to have a customer field (dropdown) be dependent on another customer fields (dropdown) choice.
We are trying to have customer field open up when tin he partner dropdown the direct support option is chosen.
Thanks
Hi Sebastian,
You'll want to take a look at the Conditional Fields app which I believe will accomplish what you're looking for.
Keep in mind that this app is only available if you have the Productivity Pack on Professional and is included with the Enterprise plan.
More on conditional fields here: Using the Conditional Fields app (Professional Add-on and Enterprise)
We also have a native Conditional Fields feature currently in EAP which you can sign up for at the link I provided.
Hope this helps!
I'd like to modify the help center ticket submission form with two fields: 'ip address' and 'license key'. Then, based on those two values, I'd like to perform a custom validation by checking that combination of ip address and license key to determine if the entered values are valid. If not valid, I would display some kind of error message and prevent the ticket from being submitted until a valid ip/license combination was entered. The check of the ip/license key pair would be performed by calling a REST endpoint outside of Zendesk. Is that possible?
Hi Samuel,
Despite Zendesk Guide generating your ticket form, you still have access to form fields and data via custom JavaScript accessing DOM info. jQuery is automatically included, so you can use that in your JavaScript as well.
You first need to figure out the ID values of your custom fields ("IP address" and "License key"). You can get these ID values a number of ways including getting them from Zendesk Support's Admin > Ticket Fields > Field ID column.
Once you have those field ID values, you can enter something like the below pseudo code into your Help Center's script.js file (replacing the bolded numbers below):
The above is just example code. You're responsible for the actual code and maintaining it of course.
In the end, your Help Center is a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There's lots of opportunities to insert custom code and modifications via the assets located in the Guide Admin/Edit Theme page.
Hope this helps!
Hi, the multi-select landing page seems to be offline (permissions or something): https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000032087
Hi Pedro,
Where exactly are you seeing that link in this article. I most likely looking in the wrong place so want to confirm with you first :)
Any information regarding multi-select fields can be found here: About custom field types
Let me know!
Hi Brett, it isn't linked in this article, I bumped into it from somewhere else (sorry, can't remember where from, but that 404 should be in Google Analytics).
Btw, bumped into another one: the article linked in this comment doesn't seem to exist anymore (article link).
Thanks Pedro,
It looks like the articles you're reference are no longer available as they were set up as Announcements when the new feature was released. The functionality for these new features should be included in their respective articles. Is there one in particular that you're looking for?
Not really, I was looking for articles about multi-select. Thanks!
Please sign in to leave a comment.