About ticket fields

Fastpath: Admin > Manage > Ticket Fields

Typically, when end-users submit support requests, they provide the subject and description of their question or support issue. They may also be prompted to provide additional data such as a model number or product version using custom ticket fields. All of the other data in a ticket is set by you or behind the scenes using the business rules.

Each of the standard ticket fields (referred to as system fields), those that are shown in the agent's view of the ticket page, are described below.

You can manage your ticket fields in the Ticket Fields page.

To open the Ticket Fields page

• Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Manage > Ticket Fields.

Here you can deactivate and reactivate some of the system fields and add and manage your own custom fields. Additional system fields are added to the ticket page when you activate additional Zendesk Support features such as ticket sharing. Some system fields are inborn and cannot be reconfigured (see What are the inborn system ticket rules? in our Support Tech Notes).

Note: Tickets contain other data that you can access using placeholders and the Zendesk API. For more information about this additional data, see Ticket data.

Requester	All tickets require a requester. The requester is the person who made the support request. If a ticket is created by an agent and the requester field is left empty, then the agent will be the requester of the ticket. If needed, the ticket requester can be changed to someone else. See Changing the ticket requester. You can also create a ticket on someone else's behalf. See Creating a ticket on behalf of the requester.
Group	The assignee can be set at the same time in Assignee field.
Assignee	The assignee can be either a group or a specific agent. See Manually assigning a ticket to yourself, another agent, or a group.
CCs	If you have been configured to allow it, other people can be CC'ed on tickets. Both the requester agents can add CCs to a ticket. The requester does it by adding CC email addresses if they requested support via your support email address. Agents can add CCs using the CC field when updating the ticket. See Copying someone else (CC) on a ticket.
Share	The Share field is only displayed if you have enabled ticket sharing, which means that tickets can be shared with other Zendesk Support accounts. See Sharing tickets.
Subject	The Subject field is required. It's typically included in the support request submitted by the requester. For example, when someone submits a support request via email, the subject line of the email is used as the ticket's subject. If the ticket title is not appearing in the ticket subject, your Subject field might not be visible to end users. To correct this, see this Support tech note.
Description	The description is required. This is the text of the support request. When an end-user submits a support request via email, the body of the email request is used as the description. The description becomes the first comment in the ticket.
Status	There are six values for status: New, Open, Pending, On-hold, Solved, Closed. A ticket's status can be set and updated either manually by an agent or automatically via your business rules. A ticket's status cannot be changed to Closed manually however; that is handled automatically via your business rules. New means that the request was received but that it has not been opened and has not been assigned to an agent. The New status can indicate that the support team is evaluating it to determine who should be assigned to resolve it. After changing the status from New to another status, you can't change the status back to New. Open means that the request has been assigned to an agent who is working to resolve it. Once a ticket status changes to Open, it can never return to New. If your tickets are being created in the Open status instead of New, see Why is my New ticket being created in Open status? in our Support Tech notes. Pending means that the assigned agent has a follow-up question for the requester. The agent may need more information about the support issue. Requests that are set to Pending typically remain that way until the requester responds and provides the information the agent needs to continue resolving the request. On-hold means that the support request is awaiting a resolution from a third party—someone who is not a member of your support staff and does not have an agent account. This status is optional and must be added (see Adding the On-hold ticket status to your Zendesk in the Administrator Guide) Solved means that the agent has resolved the support issue. Solved tickets are closed, typically, a number of days after they have been set to Solved (the exact number of days depends on how an Administrator set this up). Until a ticket is closed, the requester can reopen the ticket. For example, the requester may not agree with the agent that the support issue is resolved and reply back to the ticket solved email notification. Closed means that the ticket is complete and can't be reopened. Requesters however can create follow-up requests for closed requests.
Type	There are four values for type: Question, Incident, Problem, and Task. While the field can be blank initially (and through any number of updates), once you change the field to a specified type, you can't change it to blank again. Setting the type helps you to categorize your tickets, which you can then use in your workflow. For example, you can create views of tickets by their type. Question is used to indicate that the requester's issue is a question rather than a problem that needs to be solved. Incident is used to indicate that the requester is experiencing a single occurrence of a larger problem that is affecting multiple users. Problem is used to indicate that the requester is having an issue with your product or service that needs to be resolved and that is affecting multiple users. For example, if the wireless network in an office stops working, the problem will probably generate several support requests. Instead of handling each ticket separately, create one ticket describing the problem and set the type to Problem. Link incident tickets to problem tickets. When you solve the problem ticket, all of the linked incident tickets are solved too (see Working with problem and incident tickets). Task is used when you want to assign the ticket as a task to a specific agent. When you select Task, you also set the Task Due Date which is 12pm in the account local timezone on the due date. Note: If you deactivate the Type field, all of your tickets will default to Incident.
Priority	There are four values for priority: Low, Normal, High, and Urgent. By default, all of these four values are available, but if you are an admin you can allow only the Normal and High values to appear by toggling field options under Admin > Manage > Ticket Fields > Priority/ Priority is not a required field, so you do not always need to select a value. How you weigh the priority of your tickets is up to you.
Tags	Tags are used throughout to add additional information to tickets, which can then be used in your ticket workflow. Tags can be added to tickets in the following ways: You can add them manually. Tags can be added (and removed) automatically based on your business rules. Tags can be added to users and organizations and these tags are automatically added to tickets. Tags are flexible and powerful tools that can be used in many ways. For more information about tags, see Using tags in the Administrator Guide.

In addition to these system ticket fields, tickets can also contain custom fields, which are used to gather additional information from the person who is requesting support. For example, you may add a custom field prompting them to select a product name or model number. Custom fields are added by administrators. For more information, see Adding and using custom ticket fields.