Typically, when end users submit support requests, they provide the subject and description of their question or support issue in system ticket fields. They may also be prompted to provide additional data such as a product type or model number using custom ticket fields.
Collectively, the predefined set of ticket fields are a ticket form. Ticket fields on a ticket form, are visible to end users in the contact form, in the Help Center or Web Widget for example, and to agents in a ticket, as shown here. You can activate
Tickets contain other data that you can access using placeholders and the Zendesk API. See Ticket data.
There are two types of ticket fields:
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System ticket fields are the standard, default fields that agents see in a ticket. Additional system fields are added to the ticket page when you activate additional Zendesk Support features, such as ticket sharing. You can deactivate and reactivate some (but not all) of the system fields.
See the complete list of system ticket fields below.
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Custom ticket fields can be created in addition to system ticket fields 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.
See the following articles:
- Optimizing your ticket form to understand ticket fields and do some planning to build an optimal ticket form.
- Adding custom fields to your tickets and support request form to create the custom ticket fields you need.
You can view and manage all of you ticket fields on the Ticket fields admin page. See Viewing your ticket fields.
System ticket fields
The system ticket fields that are part of a ticket by default are detailed below. Some system fields are inborn and cannot be reconfigured. See What are the inborn system ticket rules.
System field | Description |
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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 Updating the ticket requester. You can also create a ticket on someone else's behalf. See Creating a ticket on behalf of the requester. |
Follower | Followers can be agents, light agents, or admins, but not end users. Similar to a persistent BCC, followers receive notifications when ticket updates occur, and they can view and create internal notes. Followers are invisible to end users, but CCs are not. See When to use CCs and followers. |
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 copied on tickets. Both the requester and 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 Using CCs, followers, and @mentions. |
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 does not appear 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 field 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. A ticket's status can be set and updated either manually by an agent or automatically via your business rules.
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Type | There are four values for type. 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. 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.
If an administrator deactivates the Type field, all your tickets 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 you can allow only the Normal and High values to appear. To do so, edit the priority field, then change the setting under Field values. 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:
Tags are enabled by default but can be disabled. See Enabling and disabling ticket tags. |
104 Comments
Hey Ann!
My recommendation for your requested workflow is to utilize macros with placeholders for your custom ticket field's data.
For any particular set of data that you wanted to pull from those fields and add as a comment on the ticket you can create a unique macro. If you only need one set of data, or if there are few enough variations in the data sets that you want to have as a comment, then you may consider just using a single macro for these purposes.
When you create these Macros I recommend setting the Comment Mode to Private. This way your macros will add these responses as an internal note so as not to send your customers a reply with the data you're wanting to populate in this manner.
You can then include in your Comment/description the Placeholders for your custom ticket fields. These will be formatted with either ticket.ticket_field_<field ID number> or ticket.ticket_field_option_title_<field ID number> depending on the type of ticket field data you are trying to pull in. Please keep in mind all placeholders are added within brackets {{ and }}.
When you apply your macro with these placeholders on your ticket it will then dynamically populate with the information from your ticket fields in place of the placeholder so you can add this information all in a single location. You may want to preface the placeholder in each of these situations with the name of the ticket field you are pulling the data from so your Agents see not only the field name but then the data from that field. Please see my example screenshot below.
Hi James
Thanks for your suggestion, I'll give that a try. I noticed that there doesn't seem to be any way to apply a macro using a trigger, you can set up a trigger to add tags and e-mails etc but not macros. Is that something that might be available in Zendesk in the future?
Hey Ann!
You are correct, there is not any way to apply a macro using a trigger. Since adding a comment to a ticket can cause other triggers and automations to fire, adding a comment to a ticket as a result of a trigger can cause issues with race conditions that can cause workflows to break. For these reasons I would not expect this functionality in the foreseeable future.
Thanks for the info James!
Is it possible for an end-user to have access to / view the due date of a ticket (task)?
Hi Bob!
The due date field that's associated with the Task ticket type is only visible internally, so there's no way for your end users to be able to see it. Where do you want your users to be able to see this? In their email notifications, or when they're viewing their tickets in your Help Center?
How to set custom fields for multiple languages??
You can use Dynamic Content on the Professional end Enterprise plans to display custom field text in a user's own language.
First create the dynamic content, then include the placeholder in text fields when defining your custom field. For example, the field title may become:
And for drop down options, you can do the same:
We'd like to add a more detailed description for the priority field so users understand what the various priority levels mean.
Unfortunately the formatting comes out as one block of text, and does not seem to allow for carriage returns, bold, or any other markup.
I've searched the help topics for 15 minutes now, and cannot find a solution or any references on how to format the description field so it's more readable for end users.
Hey John!
It sounds like you're looking for Customizing custom ticket field descriptions with HTML.
This is a custom code solution, so the instructions provided there are for instructional purposes only. I highly recommend reviewing the comments on that article to review the troubleshooting steps that have been provided there.
Hi James, thanks for your response.
The description field is an optional component of the system field 'priority'.
My goal is to format the text for that description field to something other than a continuous block of text and sentences.
Hey John!
Understood! The Article I linked you to in my previous reply outlines the custom code you would need to write to achieve your desired changes. You will need Guide Professional to edit that information in your Help Center Theme. The changes outlined in the linked guide will affect how that information is displayed on the Submit a Request form.
Hi James,
That appears to be far more work than we're willing to undertake for basic formatting options in default system fields.
Disappointing.
With Priority, you have the option to only show the user Normal and High, rather than all four choices.
Is there a way to do the same with Type? I'd like to only show users Question and Incident, and only allow agents to set Problem and Task.
Hi Chaz!
There isn't any in-built functionality that will hide those options from your users, but it might be possible to use some Javascript customization to do it. Let me check with our Community Moderators and see if they can share some insight on this!
I'd be really interested to know if it's possible to affect dropdown listing options with JS. This would be really helpful in controlling available options and hiding some of the system users and groups we've needed to make to handle various workflows.
Hi Dan - You can certainly look into using Javascript to do anything you need on your Help Center, although we don't support custom Javascript in Advocacy. We have The Help Center Javascript Cookbook which has some ideas for using JS in the Help Center
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/218035948-Help-Center-JavaScript-cookbook-Guide-Professional-
Additionally, you might be interested in something like the Conditional Fields app, if you are looking to hide or show certain fields, although that is not per user, but per field:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203662476-Using-the-Conditional-Fields-app-Professional-Add-on-and-Enterprise-
Finally, there is this tip on how to hide or show custom html based on user roles or group that might be helpful:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203661316-Hide-or-show-HTML-based-on-user-s-role-or-group
Hey Laura,
Thanks for the quick reply! We make heavy use of the conditional fields app to try to guide users through filling a form, but sometimes there's still so many options. It'd be great to be able to restrict the options available and visible to end users, rather than just the whole field itself. I'll check into those links and see if there's anything we can use.
Is it do this on the agent side via the Zendesk app framework? Hide or show field options based on certain criteria?
Thanks for the help, appreciate it!
Hey Dan!
I'm not sure whether it's possible to do this with an app, but it's probably worth looking into. If you haven't seen them already, you can find out V2 Apps Framework documentation here.
EDIT - Nevermind, Found it!
Is there no longer a way to custom sort the order of the ticket fields? Ours have moved and we do not like the order nor can we sort them anymore.
Hey Julie! Glad you got it figured out. :)
One thing we are away of is that the Tag field has moved above the Type and Priority fields, which it wasn't supposed to do. So we have a Problem ticket open on that and are working on a fix. If you're seeing that happening, send a ticket over to our support team so they can add to you to the Problem ticket!
Hey Jessie,
I have a scenario:
Im trying to get tickets from zendesk which shows ticket details and field id's as well. Im using the following url:
https://companyname.zendesk.com/api/v2/search.json?query=type%3Aticket+updated%3E"+Date.now().minusDays(400)
This gives me all data but field id is null. The JSON shows likes this:
"custom_fields": [ ],
"satisfaction_rating": null,
"sharing_agreement_ids": [ ],
"fields": [ ],
"followup_ids": [ ],
"brand_id": 333447
"allow_channelback": false
"result_type": "ticket"
I know this query gives me the field id's:
https://companyname.zendesk.com/api/v2/ticket_fields.json
But, I want to get the ticket details as well as field id's with one URL.
How can i get this url to work?
When I use this url to get data from another zendesk account, field id gets displayed, but from this account, field id is null. How can I get the field id as well?
Any help would be helpful.
Thanks,
Sumit
Hey Sumit!
My API knowledge doesn't go quite deep enough to answer this question for you, but I'll find someone who can help you out!
Hi Sumit,
You can include additional data on your API calls using side loading. I'm not sure if it will work with the search API, but you can take a look at the link above.
Hi guys,
I understand that some ticket fields are inborn and cannot be removed or something like that, but is there really no way to change the names of inborn fields? Like 'Your email address' and 'Attachments'.
It's a little nitpicking, but in English it's 'Your email address', in Dutch it's 'E-mailadres' and in German it's 'E-Mail Adresse'. Why is there 'your' in English variants but not in the other languages? This is a minor thing that I'd like to correct, but I'm guessing that this isn't possible?
Thanks!
Hi everyone. I am new to Zendesk and am trying to get a report together where I can see all open tickets. I am able to do that by creating a view and have added a few fields to that, then I can export it to csv. However, I need to include some more fields- like description. Can someone provide a recommendation(s) of how I do that?
Thank you,
-Terri
Hi Terri, Welcome!
You're in the right direction if you're using Views. Of note:
1) When including closed tickets, remember it only goes back ~4 months so some tickets will at some point drop off a view
2) As far as I know, you can't add the Description field to views :(
Depending why you want to see the description field, you may want to add other fields to capture what you're looking for... Most popular custom fields for IT that I've seen are: Category, Product, Lifecycle Stage, etc.
Thank you Heather. I want to ultimately be able to have all the information about our tickets (including the detailed descriptions and any updates we make) exported into a spreadsheet. Right now, we have 2 places where we store projects/tickets and I would like to put them all in Zendesk, but that only works if I/we are able to report on all the fields. We would using this report to go through the status of each item and review progress.
Also, noting the 4 month limitation, we may need to start archiving ticket information but I would need to understand that limitation more. Are those tickets just gone, you can't see or report on them?
Any other thoughts?
Thank you, -Terri
Hi Terri,
I hope my initial response didn't confuse you - Let me try to answer everything here:
I don't believe you can pull Descriptions into Views as far as I know.
If you're running things in 2 places, do you think you might "choose" one at some point or are you going to continue to run in parallel for the foreseeable future?
Views have a 4 month limitation on Closed tickets, aka tickets that go from solved to closed and are no longer editable. The reason I mention it is you can build views on all statuses and it will pick up all those tickets, but closed tickets drop off of Views.
That said, you can use your reporting tool, Insights and specifically Good Data, to build reports. I like to use Insights for KPIs and indicators but not for field by field review because Views are real time and Insights is like 1+ hours data sync difference depending what plan you're on.
However, Insights will allow more robust reports, automatic report emailing, and much more. It's just not my preference for the kind of activity you seem to be doing.
So, you don't need to archive anything purposely - in Zendesk, Closed is sort of like archived in that you can't edit it. But the data is still there and still available for reporting.
The golden catch in all of this is I'm not sure where you can create a report that pulls in the Description (or Comments) field/s..... Views and Insights don't offer that.
Perhaps I'm wrong.... I'll ping a couple buddies.
I'm very glad Terri is being helped, and I'm not trying to whine or anything, but am I being ignored here? ;)
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