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 |
---|---|
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. |
102 Comments
Hey Leon, sorry about that. I've sent your question to our Customer Advocates and asked them to chime in if they have a solution for you.
Perfect, no worries, thank you Nicole!
Heather, I appreciate you helping me. I am interested in combining our project lists into 1 place and was hoping to use ZenDesk for that. However, if i can't report on all the fields in ZenDesk) then that won't work for us. You mention a reporting tool, Insights and specifically Good Data- is that something I have to buy outside of ZenDesk and then somehow connect it to Zendesk to report with?
Additionally- can you clarify the 4 months constraint. We can't run reports- that use views- because the ticket will fall out of the view after 4 months. However, we can search by a ticket number and that will never disappear, is that correct?
Thank you,
-Terri
Hi Terri,
Good Data feeds Insights which should be included in your zendesk. If you click on reporting on the left, do you have an Insights tab there? You can clone any and all reports and make them your own. You can customize reports from scratch too.
So- views. Closed tickets have no activity because they can’t be edited. So after some time they won’t show up in views and views alone. Meaning yes, you can search and see them normally. And you’ll see them in reports and such. But not in views.
I would recommend, if you’re going to one tool, that you use custom ticket fields so your reports are meaningful. Like perhaps you want Phase info. So a field for Phase might be good with a dropdown for Initation, Planning, Execution, etc. or Perhaps you want to track releases. I’d recommend a field or just a tag for that so you can track it as The features are released. One of my clients did that to track what to include in release notes.
The other thing to mention is you’d probably get a lot of use out of some of the Zendesk apps out there that specifically support projects.
I think if you want to contact me to discuss please feel free to do so.
Hi Leon,
Thanks for your patience while we look into this for you! Unfortunately, some system ticket fields cannot be modified due to what we call inborn ticket rules. Meaning, those fields cannot be edited because they are hard coded and cannot be altered in any way.
That specifically refers to viewing tickets as an agent within the Support instance. It does appear possible to modify the code associated with your Help Center theme so that the text for "Your Email Address" can be altered. While we don't support custom coding at all, I just wanted to bring that to your attention that there is a possibility to change the text of your 'Submit a request' form.
I sincerely apologize for the limitation in regard to the native functionality but I hope this information helps!
How can I have visibility of Ticket Field set by Roles or Users? I want to have some ticket fields available to only Leads/Management users. Anyway this can be implemented.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Kunal
Hi,
Is there a way to rearrange ticket fields? I was able to add a few custom fields but they add to the bottom of the form and i need them in a different order.
Thanks
Hi Donny! Welcome to the Community!
We have a Tech Note that goes into detail about this. You can find it here. Let us know if you need anything else!
Hi @jessie,
Thanks for sending that over! I was able to reorder but i do not see the info getting passed over in the ticket. am I missing something?
Hi @Kunal,
There's no easy way to achieve this in Zendesk. The only solution here is you could setup ticket forms for just certain users. You're welcome to check out the guide here on this.
Best,
Amie
Hey Donny!
Are you using custom ticket forms? If so, you need to arrange the fields in each individual form, rather than in the ticket field list.
Hi Team,
any API to get ticket fields metadata?
Like field name, type of field is text box or drop down etc.
e.g
Name: subject
Type: text
Displayname: Subject
Thanks,
Nitin
Hi Nitin,
You can use the Ticket Fields API here to obtain ticket field meta data.
Zendesk API - Ticket Fields
Best,
Amie
Chief Unicorn Wrangler | Senior Customer Advocate - Tier 1 | support@zendesk.com
Thanks @Amie Brennan
any idea whats scope needed to get ticket fields metadata.
Thanks,
Nitin
Thanks @Amie Brennan
Zendesk API - Ticket Fields API(api/v2/ticket_fields.json) does not return some of the fields like
is_public
comment.body
is their any way to get these fields in metadata?
Thanks,
Nitin
Hi Nintex,
It sounds like you're wanting to obtain this meta data (ticket comments) for your tickets. You can do so from the Ticket Comments API endpoint - https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/core/ticket_comments
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Nhia.
Hello,
I understand that Zendesk has the 6 standard case statuses of New, Open, Pending, On-Hold, Solved and Closed. Can the names of these statuses be changed or new ones added? Being able to have different statuses would be a great help to our business needs. I see some comments that some people can change aspects of Zendesk with JS. Would it be possible to rename these with JS and CSS?
Thank you for your time,
-Evan
Hi Evan!
It's not possible to change the names of the default ticket statuses in the agent interface. The agent interface isn't able to be modified via JS or other methods, either; that only applied to Help Center.
In this type of situation, most customer utilize a custom ticket field for alternate status options.
Thank you! I will look into that.
Dears, I would need to be able to have specific ticket forms shown based on the initial two choices made by the user. We use Zendesk for our HR and Payroll support. I have created a Ticket Form which will have two fields the Category of the issue and their country. Based on these two choices I would then need to have Zendesk populate with specific Ticket Forms. Let say if they choose New Hire (category) and Ireland (country) then I would want the user to be shown as next a Ticket Form I would have created for this (New Hires_Ireland). It doesn't seem possible via the Conditional Fields app, so any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Hey Gasper!
In the conditional fields app I don't think you can select a specific pre-built form to display based on field selections, but you can choose which additional fields to display based on those selections. So rather than selecting the entire form, you would just select which custom fields should be displayed and it will have the same basic effect.
The other option would be to name your forms something easily identifiable, like New Hires - Ireland, and have your agents select the necessary ticket form, rather than relying on custom fields. Then the appropriate form would display with one click. It would also be less work for you. :)
Thanks Jessie, each country would have different i.e. New Hire forms as have different laws, so can't do that. Also if I am to go with the second option the dropdown would have 100 entries .. no one will be willing to use Zendesk if they see this.
Hey Gasper!
I'm not sure why the first option wouldn't work; can you tell me more about that? It would be labor intensive to set up, certainly, because you would need to set up each country's fields, but it would do what you need it to.
Hi, How do I report, or build a report on the Type Field? For example, how many incidents, questions etc I have received each month. I can't find any articles on this, please help.
Hi Jess, I see what you mean on the option 1. Was just that when I tried it not all custom field were showing up. So, do I have to first add all the needed custom fields to the form for then to be able to setup the custom rules? Was hopping the app would have access to all custom fields as it will save some work.
Hi Daisy,
Have you had a chance to review our Reporting on custom fields in Insights article? If you're wanting to report on a drop-down list this will be an attribute you can search for under the How tab in Insights.
Gasper,
If you're on the Enterprise plan with multiple ticket forms you'll need to add each of your custom fields to the desired form. After you've added the appropriate fields to the forms they should display within the app.
Let us know if you run into any issues!
So is it correct that I can customize the labels for the "Subject" and "Description" fields in the Zendesk Support admin configuration, but not the "Your email address" field label?
Can you please advise why the Zendesk definitions of Incident and Problem are the reverse of the ITIL definitions of both respectively? That's really confusing!
Hi C F,
I can't speak for why these decisions were made when this feature was released. If you haven't already, I would encourage you to take a look at our Working with Problem and Incident tickets article which goes over this functionality a bit more.
If you have any questions regarding how this feature works please let us know!
Hi Brett
Firstly, thanks for the prompt response, it's much appreciated.
There's some conflicting info.
To be clear:
If the definitions of Incident and Problem in this article (about 4.5 pagedowns from the top) could be corrected (i.e. aligned to the article you linked), that would be much appreciated.
Many thanks,
Chris
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