Adding tags to users and organizations

Tags can be added to users and organizations and these tags can then be used in business rules to manage the ticket workflow and to restrict access to forums.

Tagging users and organizations provides you with a way to add more data about each and then act on that data. For example, you can tag an organization or a user and then add the tag to a trigger to escalate the ticket to a specific support group.

A user's tags, and the tags of the organization to which they belong, are added to their tickets. In other words, if a user is tagged with manager and belongs to an organization tagged with premium, all the user's tickets will contain both of those tags.

Tags can also be used to restrict access to forums. You can first restrict access to a single organization and then to users within that organization based on tags. Or, if you don't select a specific organization, access can be restricted to all the users and organizations in your Zendesk that have the specified tags (in other words, multiple users from multiple organizations).

You can add tags manually when adding or editing users and organizations, during a bulk import, via the Zendesk API, and via enterprise single sign-on (JWT and SAML). Agents and administrators can add tags to users, but only administrators can add tags to organizations.

The user and organization tags are displayed in the user dashboard, the user widget, and in lists of users and organizations.

To manage tags

1. Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select People.
   Zendesk Classic: Select the Manage menu, then select People.
2. Click the Tags link at the top.

   On this Tags page you can see all the tags and how many times they've been added to users and organizations. You can also remove the tags from all the users and organizations to which the tags have been added.

User and organization tags can be referenced as placeholders and as data in Liquid markup code.

Enabling user and organization tagging

An administrator can enable user and organization tagging for your Zendesk.

To enable user and organization tagging

1. Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Customers.
   Zendesk Classic: Select the Settings menu, then select End-users.
2. In the section Tags on users and organizations, click Enabled.
3. Click Save Tab.

Note: If you want to add tags during a bulk import or via the Zendesk API, Remote Authentication, or SAML, you also must first enable this setting.

Adding tags

Tags can be added when manually adding or editing users and organizations, when bulk importing user and organization data, and via the Zendesk API, Remote Authentication, and SAML.

In your Zendesk, you add tags in the user's profile page and in the organization settings page.

The tags are added to new tickets submitted after this feature has been enabled, not retroactively to a user's existing tickets. Also, these tags are only added when tickets are created, not when they're updated.

Note: If you change a ticket's requester to another user, the original requester's tags are removed and the new requester's tags are added.

For information about adding tags during bulk imports, see Bulk importing users and organizations.

For information about working with user and organization tags via the Zendesk API, see REST API: Users and REST API: Organizations.

Managing user and organization tags

You can manage user and organization tags by selecting the Tags page. The Tags page displays all the user and organization tags that have been added to your Zendesk. Clicking a tag displays a list of the users and organizations to which the tags have been added.

Note: This page only displays user and organization tags, not the other tags that were added to tickets and forum topics.

Aside from providing you with the details of how the tags are being used, you can also remove tags from all the users and organizations to which they have been added.

To remove tags from users and organizations

1. Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select People.
   Zendesk Classic: Select the Manage menu, then select People.
2. Click the Tags link at the top.
3. Locate the tag you want to remove and then click Remove.
4. Confirm that you want to remove the tag and then click OK.

Note: Removing user and organization tags does not remove them from the tickets they have been added to. You can delete the tags from those tickets manually or just manage them out of your Zendesk as the tickets are closed.

User and organization tags in business rules

Since a user's tags (including their organization's tags) are added to their tickets, you can use these tags in business rules to automatically make changes to the ticket. For example, based on a user or organization tag, you can automatically assign tickets to a specific group, as in the following example.

These tags can of course be used in any business rules (automations, macros, triggers, and views) as well as reports. 

Note: If a customer uses organization tags and any of those tags overlap with tags associated with drop-down custom organization field selections, this can cause problems, such as business rules firing unexpectedly. For example, say an organization has the tag "test", and there's also a custom drop-down organization field with a value in the pick-list with a tag value of "test" and another of "other." If there's a trigger set to assign a created ticket to a group when a custom field selection is "other" but the requester is in the organization with the "test" tag, the trigger won't fire because the organization tag "test" will be applied instead of "other", as only a single tag associated with a drop-down field can be present on a ticket at any given time. For general information about custom organization fields, see Adding custom fields to organizations.

User and organization tag placeholders

User and organization tags are available as placeholders. They are properties of the User and Organization data objects and can therefore be referenced as user properties. For example:

{{ticket.requester.organization.tags}}

{{ticket.assignee.tags}}

For more information, see Zendesk data object (placeholders) reference.

Limiting access to forums with user and organization tags

User and organization tags can be used to restrict end-user access to forums.

To restrict access to a forum with tags

1. Select the forum you want to restrict access to and click Edit.
2. In the section User property restrictions, enter the tags of the organizations and users that will be allowed to access the forum.

   

3. Click Update Forum.

Only these users and organizations will see the forum when they are logged in to your Web portal. In the example above, all of the users and organizations that have been tagged with premium have access to the forum because no specific organization was selected.

Note: If you use more than one tag, for users and organizations to have access, they must also have all of the tags you've entered.

Searching for user and organization tags

You can always search for tags using the tags keyword, as in this example:

tags:premium

This search returns the tag 'premium' wherever it's been used in your Zendesk, including in ticket details and in the forums.

Using the type keyword, you can narrow your search results to tickets that contain the tag.

type:ticket tags:premium

A search like this returns all tags (not just user or organization tags). There's currently no way to search for user and organization tags within a ticket separate from other tags that have been added to the ticket (via custom fields, auto tagging, business rules, or manually by an agent). You can of course create a user and organization tag naming scheme (for example, user_tag and org_tag) and then search for those.

However, since tags is also a property of both the User and Organization data objects, you can narrow your search results to just those objects by using the type keyword.

To search for organization tags, you can use a search statement like this:

type:organization tags:premium

To search for user tags, you can do this:

type:user tags:beta_user