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 Help Center content.
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.
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. Administrators can add tags to organizations. On Enterprise, agents who have a custom role with the correct permissions can also add tags to organizations.
User and organization tags can be used in business rules and they can be referenced as placeholders and as data in Liquid markup code.
Tags can also be used to restrict access to Help Center content (see Restricting access to knowledge base content and Restricting access to community content).
This article contains the following sections:
Enabling user and organization tagging
An administrator can enable user and organization tagging.
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Customers.
- In the section Tags on users and organizations, click Enabled.
- Click Save Tab.
Adding tags to users and organizations
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 Support, you add tags in the user's profile page and in the organization settings page. After signing in, users can view all tags associated with their profile by accessing the Help Center source code.
Only administrators can add tags to agent profiles. Agents cannot add tags to other agents' profiles.
The user and organization 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.
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. If you only change the organization, without changing the requester, the original organization's tags are removed and the new organization'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 view all of your user and organization tags, along with the details of how the tags are being used, and you can also remove tags from all the users and organizations to which they have been added.
To view user and organization tags
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select People.
- Click the Tags link at the top.
On this 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. This page only displays user and organization tags, not the other tags that were added to tickets.
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select People.
- Click the Tags link at the top.
- Locate the tag you want to remove and then click Remove.
- Confirm that you want to remove the tag and then click OK.
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.
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, consider the following situation:
- 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."
- 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
{{ticket.requester.organization.tags}}
{{ticket.assignee.tags}}
For more information, see Zendesk Support placeholders reference.
Searching for user and organization tags
tags
keyword, as in this
example:tags:premiumThis search returns the tag 'premium' wherever it's been used , including in ticket details and in the forums.
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
type:user tags:beta_user
41 Comments
Is there an easy way of adding tags from the organisation to the end user under that org?
I mark my organisations with what service agreements they have and what features of Zendesk they use - so when there are changes or things they need to know based on product or otherwise, i can pull a list of user with the correct tags (inherited from org) and feed them to ie. survey monkey or other systems through customer lists.
No. And this is where Customer Lists is weak. I would love to see customer lists updated to have filters based on org also.
Hi
Are there anyway to add tags to an end-user through a macro, trigger or automation? We are back to customer lists and i need an easy way to add a tag to an end-user when talking with them on a ticket. Lets say they have a feature request and i want to use customer lists to get back to them when that feature is available. Adding the tag manually each time is troublesome and people can mistype the tag as well...
Carsten, the answer is "Possibly". Now before you get excited, it is not straightforward and I cannot give you all the details.
You would need to use a http target to use the api to update the end-user record. I update tickets with private comments this way but never tried updating the user object. You would need to get hold of the ID of the user I suspect.
Hopefully one of the api experts will come along and confirm if this truly is possible. But if so then you can use a trigger to send a notification to the target.
Thx Colin.
I have actually thought up a different way to achieve this:
Voila - Not at all an easy fix and somewhat inflexible since you have to create a drop down for each tag you want to be able to create a list for...
So simple - I love it!
Is there a way to bulk tag users? Sorry this might have been answered but I do not have time to read all the answers :)
Basically trying to add tags to new customers that will be coming into zendesk via the NPS survey csv upload. Do not know if I can add a fourth column to the CSV template inside the NPS page. Also for the customers inside the upload that are already users I would like to add tags on them but not create duplicate users. What is the best way for me to do this?
Let me know,
Thanks!
Hey Alex!
We have a document on bulk import and updating users which you can find here, if you haven't seen it already. I think that should answer all of your questions regarding importing/updating via CSV.
You also have the option to add/update users using our API if you have the resources and know-how.
Please let me know if you have any other questions!
Hi there.
I was wondering if there's a way to auto-assign an organization based on the tag on a ticket?
Hey Janine!
You can do this with a trigger, but it will only update the Org on the ticket. It won't update anything in the user profile, though.
Is it possible to restrict a users view of tickets in an organization using tags? Can you share instruction or alternative methods to accomplish this?
Hey Nick! Currently the only options for end user ticket access is either to their own tickets where they are either the requester or CC'd on the ticket OR access to all tickets in their organization. There is no feature available to grant/restrict access based on user tags or any other method.
Hello,
I would love to search within tags. Not only with the word a tag starts with.
ACTION: Adding a tag starting with the word delete
RESULT: Only find tags starting with "delete...." but not for example account_delete
This makes it super hard for agents to work with tags, since they don't always now every tag by heart.
Thanks!
Hello,
Is there a way we can identify who worked on a specific email? who replied on it?
Please advise.
Thanks!
How can tags be added if we are using Guide but not the Support function? All of our customer users are added via SSO.
Hi Melissa -
All user management is done within Support; Guide does not have a separate user management system. Can you tell us more about what you're trying to do?
Thanks for your reply, Nicole. We are trying to create more groups of users in order to assign more granular view permissions for Guide articles. All of our users are currently being created via SSO. Our Guide articles are mostly going to be accessed through the web widget directly from our product UI, via API calls. So far that the article accessing works fine, but we want to be able to limit the articles that a particular user or user group can view based on the subscriptions they have purchased for our product.
When I try to use the Admin page to add groups or organizations, I am wondering if the tags can assigned to the user when they are created in SSO and have the tags populate through to the user in Zendesk.
I hope this helps.
Hey Melissa,
You should be able to pass over user attributes from your SSO directory to the Zendesk user profile, although steps on how to set this up would vary depending on your SSO provider.
I was able to track down a couple article that may be helpful for setting this up:
I hope the above information helps :)
It does help, thanks. I believe my SSO admin had already found some of this info in your docs, but I've shared them with him anyway.
Happy to help Melissa :)
Let us know if you have any other questions!
Is there a way to manually add a tag to a single User Profile even if there is no Ticket for that user?
For example, when I click on a user, then select edit, there is a place to select Tags on the left side under Primary email, but there are no drop-down options with the Tags that are in our system. I am the admin. Thanks.
Hello Laura,
There is indeed a way to add a tag to a single user despite that user having any tickets. I've broken down the steps below for you to attempt this on your own.
I've also gone ahead and linked the help article relevant to this process just in case you might have any other questions regarding user tags.
Hope this helps and let us know if there is anything else we can clarify for you.
I fail to understand why we can't add user tags via automations / tiggers, seems like a very basic function, and is very limiting to us.
Is there a way to transfer Zendesk support user tags to Zendesk chat?
Hello Pedro Reis,
The way our base product is set up Support tags and Chat tags function as two different tags, so a "Copy/Paste" method of transferring these wouldn't be possible.
Best regards.
I am talking about user tags (ex:vip users), how can we reflect those on Zendesk chat?
What I mean, if the same user contacts us via chat, how can we now for example, that he is a vip?
Thanks for your help
Hello Pedro Reis,
So what you can do is utilize the Web Widget to create authenticated users, so when they contact you, they will be able to be cataloged/tagged by creating a JWT token for your VIP users. I've linked an article that goes into this process in more detail so you can set this up on your end.
Enabling authenticated visitors in the integrated Web Widget
Best regards.
Hi Devan,
Thanks for your reply.
We recently implemented the JWT token for authentication and tagging reasons in Zendesk support. So I guess my question it's how to apply it as well to Zendesk chat.
I will review the article you sent, but any additional information you can send will be useful.
For some reason I have lost the ability to update or even see the Tags associated with user accounts? I am the only Agent/Administrator.
Hi Robert -
The only reason within Zendesk that this would happen is if you somehow turned user tags off altogether. Here's the article that can help you troubleshoot that possibility:
Adding tags to users and organizations
If that's not the issue, then it is something local, such as a browser addon/extension interfering with the functionality.
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