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 a way to add a USER tag via Trigger? It seems that any tag I attempt to add using a Trigger ends up on the ticket level.
Hi pstrauss You can find a list of available Trigger conditions and actions here https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115015611647-Trigger-conditions-and-actions-reference At this time you can't add a tag to a user from a trigger.
That being said, you can create a custom user field and set that via trigger. That will then automatically add the tag at the user level.
Hope that helps!
Is there a way to search the tags under Admin>People>Tags? We have a good number of user tags on our account.
Hello Tom,
Natively there is no search feature that will let you page through tags as you described. I shared some documentation below that covers some best practices in managing ticket tags in your account. Also, if this is a feature you would like added, I would recommend posting in our Product Feedback forums so our developers can consider implementing this change in a future update.
Managing ticket tags
Best regards.
Our customers are split up into Support Tiers based on contract. Initially when we setup Zendesk, we tagged these Organizations with the support tier - "enterprise" for example.
As we progressed the system, we now see a need to tie these tags to Jira for our Product Managers via the Jira application. We are able to pass these tags if they are tagged with "jira_" for instance "jira_enterprise".
I'm wondering what the best way to replace the tag "enterprise" with "jira_enterprise" would be. We have thousands of orgs to update (with 6 different support tiers), so manually isn't really a great option. These orgs carry other tags as well, which I'm fairly confident a CSV import would remove.
Hoping someone has a solution for this!
Hi Michael,
I would do an export of your Organizations with their current tags and do a search and replace and reupload. You're right it will overwrite what's there, so make sure your upload keeps the other existing tags in place on that org!
Definitely test this out with a small sample to tweak as needed.
I am kinda in shock here...I have been looking high and low for a way to get a custom ticket field to update the user profile. And everything I read says it's not possible. I'm not just reading old stuff...even new stuff says the same thing. There are lots of frustrated people out there, trying to do this...and yet the answer is right here.
In another thread elsewhere in the community, I have been working with another user who is doing something like what Colin Piper suggested here. But it's not simple and I don't have it working yet.
I was going to play around with updating tags instead of a custom user field, so a search brought me to this article. Following on Colin's suggestion (which was 5 years ago, mind you) PROVENTIC **** EMEA Reseller Partner had an idea to use a trigger. This really caught my eye, but I figured it couldn't possibly work. There's "no way" to update a user based on a ticket field, right?
Well, apparently there is. And it was confirmed just recently by Chris Bulin who said, quite matter-of-factly, as if it was always this way, "you can create a custom user field and set that via trigger. That will then automatically add the tag at the user level."
So I tried it. And it worked.
I cannot believe that this isn't more well known. I mean, someone (I'll start, lol) should be tracing back all those threads and saying "hey, yes, there's a way!" And it's maddeningly simple.
Now I do realize that it's not elegant and may not work for all cases I have seen described in other threads. There has to be one trigger for each option, e.g., I have 5 choices in a dropdown ticket field, and 5 matching choices in a user field, so each one of them needs its own trigger. If you have 10 choices, or if you have a ton of fields and options, it might be a real bear. And there could even be conflicts or race conditions that I haven't discovered yet. But so far all testing has come out perfect. And for me, it's totally worth it to set up a bunch of triggers for the long term results.
Big ups to those who shared this simple solution here. Thank you!
Glad you figured it out and yes, the language thing would have been doable with a number of triggers as well. I should have suggested and thought of the trigger solution first though.
We use HTTP targets for a bunch of updates on ticket and user data that otherwise can't be processed through triggers because it needs at least some checks we can do with liquid, the script language used in the dynamic content.
And I'm guessing that the liquid if/else statements might be used to avoid having to create multiple triggers for a single dropdown list?Sebastian
And I totally get why you didn't think of triggers first....the thread we were on explicitly says, over and over again, that NO, you can't do this with triggers! The whole point of the thread was people trying to find a workaround. Again....unless I am totally missing something! LOL
No, it's korrekt, you can set some things via triggers, not all though. Using HTTP targets with the API helps in these cases. The if statement allows to check multiple fields and values so saves using multiple triggers, yes. While liquid is not so very mighty one can still check and to a bunch of helpful things with it.
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