The 'About' Field

It's probably no surprise that our Zendesk customer service team has a fairly big and built-out instance of Zendesk Support. There's hundreds of agents, business rules & macros, custom fields, tags, and organizations.

All that comes together in the beautiful dance that is support. Some do heavier duty than others, and there's maybe none more critical than our humble About field.

About is a custom ticket drop-down field containing over 200 values covering everything from Authentication to Zendesk Chat. Even if you are closer to ticket #10 than ticket #1000000, I always suggest that every Zendesk Support customer consider putting in a basic custom drop-down ticket field. One of the most common questions that any customer support team needs to be able to answer, is what their customers are asking about. If you start categorizing your tickets now, that will be incredibly useful data to have when it’s time to look back.

I this article, you'll learn basic & advanced steps for getting going with an About field of your own. This article contains the following topics:

The Basics
Going further

The Basics

Setting up an About field

Click the Manage icon ( ) in the sidebar then click Manage > Ticket fields .
On the next screen, click Add custom field, choose Drop-down list, and start adding values.
You’ll notice that each option gets an associated tag so you can easily build out Triggers and Views . For more information, see Adding custom fields to your tickets and support request form.

Organizing your About field

If you just have a handful of options, then this part isn't necessary. If you have over 200 like we do, then this becomes a necessity!

To create a 'folder' in your about field, use double colons to separate out the different levels.
ex. Billing::Refunds, Billing::Invoices will first give you the option to select Billing and then give you the related child options
Here's what it looks like:

Going further

Reporting on your About field

Once you’ve solved a bunch of tickets and are ready to build out your reports using your new field, we’ve got you covered in our powerful analytics tool, Explore. See Reporting with custom fields.

Correct and complete data

Quick and easy tip! When building out macros about a specific subject, don't forget to add the related About field value as a macro action. That will help ensure consistent and complete data.

Also consider making the field Required . That means agents have to fill it out before setting a ticket to solved. This data will be more useful if it's applied to every ticket.