Recipe: Using an About field to identify common issues

It's probably no surprise that the Zendesk Customer Support team has a fairly big and built-out instance of Zendesk. Our instance includes hundreds of agents, business rules, macros, custom fields, tags, and organizations.

A critical part of this instance is our About field, which is a custom ticket drop-down field containing over 200 values covering everything from authentication to messaging. Even if you are closer to ticket #10 than ticket #1000000, you should consider adding a basic drop-down About ticket field. If you start categorizing your tickets now, you'll have incredibly useful data to when it’s time to look back.

In this article, you'll learn how to start using an About field of your own. This article contains the following topics:

• Creating the About field
• Finding and tracking issues based on the About field

Creating the About field

Start by creating the About field, making sure to carefully organize your drop-down options.

To create an About field

1. In Admin Center, click  Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Fields.
2. Click Add field.
3. Select Drop-down as the field type, then start adding values.
   Use double colons to separate out the different levels, if need. For example, Billing::Refunds, Billing::Invoices will first give you the option to select Billing and then give you the related child options.
   
4. Select Required to solve a ticket so that agents have to fill it out before setting a ticket to solved.
   About data will be more useful if it's applied to every ticket.
5. (Enterprise only) If you have multiple ticket forms, edit the ticket forms where you want the field to appear, drag the field from the right onto the ticket form, then click Save. Repeat for additional ticket forms.
6. Click Save.

If you need more information about any of the options when you're creating your field, see Adding custom ticket fields to your tickets and forms.

Finding and tracking issues based on the About field 

You can create reports and business rules to identify and track common issues based on your About field:

• Reports. Once you’ve solved a bunch of tickets, you can build out your reports using your new field. See Reporting with custom fields.
• Macros. You can build macros for specific subjects based on common issues you're seeing. Don't forget to add the related About field value as a macro action. That will help ensure consistent and complete data.
• Triggers and views. Each option in your drop-down field has an associated tag that you can use to create triggers and views.