When you add custom ticket fields, you can use them in triggers, automations, and views.
For information about adding custom ticket fields, see Adding custom fields to your tickets and submit a request form.
Understanding custom ticket fields, tags, and business rules
The drop-down list, multi-select, and checkbox custom ticket fields can add tags to tickets that can be used in your business rules.
With drop-down and multi-select fields, Zendesk Support automatically generates tags as you enter field options for your custom field. You can modify the automatically generated tags by editing the Tag field. You must have a tag for each field option.
With checkbox fields, you have the option of associating a tag with the field.
These tags can be used as needed in your business rules. For example, you might use the tag to automatically assign the ticket to a specific support group. For an example of how to use tags in business rules, see . For more information about the relationship between tags and ticket fields see, Understanding tags and ticket fields.
The custom fields are also available as conditions and actions in business rules, which means that you can directly access the custom fields in your business rules rather than having to access them using the Tags action or condition.
Understanding custom ticket fields and views
After creating a custom ticket field, you can add it to your views. For example, suppose you create a custom field to let users select one of your product lines. After adding the custom field as a column in a view, you can sort the tickets by product line by clicking the column's heading. For more information on views, see Using views to manage ticket workflow in the Agent Guide. To add fields to your views, see Setting formatting options in the same article.
The sort order of custom-field columns in views is by the underlying tags used for the custom field. For example, if you sort the tickets by ascending order, the order is by the alphabetical order of the field's tags, not its titles.
For example, suppose you create a custom drop-down menu with the following product lines:
- Photography (tag: photography)
- Video (tag: audiovisual)
- Medical (tag: endoscopy)
If you add the field to a view and sort by ascending order, the tickets would be grouped and ordered as follows:
- Video tickets (tag: audiovisual)
- Medical tickets (tag: endoscopy)
- Photography tickets (tag: photography)
If you want to list your photography tickets at the top of the view, click the column heading again to sort by descending order.
If you want to use text, multi-line text, numeric, decimal, and regular expression custom fields, drag the fields to the columns included in the table section.
Once added, the columns will appear in the view.
About required fields and automations
If you have automations that set the ticket status to Solved, the ticket will be set as solved even if the ticket has "required" custom fields that are still blank. The reason is that automations check the automation conditions, not the ticket field conditions.
A workaround is to use tags to prevent the automation from running until the required fields are completed. For example, you can tell the automation to hold off until the okay_to_close tag is present, then set a trigger to add the tag when the required field is no longer blank. Here's how. Add the following "All" condition to your automation: Ticket: Tags > Contains At Least One of the Following > okay_to_close. Next, create a trigger with the following "All" condition: Ticket:{custom_field_name} > Is Not > - (blank). Set its action as Ticket: Add Tags > okay_to_close.
For more information, see the following articles:
8 Comments
Hey Scott!
The options that are going to be available to you will vary depending on what type of field it is. What type of ticket field are you working with here?
Hey Scott! Thanks for clarifying!
A text field should give you the following options: Is, Is not, Present, Not present, Contains at least one of the following words, Contains none of the following words.
So you should be able to test for a specific word or string.
Hey Scott -
I'm not sure why those options aren't showing up for you; I'm going to create a ticket to see if we can troubleshoot this better for you. Look for an email from us shortly!
Hello,
Some of my ticket tags are being overwritten when tickets with the tag "answered_call" are moved to an email ticket for example. How to I make my ticket tags permanent with each ticket?
Chris
Hi Christopher, That doesn't sound right! Tags don't get removed or overwritten unless:
1. you have a trigger or automation to remove them in certain circumstances
2. the tag "answered_call" is attributed to a drop down field that CHANGES to another choice in the dropdown when your scenario occurs.
So, you may need to look at which one of these is happening on your ticket (look at the ticket events) and make changes to your fields/tags as needed. Remember, though, that any changes you make could affect reporting.
Also, if you have a Talk account (not sure which phone app you're using), the ticket should get tagged with "phone" or something similar - just an FYI.
Heather responded:
Hello!
I am not sure this is the right place to ask this question but I cannot find a better thread.
In my business we have multiple teams/brands within the same instance. Each brand is presenting bespoke ticket forms to our end-users however we are running into the issue that we cannot have the same values in different ticket fields.
For example: I want to ask 'Do you have an order' and the choices should be 'Yes, No'
Another brand wants to ask: 'Are you travelling today' and the choices should also be 'Yes, No'
However the second brand cannot use the same values in there fields because I have already taken these. Is there any workaround for this at all? This is just an example as we have many ticket fields that require some of the same words (that can be very business specific) so we cannot use similar words as a workaround.
Thanks!
Milo
Hi Milo,
If I'm understanding you correctly, it sounds like your ticket fields are using the same tag (assuming you're using drop-down fields). If that's the case, you should be able to use the same drop-down value but you'll just need to change the tag associated with that drop-down value.
For example, Do you have an order would have Yes as the drop-down value and the tag associated with that value could be yes_1. For Are you traveling today your Yes value would have the tag yes_2 and so on.
You can find out more information in the following Support Tip as well: Understanding tags and ticket fields
Hope this clears up any confusion :)
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