Working with ticket tags

Tags are words, or combinations of words, you can use to add more context to tickets and topics (see About tags). This article describes how agents can add or delete tags in tickets, create views based on ticket tags, and search for tickets by tags.

Note: Tags are available on the Essential plan, but you can't use them to create views. Enterprise agents receive permission to edit tags based on their custom role.

This article contains the following sections:

• Adding tags to tickets
• Deleting tags from tickets
• Creating views based on ticket tags
• Searching for tickets by tags

Related topics:

• Adding tags to users and organizations
• Reporting with tags

Adding tags to tickets

Agents can manually add tags to tickets. Depending on your support workflow, you might want to add tags to provide more context for the request so that tickets can be viewed and tracked, or processed by your account's business rules.

Tip: Avoid manually adding tags for common words like 'and' and 'the', these words will generate a high number of tags in your tickets, making automatic tagging a much less useful tool. If you've already created common words as tags, you can delete them.

To add tags to a ticket

1. Create or edit a ticket.
2. Enter new tags into the Tags field as needed. Enter a space after each tag. As you type the tag, note the following:
   • If a tag you are typing does not exist, it will be automatically created when you hit enter.
   • If the tag you are typing already exists, autocomplete displays tags containing words with the same prefix. For example, if you begin typing cust, the tags vip_customer and customer_feedback will show up; however, locust_street will not.

     

   • You can't use special characters, such as #, @, or ! in tags. If you try to add tags with these characters, they disappear when the ticket is updated. You can use only alphanumeric, dash, underscore, and the forward slash / characters.
   • Zendesk supports UTF-8 (Unicode). All languages supported by Zendesk can be added to tags.
   • You can create a tag with more than one word, but the words must be connected with an underscore.
   • There's no limit on the number of tags that can be added to a ticket; however, there is a limit on the total number of characters allowed in the Tags field. This field supports up to 5096 characters. After you reach this limit, you will no longer be able to add more tags. None of your existing tags will be automatically removed.
3. Click Submit to create or update the ticket.
   Note: It takes up to 24 hours for tags to appear in the tag cloud and for the tag autofill feature to take effect.

Adding tags to your tickets gives you even more flexibility to track, manage, and interact with your tickets. They can be used to attach additional data to your tickets, which you can then use in your personal macros. For more information, see Creating macros for tickets.

Deleting tags from tickets

Agents can delete tags on one ticket at a time. To delete tags that have been applied to many tickets, you need Admin permission. See Deleting a tag and removing it from all non-closed tickets.

To delete tags from a ticket

1. Open a non-closed ticket. You cannot delete tags from closed tickets.
2. In the Tags field of the ticket, click the close box (x) for the tags you want to delete. The tag is removed from the ticket.

Creating views based on ticket tags

You can add tags as conditions in views, which enables you to quickly view all tickets that contain specific tags. Agents can create personal views for their own use. Admins can create shared views. You can also view all tickets where a tag is applied.

To create views by tags

1. Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Views.
2. Select the tags condition.
3. Choose the condition operator Contains at least one of the following.
4. Enter one or more tags (separated with a space).
5. Add any other conditions that you'd like (for example, adding a condition for open tickets).
6. Set the view formatting options as needed.
7. Click Add View.

Your new view is listed in the Views menu in Zendesk Support.

Searching for tickets by tags

You can search for tags contained in tickets and forum articles. Using the search box, enter the name of the tag and the search results will display all the tickets and forum articles that contain the tag.

You can further improve your search results for tags by using property keywords in your searches. For tags, the property keyword is called ‘tags’ and is used like this:

tags:installation

Your search results will contain only occurrences of the word ‘installation’ when used as a tag.

When searching for tags, you must use the exact tag string or your search will fail. For example. if you've got a multi-word tag called about_sales a search for sales will not return this tag. You need to search for the exact string:

tags:about_sales