You can add custom fields to your Zendesk Support tickets to enable you to collect information that's not collected by a standard Zendesk ticket. For example, you could add a drop-down list to tickets that enables the requester of the ticket to choose their office location.
When your Support data is next synchronized with Explore, custom fields are also synchronized and can be used in your reports. This synchronization occurs every hour. Explore synchronizes ticket, user, and organization custom fields.
For details about how to create and use custom fields in Support, see Adding custom fields to your tickets and support request forms.
This article contains the following topics:
How custom fields synchronize with Explore
When you create, edit, delete, or reactivate custom fields in Zendesk Support, the following happens in Explore:
- When a custom field is created or reactivated in Support, a corresponding metric or attribute is created in Explore at the next data sync (which can take between 1-2 hours). The custom field values must have been used in tickets, users or organizations for them to appear under the corresponding metric or attribute in Explore.
- When a custom field title or value is updated in Support, the metric or attribute title or value is updated in Explore.
- When a custom field is deactivated in Support the corresponding metric or attribute is deleted from Explore.
Finding custom fields in Explore
All ticket, user and organization custom fields are synced with Explore and automatically placed in the corresponding attribute or metric folders of the datasets. From there they can be selected and used on the queries or dashboards.
Only the latest field value is recorded in the standard Explore metrics and attributes. In the Ticket updates dataset, you can track updates to the fields by using the Changes attributes. For details, see Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Support.
Use the following table to help you understand where to find your custom fields in Explore:
Field type (from Zendesk Support) | Object type in Explore | Explore folder |
---|---|---|
Drop-down Multi-select Text (single line) Multi-line Checkbox Credit card Regex |
Attribute |
Ticket custom fields Requester/user organization custom Fields Requester/user custom fields |
Date |
Attribute |
Each date attribute is represented by multiple time dimensions placed in the attribute’s individual folder |
Numeric Decimal |
Metric |
Numeric custom fields |
Custom fields example
In this example, you'll create a custom field containing a drop-down list that lets agents add the requesters office floor to a ticket. You'll then synchronize this with Explore and finally, create a simple report showing tickets associated with each office floor. You must be a Support administrator to add the custom field.
Create the custom field in Support
Perform the following actions in Zendesk Support.
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Manage > Ticket Fields.
- Click the Add field button.
- Click New Field at the top of the page, and enter a title for the field, in this case Office location.
- From the list of field types, click Drop-down.
- In the properties for the list, enter a title for the list, an optional description, and configure permissions as to who can set values for this field.
For detailed information about the options on this page, see Adding custom fields to your tickets and support request forms.
- In the Field values section, enter each line of the list. For this example, enter 1st Floor, 2nd Floor, 3rd Floor, 4th Floor, and 5th Floor.
- Click Save.
- Add the custom field to the ticket forms you want to use it with. For help, see Adding custom fields to your tickets and support request forms.
The new custom field is now available in your Support tickets. Before you move on, create a few tickets using this new field, or update the field on some existing tickets.
Create the Explore query
Perform the following actions in Zendesk Explore after your data has synchronized. Synchronization takes place once every hour.
- In Explore, create a new query using the Support: Tickets dataset. For more help, see Creating queries.
- In the Metrics panel, add the Tickets metric.
- In the Rows panel, expand Ticket custom fields, and then click Office location. It might take a few seconds to display the custom field.
Tip: To find custom fields for users, expand User custom fields and for organizations, expand Organization custom fields.
- Explore generates the report in a table similar to the following:
Tip: Previously, Explore displayed custom field values as a tag instead of the actual value. If you have query filters, calculated metrics, or calculated attributes that reference the tag values, update these with the new custom field value to ensure they continue to work correctly.
- Give the query a name, and then save it.
Tips for using custom fields in Explore
Use the tips in the following table to help you understand how custom fields work in Explore and how you can get the best from them:
Field type (from Zendesk Support) | Values | Usage |
---|---|---|
Drop-down Multi-select |
Agents or end-users select values from drop-down and multi-select fields. These values appear in Explore as they are recorded in the Support UI. However, if a value is later deleted from the field in Support, its tag will be displayed in Explore instead of the actual value. |
The drop-down field is commonly used to track information about the user or their request. Some common examples are category, issue type, region, plan, etc. Drop-down fields work in a similar way to built-in Support fields like Type or Priority. Use the multi-select field when multiple values are required. For example, you could record multiple product areas, services provided, or areas of interest. Reporting on this field type is more complex than reporting for a drop-down field. Use this field type when a drop-down field cannot be used as an alternative. |
Checkbox |
Checkbox fields have three values True (if the box is checked), False (if the box is not checked) and NULL (if the ticket was closed before the checkbox was created). |
The checkbox is the simplest field type to use and is commonly applied as a query filter. Examples: Submitted for review, Serviced, Completed. |
Text (single line) Multi-line |
Text field values are manually typed in by agents or end-users meaning the field might contain a large number of values. Additionally, the values entered might be inconsistent, or contain spelling mistakes. |
Normally, text fields are used as notes to record additional unstructured data. This makes them less useful for reporting purposes. However, they can still be added to the table queries to provide context details about tickets or users. |
Credit card Regex |
Values for these fields are also manually typed in by agents or end-users, but the format is controlled by the credit card number format or custom regular expression. |
Because these fields provide a more structured way of recording data, they can be more useful for reporting purposes than standard text fields. |
Date |
Each date attribute is represented by multiple time dimensions like Date, Month, Year, etc. |
Enables you to record dates or deadlines, like date of birth, project end date, and booking date. They can be used in queries, dashboard filters or calculated metrics in the same way as any built-in time attributes. |
Numeric Decimal |
Numeric and decimal fields allow storing numeric values that can be computed in the same way as any other metric using the available Explore aggregators. |
These fields are similar to the system metrics, like Agent Replies or Resolution Time. Examples you could use are revenue, project length, or area in square meters. |
31 Comments
Why do the reports show the tag associated with the custom field value instead of the actual field value?
Hey Chandra,
It's currently expected behavior that the tag will be displayed rather than the field value. It does look like we are planning on changing this in the future though; here is the Product Feedback post if you'd like to upvote it and comment with your use case:
Custom drop-down field displays tags rather than title value
In the meantime, as a workaround you can navigate to Calculations > Renamed Set in the query to manually rename the values. This article has a bit more information:
Explore recipe: Using renamed and ordered sets to change displayed values
Hope this helps!
Hi,
I have about 75 customer fields on my instance.
I followed above advise, however, in zendesk explore, i can only see 1 custom field :-(
What am I doing wrong?
Hi Massimo,
Your custom fields should be appearing within Explore. As this sounds like an account-specific issue, I'm going to create a ticket and reach out to you via email. Keep an eye out for my reply.
Long time listener, first time caller. Can you report on deactivated fields?
According to this article on altering ticket fields, "The data in the custom ticket field remains stored in the ticket audits endpoint below. GET /api/v2/tickets/{ticket_id}/audits/{id}.json"
If that's the case, can I create a data set of deactivated fields and active fields?
The longer version of this story is that we're updating custom fields (drop-down) across our org which requires that some values become fields. At this point, I'm considering deactivating everything and starting from scratch, but I don't want to lose the historic data held in our old fields and values.
Hi Mireille, thanks for joining the show.
There is a couple of ways you can go about that. You may want to just keep the ticket field active, but remove the field from any forms on new tickets. If you deactivate, the data for reporting on the dropdown itself will disappear, but the tags will remain. The second route would require you to change your reporting to be based on whatever tags existed for the old dropdown field answers.
A question about Organization Custom Fields
In Explore, it seems we can only report on the org custom fields of the requester organization, but can't report on the custom fields of the ticket organization.
For non-custom fields, both options exist separately ("requester organization" vs "ticket organization"), but for custom field, all we get is the user's, which is LESS useful (for us, at least).
This is a major gap in our ability to report on tickets based on the organization they actually belong to. I know we can work around this with more ticket custom fields and triggers, but that would be a lot of triggers and we already made it complex enough.
Is there any plan to make the ticket organization custom fields available?
Hello Gal!
Hi Shera,
What this seems to give me is not the custom fields of the ticket organization, but those of the default organization of the requester. So if requested X has two organizations, A and B, and A is the default, it will always show the values of organization A, even if the user opened a ticket for organization B.
I hope that clarifies my issue.
In this image, I filter a single ticket. You can see that the same ticket has two organization names - that of the ticket and that of the requester.
"Client Type" is a custom organization field, and is available for me to select only ONCE. The empty client type in the image is this of "**** Main Account", and there is no way for me to see the Client Type of the ticket organization, "*** Brazil Search"
Hello Gal!
Good day!
I am sorry to inform you, but I have checked with our Developers and there is no option to pull all custom ticket organizations in Explore as of the moment. However, this has been suggested as a feature request. As a workaround, you may use tags.
Best regards!
Hello,
I'm looking for a way to hide the empty cells from the table. I have my custom ticket field selected and it shows the ticket number. But since this custom field is new, I have a lot of blank values where the ticket number is high but the custom field is empty. Does this make sense? How can I remove these empty cells from the table, so that I only see those tickets where the custom field has been set? Thanks for any help!
Hello Nelli Laine,
I would recommend filtering out the null values, so all that shows is the dates a value you are trying to report on. I've shared a screenshot below of what this should look like on your end. Let me know if you have any other questions and happy reporting!
Best regards.
Hello! Is there a way to turn a custom field into a date value for filtering? Currently, we have a custom ticket field that is a date, however when filtering can not go about the usual simple/advanced date options. Is it possible to convert these values to be able to filter by last week/this week/this month, etc without needing to choose each date individually?
Hello Adam Hanna,
Currently as Explore stand this is not possible. I would recommend posting your suggestion in our product feedback forums so our developers can consider making this change in future a update.
Best regards.
I am trying to run a query on all agents associated to a particular custom field in the user section and getting unexpected results.
I have create a field in the User record page to designate if a user is an actual agent and what support group they below to since we have multiple groups using our instance of ZD and for billing purposes we need to know how to prorate the cost to each department.
When I simply create a report using the Support Ticket [Default] using a
metric of: Users and Organizations: Agents (d_count)
attribute: Agent Type [custom drop down]
I get an accurate count for each agent type which is a good first step. What Id like to do is be able to list all agents associated to each value in the choice list. When I do I get names in groups they are not part of and "counts" in the metrics >1. I tried a custom attribute that listed only users that were agents but that didn't work either. What interesting there is a metric for agents but no attributes. When I try to use assignee I get a metric count >1. thoughts?
Hello Bill Cicchetti,
So, unfortunately, the report you are trying to create isn't possible since Explore is not made to report on users. The report you are trying to run is counting based on tickets, which is where the root of your issue lies.
Best regards.
Hi,
Does anyone know how to get the text string visible in a query? So not only the count of how many times a text field has been used but also the actual text? Can it be shown or do I need to drillthrough to see it?
Thanks in advance!
-Ron
Hi Ron de Vries I don't believe that's currently natively possible in Explore. It's an excellent suggestion to add to our product feedback forums though.
On Wednesday, April 8, from 8:00am-10:00pm CDT, we'll have a special guest team of experts on hand to answer your questions about Explore: Reporting & Insights Migration in your Zendesk Explore instance for an AMA-style conversation!
Just click the "new post" button and write up your question. Be sure to be as detailed as possible. The best questions include:
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"Note: The Backlog history dataset does not contain custom fields."
Are there any plans to change this? This is a huge impediment...
Hi @Jaïs Pingouroux there are no plans that I know of to add this feature at the moment. However, please do consider adding this request to our feedback page at https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/360001200913 This way, other customers can vote on the request and help the product team prioritize updates. Thanks!
Hi all,
Does anyone know if custom fields flow through from Tickets to Calls? If we have a custom field for tickets, is it possible to filter the associated calls using that code?
I'm trying to build a report to find the resolution time on a ticket AFTER a custom field is used (we have a checkbox and also a dropdown that change so this event would be the triggering point to start the timer).
More details:
We have an internal SLA of x days for a resolution after we have all of the information needed from the customer. Sometimes it can take several days / weeks to get all of the details needed from the customer so reporting on the full resolution time isn't accurate. Once we have all of the needed data we set a custom field so this is when I am wanting to start the timer of x days.
Is this possible? I've been trying all sorts of ways to get accurate reporting on this to be able to gauge effectiveness of my team.
Hey Rob,
Hope all is well.
I am manually adding our total phone calls to a text field I added in a Dashboard and then it goes out every night at 8pm so it captures it on the report.
Is there a way for Zendesk to keep a running total somewhere in Zendesk of a custom field? If enter it manually at the end of each day then I could create a monthly snapshot of this information...hope this makes sense.
Hi James Phipps apologies for the slow reply here. I'm not aware of a way you could automatically do this in Explore. You could create another custom field in Support where you manually enter the running total. Additionally, you might be able to use the Zendesk API to update the field in Support and then sync this with Explore.
Hi
I am looking to create a report on the amount of times a custom text field has a value stored within it. Ideally, I would like this to be in a Column Chart so I can track over a period of 12 months how many times the field has been used. Is this possible? I suspect I will need to create a calculated metric but I am a little lost.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Jason
Hi Jason,
I think i can help you with your need. Can you please be more specific so i can give you a calculated metric to use it?
The custom field that you have built has a free text or is something defined by you like a drop-down list with some values?
Thanks,
Violeta
Hi Violeta
Thanks for your response, the below is an example of our field. The field is a text box that we manually type a reference in to link an external parties support code to our systems.
In Explore I would love to be able to create a report that counts whenever data is entered in to this field. The plan is to then create a column chart that shows how many times this field has been used each month.
Hope this makes sense!
Jason
Hi Jason,
Thanks for expanding on this. Would you need to count how many times particular answers were applied or just how many times the field is used overall?
Thanks!
Hi Ben
How often the field is utilised overall, thanks!
Jason
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