Question
Which time zone does Zendesk use?
Answer
Timestamps can be displayed in different time zones across your Zendesk account, depending on your configuration.
This article covers:
Ticket timestamps
Ticket timestamps appear in your user profile time zone. Each user on your account can have a different time zone. However, by default, all user profiles are set to the primary Zendesk account time zone.
To view or update your account time zone
- In Admin Center, click the Account icon (
) in the sidebar. - Navigate to Appearance > Localization.
- Select the appropriate time zone in the Time zone menu.
To view or update a user profile time zone
- Click the Search icon (
) in the upper-right of the top toolbar. - Type in the user's name or email address and hit Enter.
- In the top menu, click Users.
- Choose a user from the list.
- Find the Time zone field in the side menu and amend it if needed.
Talk time zone
Phone call timestamps in a ticket are displayed in the time zone on the user profile of the agent or admin viewing the ticket. If no time zone is set in the user profile, the timestamp on the ticket defaults to the time zone for the account.
When your agents receive a call, Zendesk Support creates a ticket with an internal note that indicates the details of the call. The Time of call piece of information uses the UTC timezone.
The timestamps are shown on the Talk History dashboard display in the default time zone of the account in Admin Center under Account > Appearance > Localization.
Chat time zone
In-ticket Chat Transcript
Chat transcript's time zone is always UTC.
Chat account time zone
The account time zone is mainly used for operating hours and Analytics and can be set in the Timezone tab of the Chat account Settings.
Chat agent time zone
Timestamps in the Chat History and inside of individual chats appear in the local time. The local time is determined by the system time on the agent's device currently being used to view the data.
Website Analytics
The website analytics on the Home dashboard shows statistics in UTC.
However, the CSV export file that you can extract from this feature is in UTC.
API timestamps
Timestamps in the API use UTC and are formatted as ISO 8601 strings. For example: 2015-04-16T09:14:57Z.
Some endpoints use Unix time, also known as Epoch or POSIX time. For example: 1455821369. For more information, see the Zendesk Core API.
End user portal
Timestamps in the end user portal where your customers can view their existing tickets use the timezone set on the device/operating system they are viewing the ticket from. The timestamp will change automatically based on the timezone set on the device they are viewing the ticket from.
4 Comments
"Chat transcript's time zone is always UTC."
This is a joke, really ... it causes huge confusion in my clients, because they have to keep calculating the time according to the time zone, since everything is already set up correctly in my Zendesk Support ...
We have had discussions since 2018 about the case and no official response from the company that would be the "best in the market"
Setting a timezone per user is overly complicated when it's very simple to use the browser time/timezone as a reference in order to display a human friendly ticket timestamp. Any plan to support that? That would be one setting less, in a system that already has many.
Both Julio and Etienne are making solid points.
Anything to add, Zendesk Team? Users don't want to 'configure a profile' to make a simple request, they're trying to engage with your users, us, not Zendesk itself.
For visibility and to let others upvote and comments, could one of you post to our Feedback - Chat and Messaging (Chat) topic, using this template to format your feedback? Thanks!
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