| Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends |
|---|---|---|
| March 23, 2022 | April 26, 2022 | May 6, 2022 |
Starting on April 26, 2022, we’ll be rolling out some changes that simplify the sorting and ordering behavior in views. These changes will improve the performance of views in all accounts, especially in accounts that have a large number of active tickets. This announcement explains what we’re removing and changing, what to expect, and what to do before it happens.
This announcement includes these sections:
Why is Zendesk making these changes?
There are some major infrastructure changes happening in the backend for Views. This is going to make the performance of views more consistent and less reliant on the scale and complexity of the view. Larger active ticket volumes will have less effect on the performance of views. This will also start to open up feedback improvements to the views interface that were previously blocked due to the technical limitations.
Changes to the sorting behavior in views
We will be removing the ability to sort tickets in a view by Subject and Submitter. For example, if you click these column headings, nothing will happen. You will still be able to sort by other columns.
Sortable columns include the sorting icon next to the column to indicate that the column is sortable.
Changes to the ordering setting in views
Order by is a setting on each view that specifies which column is used by default to order tickets in the view. You need to go to the Views management page and then open a view for editing in order to see it. Once this change goes into effect, the Subject and Submitter values will no longer appear as options in the Order by drop-down list.
What you need to do
If you currently have views where Order by is set to Subject or Submitter, you’ll need to open those views for editing and then change these values to something else. If you don’t, you will experience performance issues with these views once the change occurs.
72 Comments
Do you have any suggestions on how we can find views with either of these set in the order by, so that we can get them ready for this change? I have way too many views to go through them all one by one.
This is not ideal for our workflows, in some cases we sort by requester to merge multiple tickets with the same requester. Can you share a recommendation to do that after these changes occur?
This is a really bad decision. We have an account that receives thousands of tickets a day, and we use the ability to sort by requester when assigning tickets to easily find potential duplicates. We also get "campaigns" where requesters use the same (or very similar) subjects, so sorting by subject is something we do a lot. Taking away these functions will cause issues. Any suggestions for how we can accomplish the above?
Am I correct in reading that this is only by submitter, and NOT requester? Or is it both columns?
If it's not, anyone could swap to Requester instead and still be able to sort appropriately?
Hi CJ Johnson –
I think the most thorough way would be to use the List Views API endpoint to get a list of your views, and search for Subject and Submitter in the Execution portion of the returned data.
Taylor Painter, James, and Kel S., not to worry! Your ability to sort by Requester will not be affected. You can find a discussion of the difference between Requester and Submitter in our developer documentation.
Was worried for a moment. Thanks Dave Dyson for the dev doc link
> The user who is asking for support through a ticket is the requester.
> The submitter is the user who created a ticket.
Being able to sort by requester is valuable, glad we still can.
We've not yet found a use to sort by submitter.
I'm on board for changes to improve performance of views, but I echo what CJ Johnson wrote. We have hundreds of views, what does Zendesk propose we do to find if we have views that will be affected?
In case it helps anyone, this solution was given in the support driven slack for sorting by subject:
I’d recommend creating a new view based on your existing view(s) and grouping by Subject. That’ll give you your clusters without needing to sort your main queue.
This is kind of a bummer, y'all. We sort by subject to help us quickly identify and manage large batches of tickets during incidents as well as during our everyday workflows. With 1000+ new tickets coming in every day, this throws a real wrench in some of our processes.
I agree with Erica. I understand the performance reasons, but we have some teams that utilize subject line for sorting their work a lot so this will be seen as a negative change.
I agree that the removal of these grouping/sorting capabilities will have a very negative impact on our workflow, unfortunately. A core duty of several members of our team is to review all of our incoming tickets and resolve merges/remove spam/bulk-respond/etc., before these tickets end up in our agents' hands.
- Grouping by Submitter in a "Merge View" I've created allows me to quickly see necessary merges at a glance. Grouping by Requester is not optimal due to other departments within our organization submitting tickets on behalf of customers (i.e. Grouping by Submitter allows me to skim past all of these at once; Grouping by Requester means I have to manually review each potential merge to determine if one of the tickets had been submitted from elsewhere)
- More importantly, sorting by Subject is incredibly important for us to not only flip through and bulk/batch resolve certain ticket types, but also easily see exactly what sort of tickets are coming in. This allows us to quickly determine if our customers are suddenly experiencing a new widespread issue, determine the nature of all new requests from within one view, and allows those of us reviewing tickets to quickly locate bulk-response tickets, junk, and spam not caught by filters. Removing the Subject sorting functionality will make this process extremely inefficient and will ultimately lead to our agents handling tickets they shouldn't need to.
Chiming in here to agree that changing this is definitely not ideal. Being able to sort by these two columns is incredibly valuable and removing it will also have a negative impact on us as well.
If y'all could stop removing existing functionality, that'd be great. These are things we use on a daily basis. Constantly needing to come up with new ways of solving Zendesk problems that have already been solved is a serious drain on our limited resources.
I sort by Subject on a daily basis and I have the maximum number of views in my sidebar. What do you propose I do? Please stop removing useful functionality. Having to find time-consuming workarounds for simple processes like this will result in us moving to an alternative platform after 10 years.
Thank you all for taking the time to provide some feedback here. We have created a list of clarifying questions and answers that we hope will alleviate some of these concerns. Please take a look at this new article for some answers and clarifications.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4615306914458
WHAT HAPPEN TO MY SORT FUNCTION TODAY???? I was just told from my IT department that someone in ZenDesk thought life would easier if they removed the ability to sort your groups. I have no idea who would think that....because my life just got a whole lot harder. Change it BACK!!!!
Hey Zendesk Admins!!
This change hit our account today and immediately had a negative impact on our workflows. However, I created a workaround to allow us to continue sorting by Subject.
1) Add a new custom ticket field for free text: Subject (Sortable) (no need to add it to your ticket forms)
2) Create a new webhook at the following endpoint, for PUT requests:
https://[yoursubdomain].zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets/{{ticket.id}}.json
3) Create a new trigger, which will dynamically fill the custom field when a ticket is created.
Conditions ALL: Ticket Created
Actions: Notify Webhook with this JSON (replace the ID with your custom field's ID)
{"ticket": {
"custom_fields": [{"id": 1234567890, "value": "{{ticket.title}}"}]
}
}
4) Add the field as a column in your Views, and use it for Sort By.
You may be able to remove your old Subject field columns in the view at this point. But the trigger is for new tickets only - you can use this action to update existing tickets in your own triggers/automations for other use cases.
This is a little more complicated than it should be, since sorting should be available (gasp!), and there isn't an ability to fill free text custom fields with triggers or automations.
Hope this helps folks out! Also, please politely use your voice as a customer with your team's CSMs, AEs, etc., to help Zendesk understand the impact of these changes.
This is a poor decision, that is having significant negative impacts on managing our tickets, as we often receive duplicate tickets that we need to merge.
In addition I can use this to easily see if we have received a large volume of particular tickets that might be causing our queues to blow out unnecessarily.
I hope this issue is fixed ASAP.
This got rolled out to us today without warning. One moment my team could sort by subject line to crank through similar tickets quickly and the next they could not.
This is adding an unnecessary number of hours to getting back to customers.
Please re-enable the ability to sort views by subject line ASAP.
Jake Bowen I'm looking at your solution by adding a webhook, just curious how you got around the authentication issue? I've created the webhook, custom field and added it to views; however, when I create a new ticket, nothing happens. When I've checked the webhook activity, I see the below.
Unfortunately, removing sorting by subject complicates our workflow significantly. We receive emails from applications, from forms as well as directly from end customers. Sorting by subject allows us to:
- Quickly check if issues from individual applications are increasing.
- Quickly sort out spam and unnecessary messages that Zendesk does not automatically detect
- Process similar problems one by one
Unfortunately, Zendesk has taken these options away from us with the changes and we have a higher workload with less functionality.
Update: The workaround Jake Bowen provided does work for us. Thank you very much.
This slows down our work significantly. We need to be able to quickly gather tickets with the same subject in order to merge them and/or get rid of duplicates. Please bring this possibility back.
The ability to no longer be able to sort by Subject is the worst decision. I know someone above had a work around. Unfortunately, I could not follow their steps. Why did Zendesk make this sort of decision without reaching out to those of us who use the system. This is a major negative impact to my workflow.
You just added more to my already busy workload... Bad decision...
+1 to anything above.
Also we got instant feedback from our agents who, in some scenarios, have to rely on "Subject sorting" to get 6,000+ Tickets per week handled properly.
Fun fact: for the "Suspended Tickets" view it still works for us. Any it's CRUCIALLY important to be working there because of the already BAD ways to manage the suspended folder (which would turn worse with less sorting).
Please act, Zendesk
Oliver
After a meeting with the product and customer success teams a couple weeks back, I was promised a temporary exemption from this rollout as the timing simply could not be worse for us (huge product rollout happening right now). However, I saw this morning that I've also lost this functionality... I contacted my CSM about it and am hoping to hear back today with good news, but I have to say I'm not happy about what I'm really really hoping is a reversible accident.
Edit to add: My CSM got this all sorted (no pun intended) out for me within a few hours and sent a great explanation for how this happened. Big thanks to him for his diligence and support!!
I agree that this was a mistake for Zendesk to roll out. If you're looking for a solution while they sort this out, my team has been using the Lovely Views app and it looks like it still has this functionality.
While I agree that we shouldn't have to use an app to solve this, we do really like Lovely Views for the flexibility it gives us in organizing our views into categories and allowing the display of more than 12 at a time.
No I don't work for them and no I wasn't paid. :) I hope it helps some of you!
We rely on subject lines to prioritize our tickets effectively - this has put a huge wrench in our systems and taken away important functionality for views with thousands of tickets. We hope that this can be rolled back ASAP
I'm super bummed about this change. We have macros that set the subject line making it easier for us to scan through for urgent items.
Please, please, please consider putting this back. We will have to change all of our workflows.
I appreciate the hack above, but I don't know how to implement that fix. If there is someone on the Zendesk side that can help me with this, that would be appreciated.
When can we expect the anticipated filtering option on views?
Whose idea is this? What are your reasons of removing Subject sorting? who approved this idea? what are you guys thinking about?
Limit our ability to make us subscribe any third party app? or suggesting us to upgrade our plan?
Ridiculous!
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