| 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
I totally agree with all the comments on removing the Subject sorting! Worst idea ever!
Agreed that this change was not beneficial. Our team uses the sort by subject functionality to quickly find and eliminate spam that makes it into our queues. These spammers often use different email addresses, so sorting by email was the quickest way to find and eliminate the spam.
Please allow us to sort by subject once more. It's not the primary way we'd sort a view by, but it's useful to toggle on briefly.
This is very suboptimal for us. We often group messages by subject because they pertain to certain teams or workflows. We also get spam messages filtering though from different requestor bots, and it's much easier to mass action them when we can sort by title.
I 100% agree with everyone's comments. The so-called work around that they recommend is useless. Why can't they just put everything back the way it was. If the sorting by Subject field was causing undue issues with their database servers (which I feel was the reason) maybe upgrade the servers? Why should we and our clients be the ones who suffer for their problems.
Why would you make this decision, do you work tickets every day as we do? What are your reasons for removing Subject sorting? We need to have this back to make our workflow to be smooth, now you complicate things and we have to scroll through hundreds of tickets daily to check the subjects, not a good move.
Adding in, this change is absolutely not ideal. Why break things that were clearly a benefit to many people?
When can we expect a true solution within Zendesk, without additional programs or apps to be able to sort by subject?
THis is simply NOT ok. Sorting (by subject) is extremely important and a feature you expect to have.
This needs a rollback - thanks
This is really not great. Like many of the others we use sorting by subject to quickly get to urgent issues in times of high volume. Please consider bringing this back.
I've been using Zendesk for 10+ years and always raved about it (even got management to okay installing it in a company I worked where we did not have Zendesk), but I'm seriously getting so fed up of all the changes which affect my productivity and that of my staff.
Explore is a nightmare. Don't even get me started on the hopeless 'Account Managers'. 4 changes of Zendesk account manager for our account in the 2 years I've been at my current company, 3 of them I wasn't even informed about until I contacted them with an issue. Only 2 were ever really good, and another just sent me links any time I asked for real help after I had already read through the articles before contacting him.
There are newer ticket handling tools which are constantly asking to demo for me. Maybe it's time to consider a move.
Expressing our displeasure about this update. In your What's New in Zendesk for June 2022 you have screenshots and videos in the coming soon section of the page indicating this feature still exists.
This feature is critical to our Support teams' workflow. Reinventing something that's working with no positive tradeoff is unwise. We request a rollback.
Sorry, I dont need a view with good performance if the view does not show me what I need. As many others, we are heavily using sorting by subject in our workflows.
Using tags is not an acceptable workaround, for two reasons:
And the recommendation "use 3rd party apps": You're kidding, right? If I need 3rd party apps for such a simple thing then maybe I rather need a whole new 3rd party support tool. Even if I would decide to go with a 3rd party tool: The next time you change something that breaks the app you will just say "No support, talk to the 3rd party company"...
I mean, we don't talk about asking for a new feature. We're talking about a feature that existed all the time and now you just took it away.
Please don't try to fix something in the backend by taking away useful features in the frontend. It seems that someone who never really used a system like zendesk tried to find a quick solution for a problem without knowing the consequences.
This change is unacceptable for our work flow and has forced us to start investigating a migration to another solution.
My colleagues are not happy with this change, this makes work much less efficient, because it was an important function for them.
I agree totally with negative comments, Zendesk please make a rollback of this functionality.
Why did this stop working?!?? Sort by subject is super important, and now it is dead.... Has anyone here tried FreshDesk? We are looking for a replacement for zendesk now...
Very frustrating, as we just upgraded to ZenDesk Enterprise, and we used the Subject Sorting daily, and now we are being forced to find workarounds to continue the efficiencies we had relied on. Very unhelpful.
This was a very bad decision. We process thousands of tickets a day and being able to sort by Subject is vital to processing quickly and efficiently.
I came back here to see if there was an update only to see my original comment got censored. I show my distaste for the ridiculousness that goes on in those decisions. Why don't you guys actually ask your customers if this is a feature they want OR much less do a survey on it or stop to at least think of the business impact it will have on your customers? Like come on! I think I speak for everyone here who is a bit nicer about it than I am. Stop screwing up everyone's processes and don't break something that doesn't need fixing! Such an easy thing to do! Get it right next time ZD
When is sorting by Subject coming back? Its been over a month and this has made our workflow extremely inefficient. Please reconsider the decision, as you can see, many have been negatively impacted by the decision to change something that was already working fine.
Zendesk, you have taught us how to be THE WORST at serving our customers by example. It's like you removed four of our fingers on each hand, leaving only the middle fingers to point with...
Regardless of their position, the people who made these decisions in your organization need to be terminated. All of them...
This morning, yet again, I was inconvenienced by my inability to sort by Subject in the 'My unsolved tickets' view. A simple two-click process has turned into a multi-step filtering process that wastes time unnecessarily. I'm still baffled that this was OK'd and that continued negative feedback is seemingly being ignored. After 10 years with Zendesk, we've started trialling other solutions.
Lydon McGrane - I'm sad to say we're in a similar boat here. Not over this specific decision, but similar decisions that have been made over the years. There are so many things that Zendesk could/should do out-of-the-box that, 10 years later, it STILL doesn't do.
And sadly, my experiences with Support have been extremely unhelpful. Lately I've just given up and decided to find workarounds (if possible) rather than ask for help. It's really sad.
This is an amazingly bad decision. This makes it SO much harder to find and merge duplicates, and adds so much work to our day. The FAQ on this says "Oh you can use third-party apps to help you merge!" -- seriously?
Agree with you Joshua Bentley. We identified a clear bug earlier today, even, but dealing with support is so incredibly difficult and frustrating, we are just working around it rather than trying to get it across to ZD.
Please consider putting the SUBJECT sorting option back. I used it every day, all day long. It has really affected my workflow when trying to find a specific ticket on hold out of like 150 of them. I have been forced to export to excel and sort them that way to find what I need. I should not have to do that. I seldom use anything but the sort by SUBJECT and the sort by REQUESTED. We put the linked Jira ticket number at the front of each subject line so when the Jira has been resolved we could just sort by SUBJECT and it would throw all of them there on the screen together and you could just go down the list and reply and close them out. It's ridiculous now what all I have to do in order to find all of those tickets with no SUBJECT sort. I appreciate your consideration on this. I can see from numerous other comments, I am not the only one affected by this change.
literally, the worst update zendesk ever made. This LITTLE change has added HOURS of extra work for our team. We need to be able to sort by subject!
It is sad.. Very sad. But no one is listening
Another day another issue - - we have a huge queue of voicemails all from the same email address but from different phone numbers. Searching by subject is the only way to get through them quickly. This change has added a crazy amount of time to our workflow. Please please bring it back!
+1 To everything above.
This really seems like a HUGH step backwards in terms of efficiency and progress.
Hi everyone,
Thanks for your feedback. We want to acknowledge this has been and is a painful experience for many of you — that certainly wasn’t our intent, but the impact is real and we’re sorry for disrupting your processes.
To reflect what we’re hearing from those of you who have commented in this and other threads on this subject:
Why again did we make this change?
We’ve discussed this in the announcement here and follow-up thread, but to restate:
We made this change for two reasons. First, sorting views by Subject was significantly more resource-intensive than sorting by other fields. Even though it was used by a tiny percentage of our total customer base (well under 2%), there was a risk that continued and scaling use would adversely impact performance across all accounts. Metaphorically, the best time to put out a fire is when it’s small, not when the whole house is engulfed in flames. For this reason, the change was necessary to protect everyone’s overall experience, even though that meant sacrificing functionality that a smaller number was depending on. Not an easy decision, but one we felt we had to make. It’s not that we don’t care about your needs, but we have to weigh the needs of the vast majority of our customers. Performance issues that affect everyone will affect you too.
The second reason is that updating the underlying code for Views will provide a foundation for many future improvements that would have been impossible before, such as filtering that will create a more efficient workflow compared to sorting and paginating, the ability to access more than 12 views in the agent UI, and more. We look forward to delivering these additional features in upcoming quarters. We realize that may be of little comfort right now, but we hope you’ll appreciate the improvements as we deliver them.
How did we communicate the change?
There were two main thrusts in our communication strategy. First, we published the initial announcement on March 23rd, 2022. We always recommend that people follow and read the announcements section in the help center, although we acknowledge that there can be a lot to absorb there and in all the other communications you receive from us and other vendors.
Second, we identified the customers that we knew were using the sort by Subject or Submitter functionality, who had it as a definite sorting criteria in one or more Views, and we created proactive tickets for those customers (over 1000) that went to the account owners and CC’d all the Admins on those accounts on April 22, 2022. However, if you’ve commented here, you probably did not receive that ticket. We believe that’s because we didn’t consider the customers who were using this feature on an ad-hoc basis only, just clicking on the Subject view column as needed. We do apologize that we didn’t get the message out in a proactive way to those of you in this category — while that likely wouldn’t have changed your feelings about the feature’s removal, you at least would have been alerted in advance of the change, if you’d missed the initial announcement.
Why haven’t we removed the sorting functionality for other text-based fields?
The answer to this is that this is used so infrequently that the risk of widespread performance issues is considered minimal at this time, so there’s no immediate need to remove the functionality. It’s entirely possible that conditions may change in the future, however, and we can’t make any promises that we don’t decide to restrict sorting on other text-based fields in the future.
Will we revert this change?
We will not. We understand this is a tough transition period and we want to work with you to get through this — we have already worked with many of the customers to find work arounds or temporary solutions until new filtering capability is available. Please reach out to your account rep so we can also help you through this transition. In the meantime, we’d direct you to the workaround we list in this article: Clarification about announced changes to views sorting capabilities and pagination
Additionally, we are committed to improving our process of determining who will be affected by future changes, so that we can be sure to include all affected customers in our proactive communications.
Dave Dyson
While your acknowledgment and sympathy are certainly noted, It's very frustrating to be told we hear you and we're not going to change what we did. When your company made this change, our organization was still wrapping up our launch of the enterprise suite, and when I pointed out this change, our ZenDesk trainer and our ZenDesk project manager were unaware that this had happened. We appreciate that you have decisions being made at high levels of development and deployment. But your communication of upcoming changes and your unwillingness to receive and act on critical feedback when it is provided is very upsetting. When we brought this unannounced change to our ZenDesk project manager and trainer, they were the ones that told us our pathway to resolve this was to leave feedback here. Even though we have done so as instructed, this feedback did not result in our ability to control the features of the enterprise product we paid for. That said, since a decision to move forward has been made, we would very much appreciate someone reaching out to us to help us redesign the organizational workflow we planned for and anticipated when we purchased your product.
So 2% of your customers were taking down your system with their resource usage, sounds like BS Dave... Also your answer wasn't to increase system resources, it was to eliminate functionality... Sounds onece again like BS Dave...
It doesn't seem like Zendesk is realizing this isn't a "tough transition", they've literally broken a basic feature that many people relied on for a plethora of reasons. Rather than breaking something that is being used by clearly many users, fix the issue. Fix It!
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