- Suite Growth and Professional includes up to five brands.
- Suite Enterprise and Enterprise Plus includes up to 300 brands.
- Support Enterprise includes up to five brands.
Brand is also a ticket value, added to all your tickets. Agents can manually change the brand associated with a ticket, and they search for tickets by brand. You can also use brand in business rules, including macros, views, triggers, and automations, as well as in Explore and Insights reporting.
You have one brand by default, that was created when you set up your Zendesk account. You can create a number of brands, depending on your plan type.
You must be an administrator to add and manage brands.
This article contains the following sections:
- Understanding how Multibrand works in your account
- Adding multiple brands
- Generating an SSL certificate for host-mapped brands
- Requiring the Brand field on tickets created by agents
- Excluding your branded help centers from system generated account emails
- Next step after you add a brand: Configure your channels to support multiple brands
For a list of resources, see Multibrand resources.
Understanding how Multibrand works in your account
When your account is created, one brand is created for you by default. So, before you add any brands, you have a single account subdomain and one brand subdomain that match. When you add brands, you still have a single account subdomain, but you have multiple brand subdomains, including your original brand that matches your account subdomain.
When you have multiple brands, one is always assigned as the default brand. This is the brand associated with your default help center, and is applied in any situation where another specific brand is not indicated. The default brand cannot be deleted or deactivated until another brand is made the default. The default brand is identified as (Default) on your brands list.
You can also define an agent brand, or agent route, which is essentially the default brand for agents. Meaning, the agent brand is the brand that agents are routed to when they sign in to Zendesk. The agent brand cannot be deleted or deactivated until another brand is made the agent route. It is identified as (Agent) on your brands list. The agent brand is also the brand retained if you downgrade to a single-brand plan.
Brand is a ticket value. Every ticket has a brand. Users and organizations do not have a brand value. They belong to the account, not a brand. You cannot segment users or orgs by brand.
Most channels have a brand value, so that you can configure specific channels for specific brands. This includes help center, messaging Web Widget, Web Widget (Classic), Talk, Twitter, and Facebook.
Adding multiple brands
You have one brand for your account by default, but you can set up a number of brands, depending on your plan type:
- Suite Growth and Professional includes up to five brands.
- Suite Enterprise and Enterprise Plus includes up to 300 brands.
- Support Enterprise includes up to five brands.
- In Admin Center, click
Account in the sidebar, then select Brand management > Brands.
- Click Add brand.
If this is the first time you are adding a brand, click Get started instead.
- Enter a Brand name.
Brand name is required and must be a unique name, not used by any of your other brands. This name will be customer-facing.
- Enter a Subdomain for this brand's help center.
This subdomain will be the address (URL) for this brand's help center: yoursubdomain.zendesk.com/hc. It will also be the default support address for this brand: support@yoursubdomain.zendesk.com.
Subdomain is required; each brand has its own subdomain. It can include only letters A-Z, numbers 0-9, and dashes (-). When you enter a subdomain you'll see notification that the subdomain is either available or already taken.
- (Optional) Add a Logo by dragging your file to
the designated logo area or by clicking choose
file.
Your logo should be 2 MB or less and must be a PNG, JPG, JPEG, or GIF file. For best results, your logo should be square. Otherwise, your logo will be stretched or compressed to fit.
- (Optional) Enter a brand signature to append your
agent's personal email signature when they are
representing that brand. For information on agent
signatures, see Adding an agent signature to
ticket email notifications.
- (Optional) Enter an alternative support site URL in
Host mapping to map one of your own domain
names to the help center for this brand. For
example, you might use
support.yoursubdomain.com/hc instead of
yoursubdomain.zendesk.com/hc.
When you enter your host mapped URL it is automatically tested, and you'll see notification that your host mapping is either working or not working.
Note: There are multiple steps required to set up host mapping for a brand, including generating an updated SSL certificate every time you add one or more brands. For more information, see Generating an SSL certificate for host-mapped brands.After you add multiple brands, host mapping is managed in Manage > Brands instead of Settings > Account.
- Click Save changes.
Your new brand is created and added to your list of all brands.
Note: Your new brand will not be available to end users until you add a help center or associate it with another channel (see Configuring your channels to support multiple brands).
To manage your brands, see Managing multiple brands. To start using and supporting your new brand, see the next section Next steps after you add a new brand.
Generating an SSL certificate for host-mapped brands
When you add a host mapped brand, you need to regenerate your SSL certificate. If you do not regenerate your certificate, host mapping will work, but the brand will not be protected.
You need to regenerate your SSL certificate every time you add one or more host mapped brands, but you do not need to regenerate your certificate for every host mapped brand. For example, if you add three new brands, you need to regenerate your certificate only once. If you later add two more brands, you need to regenerate your certificate again.
Your certificate request should be formatted as a SAN (SubjectAltName) cert. This type of certificate is used to manage multiple SSL-protected host mapped domains. Each brand subdomain is listed in the certificate as a SAN.
Alternatively, You can use a wildcard certificate if your brands are in the same domain. For example brand1.company.com, brand2.company.com, and brand3.company.com are all in the same domain.
To regenerate your SSL certificate when you add one or more host mapped brands, see Using hosted SSL.
Requiring the Brand field on tickets created by agents
When you have multiple brands, every ticket has a brand. For all customer-facing channels, the brand is automatically applied to the ticket.
When agents create tickets, they have the ability to chose the brand. You can require that agents select a brand before they submit a new ticket. If you do not require that agents select a brand, then your default brand will be applied to the ticket, unless the agent selects another brand before submitting the ticket.
To require that agents select a brand when creating new tickets
- In Admin Center, click
Account in the sidebar, then select Brand management > Brands.
- Click the toggle beside Require brand before
save.
- Navigate away from the Brand settings page.
Your change is automatically saved.
Excluding your branded help centers from system generated account emails
By default, when you have multiple brands with active help centers, a list of all your active branded help centers are included in account emails. Account emails are system-generated emails that notify agents and end users about their profile, including welcome emails, account verification emails, and password reset emails.
If you do not want to include a list of your active branded help centers in account emails, you can exclude it.
To exclude the list of active branded help centers from account emails to agents and end users
- In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Configuration > End users.
- Beside Account emails, deselect Include a list
of active help centers in account
emails.
- Click Save tab.
Next step after you add a brand: Configure your channels to support multiple brands
When you add multiple brands, you have to add a help center, or associate another channel with each brand, before your customers can open requests with a specific brand.
You can support your brands in any of these channels: email, help center, messaging Web Widget, Web Widget (Classic), Talk, Facebook, Twitter, and the API.
Other possible next steps after you add a brand and configure your channels
For a list of resources, see Multibrand resources.
13 Comments
Team
I hope you can help me here please!
I have Brand A, B and C.
1. If I create a new ticket (on +Add new ticket) and even using a macro that sets the correct brand, for instance, A (this is also happening without selecting any macro).
2. The customer receives the e-mail with the help@brandB.com and if the customer replies, this reply is received again on brand A
3. Any reply with brand A is going with the correct format and help e-mail address.
4. Also I notice that when I create new tickets (on +Add new ticket) in the ticket field it shows "from Zendesk Support" where any other email shows as "Via help@brandA.com" for example.
I tried to be as clear as possible and I do hope someone could help me here.
Regards.
Fernando
Hi Fernando,
I created separate ticket for our Support team to investigate your particular issue, please check your email.
Hi there, is it possible to have multiple brands (support centers) all pointing to one one help center (guide) section? Thus if a user submits a ticket, it would be routed to the relevant help center, but they will all access and view the same articles from one central guide?
Hi Marisa,
Great question — right now there is not a way to have one Guide section referenced by two different brands natively, unfortunately. We recommend creating the section in each Help Center and copying your content over to make sure it can be everywhere it needs to be.
Let us know if any other questions come up!
There is a note containing an article with a broken link. I'd love to read the article to learn more as we have a multibrand instance and hope to have separate chat agents for each.
Note: Currently, live chat does not support multiple brands (see Multibranding Zendesk Chat for a possible option).
Hi, Krista. The Multibranding Zendesk Chat article is currently unavailable because it is outdated and in need of an overhaul. It's on the docs radar, but we haven't had the bandwidth yet to make the necessary updates. I'll see if I can bump it up the priority list, though. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Hi, I'm trying to understand how this feature should work. Let's say we have 3 brands:
If I create a new outbound ticket, and select Brand B or Brand C, I expect the email to be sent from billing@brandB.com or legal@brandC.com. However, the email is sent from help@brandA.com.
I submitted a ticket to ZD support and they tell me this is a feature and not a bug. They also redirected me to an app where I can select the "from" email. However, I can't find any documentation that explains this failure anywhere in the docs relating to multibranding.
As it is, brands appear to be merely decorative for the intended purpose since the email recipient is being contacted by someone they're not expecting. I would personally think it's a scam if someone other than billing@brandB.com emailed me wanting to discuss a payment issue I had on a purchase to brandB.com
Can you please clarify if this bug is the intended behavior?
Suppose our company has domain company.com, and our production instance is company.zendesk.com, then can we add a brand for HR department as well, but the catch here is even they have same subdomain, so if we add brand then subdomain has to be unique, kindly let me know what to do?
Hey Ravindra Singh! If you create a new brand, it must have its own unique subdomain. If you do not want to have a separate subdomain, then perhaps looking at separating tickets based on groups would work better for your workflow. You can check out the article, About organizations and groups, for more info about groups.
My company is subscribed to Suite Professional. I have been able to successfully add a second brand in Account > Brand management.
However, in Appearance > Branding, under Zendesk Support multibrand, it says, "Upgrading to the Support Enterprise plan enables you to manage five brands by linking your separately branded accounts to a central Zendesk account."
My understanding is that multibrand support should be available with my Suite Professional subscription.
The message you are seeing is specifically for standalone Support plan. If you are using a Zendesk Suite: Plan, you can disregard it. Rest assured, you have access to five brands. I'll also mark this as a feedback for the UI improvement.
Dane
Thank you for the prompt reply. I understand the messaging you posted above. The problem is that the logic in the Admin Center UI is wrong. I am locked out of a feature that the plan I am paying for supports.
This is what I see in Admin Center (Account > Appearance > Branding):
I am unable to manage multiple brands, even though I have ZSuite Professional.
You need to go to the Brand Management section to manage the brands. If you'll disregard the option "Zendesk Support multibrand" every other feature in your plan for multibrand is the same with an Enterprise Plan (aside from the number of brands of course).
Please be reminded that for your agent's view, only one subdomain is available when they login. It can be setup in Account > Appearance > Branding > Subdomain.
To manage your brand's Help Center, you can go to Guide and select the brand on the top left.
If these options are not available on your end, feel free to contact us through Messaging and we'll help you out.
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