Tags are words, or combinations of words, you can use to add more context to tickets (see About tags). Depending on your support workflow, you might want to add tags to provide more context for the request so that tickets can be viewed and tracked, or processed by your account's business rules.
Agents can add or remove tags in tickets, create views based on ticket tags, and search for tickets by tags. Agents in custom roles can add and remove tags only if their custom role allows it.
This article contains the following sections:
Adding tags to tickets
Agents can manually add tags to tickets to add more context. Agents in custom roles can add and remove tags only if their custom role allows it.
The following video gives you an overview of how to add tags to your tickets:
Adding tags to tickets [0:54]
- Create or edit a ticket.
- Enter new tags, separated by a space, in Tags.
As you type the tag, note the following:
- If the tag you are typing does not exist, it will be created when you press Enter.
- If the tag you are typing exists, autocomplete
displays suggested tags you can choose from.
For example, if you begin typing
cust
, the tagsvip_customer
andcustomer_feedback
will show up; however,locust_street
will not.Note: If an existing tag hasn't been used in a ticket for 60 days, then it won't appear in the suggested tags list. - You can use only alphanumeric, dash, underscore, colon, and the forward slash characters.
- You can't use special characters, such as #,
@, or ! in tags.
If you try to add tags with special characters, they disappear when the ticket is updated.
- Zendesk supports UTF-8 (Unicode). All languages supported by Zendesk can be added to tags.
- You can create a tag with more than one word if the words are connected with an underscore.
- There's no limit on the number of tags for a
ticket, but there is a limit on the total number
of characters in the Tags field.
This field supports up to 5096 characters. After you reach this limit, you will no longer be able to add more tags. None of your existing tags will be automatically removed.
- Click Submit to create or update the
ticket.
The tags are added to the ticket.
Deleting tags from tickets
Agents can delete tags on one ticket at a time. To delete tags that have been applied to many tickets, you need Admin permission. See Deleting a tag and removing it from all non-closed tickets.
Deleting a tag from a ticket only removes the tag from that ticket; the tag will still appear on other tickets and in your account as a suggestion. If a tag hasn't been used for 60 days, it no longer appears as a suggestion.
To delete tags from a ticket
- Open a non-closed ticket. You cannot delete tags from closed tickets.
- In the Tags field of the ticket, click the close box (x) for the tags you want to delete. The tag is removed from the ticket.
Creating views based on ticket tags
You can add tags as conditions in views, which enables you to quickly view all tickets that contain specific tags. Agents can create personal views for their own use. Admins can create shared views. You can also view all tickets where a tag is applied.
- In Admin Center, click
Workspaces in the sidebar, then select Agent tools > Views.
- Create a new view, or open an existing view for editing.
- Add a Tags condition.
- Choose the condition operator Contains at least one of the following.
- Enter one or more tags (separated with a space).
- Add any other conditions that you'd like (for example, adding a condition for open tickets).
- Set the view formatting options as needed.
- Click Add View.
Your new view is listed in the Views menu in Zendesk Support.
Searching for tickets by tags
You can search for tags contained in tickets and forum articles. Using the search box, enter the name of the tag and the search results will display all the tickets and forum articles that contain the tag.
tags:installation
Your search results will contain only occurrences of the word ‘installation’ when used as a tag.
tags:about_sales
42 comments
Nara
I would recommend checking out the reference on Automation Conditions and Actions to see if those available can assist with your workflow of tagging tickets.
0
Gabriel Ortiz
Do you know if Zendesk changed how tags are auto-created?
when I create new field options, It used to convert the
::
used to delineate levels to__
and now, as of sometime earlier this week, it doesn't.Previously: I create a new Primary Contact reason type Category::Reason A and the tag is auto-created as
category_reason_a
Now: I create a new Primary Contact reason type Category::Reason A and the tag is auto-created ascategory::reason_a
Is there a reason why it's now being converted to :: instead of __ ?
0
Gabriel Manlapig
We understand you are mainly concerned with the change that has occurred. And we do not see any external documentation that specifically calls out how tags come up as a default when you set nested field values. But, the change was intentional from __ to :: .
Since Explore doesn't have a native ability to report on nested fields. As a result, we provided a workaround to reporting on customer fields that required the addition of custom attributes using custom code. The code that we provided in our Explore recipe (Explore recipe: Reporting on nested drop-down fields) assumes that all the values returned by the main attribute show in Explore formatted as the field's option (using ::), not the field's option value (using _). The underscores are shown in the main attribute due to Explore not being able to access the field option associated with a specific field option value. This is a limitation on drop-down value reporting.
I hope this answers your question. Thank you!
0
Omar
Hi
We have a lot of tags constantly added on tickets. A lot of the tags dont seem to be created by us, so:
(i) how are these tags created?
(ii) where can I delete them?
(iii) how to stop them being added to tickets? (we only want the tags we create to be added)
FYI- we have auto tag DISABLED (not turned on as a feature)
Also- when creating a macro, what is the difference between ADD TAG and SET TAGS
Thanks
0
Zsa Trias
Hello Omar,
"Automatic ticket tagging" is a feature where tags are added based on ticket content. If you don't have this setting enabled, you may also want to look into the user's tags and the organization's tags, as the ticket will inherit any tags from the user and organization. More details about this here: Automatically tagging tickets from specific users and organizations
For your question about the macros, here's the difference between Add tags and Set tags:
The tags you want to add to the existing list of tags (if any). Tags must be separated with spaces. Multi-word tags must be joined with an underscore (for example, about_sales).
Reference: Building macro action statements
0
Paul Hughes
Hi Team,
I'm a bit confused about my tagging setup. During a recent conversation with support, they mentioned that even with auto-tagging enabled, the tags wouldn't be assigned to a ticket unless they were part of the top 100 tags list. This seems counterintuitive because how am I supposed to identify emerging tags if they aren't applied to tickets? Do I need to manually add these tags to a ticket for them to appear in the top 100?
I've also observed numerous tags being applied based on field values, such as "registration_department" or "programme_enquiries." These tags don't seem to be added through triggers, leading me to believe they are applied when a field option is chosen and its tag is applied to the ticket, in the ticket event it just says Tags: Name of Tags . However, I prefer not to have these tags assigned to tickets.
Is there a method to prevent field values from being automatically applied as tags? As per my understanding, I need to manually input tags into the system before they appear in the top 100 list. Ideally, I'd like the top 100 list to display only those tags extracted from ticket descriptions and not the field values?
0
Arianne Batiles
Hi Paul Hughes,
The way automatic ticket tagging works is that when a ticket is created in Zendesk, the text in the ticket description is scanned. Our system looks for words longer than two characters and then compares those words to the tags that have already been used in your account. The top three matches are added as tags to the ticket.
Tags are only added to tickets that come from end-users via the ticket channels. You may refer here for a more detailed explanation on how this feature works.
You are right that tags from custom field value selected are added to the ticket. Unfortunately, we cannot prevent the tags from being added when a field value of a field is selected for a ticket. As also mentioned by one of our Community managers here, since custom field values use tags, if your dropdown field values have common names, it's possible that an automatic tagging could add a tag based on a word used in the ticket that makes the ticket think that your dropdown field should be set to a certain value.
Hence, if you would like to use automatic ticket tagging, we recommend you make sure any dropdown field tags are complex enough that they won't be confused for tags based on ticket text - e.g. prepending the field name or even the ticket field id number to each tag.
That said, there are some third-party integrations such as MonkeyLearn and Pythia found in our Apps Marketplace that you can also try to see if it works for your workflow.
Hope this helps!
0
Paul Hughes
Hi Arianne Batiles
I appreciate the explanation and thanks for coming back to me. I have a specific query based on information provided by the support team: is the assignment of tags to tickets dependent on the tags being part of the top 100 popular tags list in the admin center?
If that's the case, my concern is that my top 100 tags list is heavily populated with field values, making it challenging to observe normal keyword trends on a daily basis. What I'm looking for is a straightforward solution that can analyze all tickets and extract the most frequently used words over a given period, say a week. Is there a method to export tickets along with their text data? I'm also open to exploring third-party apps that can perform such analyses and I think there might be if I can get that data exported.
0
Arianne Batiles
Hi Paul Hughes,
The assignment of tags via automatic ticket tagging is not dependent on the 100 most used tags list. The tags would be set by the system depending on the description of the ticket sent by the requester.
I think what you might be referring to is the tags being auto-populated when agents type in the ticket. In this case, we only surface the 100 most used tags, if the tag isn't on the top 100 list it won't populate.
0
Melody Matos
Hey team, can Ticket Tags names be edited or deleted permanently from Zendesk? I'm looking for ways to restructure our ticket fields, and we all know that when you create new fields, It generates a new ticket tag and we don't want that. We just want to change how they operate, but keep the same ticket tags. Let me know if that's at all possible!
0
Mike DR
You can delete tags and this article sub topic can help: Deleting a tag and removing it from all non-closed tickets
0
Craig Bailey
I do agree that auto-tagging tickets from the top 100 tags is strangely not efficient. Most ZD installations are probably very much like us using many custom fields and tags that greatly skew the pool of top tags. That's a very bad design.
What we really want is to pin a few very specific tags that are always searched and applied on a new ticket. In our case, we're a software vendor. Anytime the word “crash” is seen in a new ticket, we want it auto-tagged by the system and take alternate actions. In fact, it seemed that it used to work this way years ago, but the current method doesn't allow anything like this. I'm not really sure what the value of auto-tagging is today with the current method.
0