A user segment is a collection of end-users/agents, defined by a specific set of attributes, used to determine access to help center content.
User segments are the building blocks for user permissions. You apply user segments to a help center, a knowledge base article, or a topic in your community to define viewing access. And you use user segments to build management permissions that you apply to knowledge base articles to define editing and publishing permissions.
There are two built-in user segments by default:
- Signed-in users, includes users who are signed-in to your help center
- Agents and managers, includes all agents and admins
You can create custom user segments to further refine those groups of users as follows:
- Signed-in users (internal and external), these segments are created in the Admin Center and can be based on tags, organizations, individual users, or all of them combined
- Staff (internal), these segments are created in the Admin Center and are based on tags, groups, individual users or all of them combined
Guide admins have access to all content, regardless of any user segments they belong to. You must be a Guide admin to create user segments.
Understanding access restrictions for user segments
-
Signed-in users can be restricted by tags, organizations, individual users, or
a combination of all three. Tags must be on the user or an organization they belong
to.
When you create a user segment based on tags for signed-in users, you can require that all specified tags match for the agent to be included and/or you can require that at least one of the specified tags match for the user to be included. For organizations, the user must belong to at least one of the specified organizations.
Signed-in agents must have any required tags, agents do not have to belong to any of the specified organizations to be included in the user segment, so the organization is ignored for agents.
Individual users do not need to meet any filters to be included in a user segment, in fact if only individual users are in a user segment, the segment will contain only those users.
-
Staff (agents and admins), can be restricted by tags, groups, individual users,
or a combination of all three.
When you create a user segment based on tags for staff, you can require that all specified tags match for the agent to be included or you can require that at least one of the specified tags match for the agent to be included. For groups, the agent must belong to at least one of the specified groups.
Guide admins have access to all content, regardless of the user segments that they belong to.
Individual users do not need to meet any filters to be included in the user segment, and if only individual users are in a user segment, the segment will contain only those users.
To define user segments, refer to the following table
| User role | Restrict by tags (users need all tags) |
Restrict by tags (users need any of the tags) |
Restrict by organizations (users need at least one org) |
Restrict by groups (users need at least one group) |
Restrict by individual users |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Signed-in users | YES | YES | YES (ignored for agents) |
NO | YES |
| Staff | YES | YES | NO | YES | YES |
Creating user segments
The two access types for user segments are: signed-in users and staff. You can create custom user segments to further refine those two groups of users as follows:
- Signed-in users (internal and external), are created in the Admin Center, these segments are based on tags, organizations, individual users, or a combination of all three.
- Staff (internal), are created in the Admin Center, these segments are based on tags, groups, individual users, or a combination of all three.
You can create as many as 200 user segments per account. If you have multiple brands in your account, then your user segments are shared across all brands.
Guide admins have access to all content, regardless of the user segments they belong to.
- In Guide, click the User permissions icon (
) in the sidebar. - On the User Segments page, click Add new.
If you receive an error message, that means you have reached the maximum number of 200 user segments. You can delete some user segments if you want to continue.
- Enter a Name for this user segment.
- Select a User type as the base of your user segment.
- Signed-in users - includes internal and external users who create an account and sign in to your help center.
-
Staff - is for internal users only, including agents and Guide
admins.
- Click Filter by tag.
Then click the drop down menu to select a tag:
- Users and organizations matching ALL of these tags: all of the tags must be on the user or org to be included in the user segment.
- Users and organizations matching ANY of these tags: one or more of the tags must be on the user or org to be included in the user segment.
You can add up to 50 tags each in Users and organizations matching ALL of these tags and Users and organizations matching any of these tags. Not all available tags appear on the list, so use search or scroll to find the tags that you are looking for. You can choose any tag that is applied to existing users or organizations. The tags can be on the user profile or, in the case of end-users, inherited through an organization.
A list of matching users appears to your right. Agents do not appear on the list of matching users. If there are more than 30 matching users, click View all matching users, then you will see the full list.
Note: You must have user tags enabled to create a user segment based on tags. For more information, see Enabling user and organization tagging. - (Optional) You can further refine your user segment by doing one of the following:
- For signed-in users - if you want to restrict by organization, then select an organization from the drop down menu, and click Filter by organizations.
- For staff members - if you want to restrict by group, then select a group from the
drop down menu, and click Filter by groups.
The user must belong to at least one of the organizations or groups to be included in the user segment. You can add up to 50 organizations or groups to a user segment. The exception is that organization is ignored for signed-in agents. Agents do not need to belong to any of the organizations to be included in the user segment.
The list of matching users will update accordingly.
- To add users to a new user segment, click Add individual users. You can add up to 50 additional individual users, regardless of the number of users in the group, tag, or organization filters you've specified. As you add users, the list of matching users updates.Note: If you add individual users, they are added to the user segment regardless of any group, tag, or organization filters that you may have already set.
- Click Create segment.
See the following topics for more information on how you can apply user segments:
41 Comments
@... Are you still seeing this error? When I have seen it in the past, it has usually been a permissions or network issue. Logging out entirely, closing the browser, and restarting has seemed to fix it.
It would be helpful to have user segments also consider custom user fields as evaluation criterion. Right now, our team would need to have an external process update tags via API, which is not slick. Having extra user data available between support and guide would make this process far easier.
@... - Our end users can no longer access Guide through IE because of an error on the Zendesk sign in page. If we bypass the sign in screen, then the site works with no problem.
If you don't use a sign in for Guide, then I'd suspect that it will likely work. However, there's no guarantee since it's an "old" browser.
Is having end users sign in the only way to gate help centers?
Hi Kate!
Yes, that is the only way, is to restrict the Help Center.
Restricting Help Center access to signed-in end-users
Hello,
Can I create a user who can only access Guide workspace but not the other workspaces such as Support, Chats, talks, etc?
Hoping to hear from you soon.
Hello Nigel,
AFAIK this is not possible in Zendesk. User must have access to Support in order to access/manage Guide.
Hi, you wrote: 'You can create as many as 200 user segments per account'.
Today, we have 22 segments, more to be implemented in the future.
We just see 20 segments, on the right, via 'Visible to' / 'Visible pour' in the Help Center.
IT'S A BUG!!!!!
One of the 2 missing segments is the one that we use the most.
We have more than 1000 articles.
The workaround (a bad workaround) is to type manually the missing segment, this word is not suggested even in the automatic writing.
For information, in our style.css file, we have no '.nesty-panel' class, which seems to be the used class for 'Visible...'.
Please upgrade the limitation from 20 visible segments to 50 or 100.
Zendesk Support team (+ Product Management team) is unable to provide a solution, to take this request into consideration.
Regards,
We would be happy to further troubleshoot this in a Ticket. If you wouldn't mind submitting your issue to us via our Form Submission or Email we would be happy to further assist!
@... bonjour, pourquoi 'gagner du temps' (méthode ping-pong non constructive) avec des réponses évasives, ne pas aller au bout des choses et donner tous les détails ? Vous ne pouvez pas créer cette demande vous-même ou lever le bug vous-même puisque j'ai donné tous les éléments déjà ? Et si vous ne pouvez pas ou ne savez pas créer un ticket de bug : à quelle adresse e-mail doit-on soumettre cette requête ou quel est le lien, l'URL (autre ?) du formulaire de soumission ?
Apologies for the lack of info. I deferred to creating your own ticket for you to provide as much info as you needed in the ticket.
Here are all the ways you can submit a ticket to us:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408843597850-Contacting-Zendesk-Customer-Support
Let me know if you need any further information!
Hi @Erik Boudreault. Thank you. It's quite blur.
Reminder: I wrote in a previous comment --> "The Zendesk Support Team (+ Product Management Team) is unable to provide a solution to accommodate this request.". If I should raise a new ticket to Zendesk Support team with the same request, it makes no sense.
Original request = https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/9672936
Please inform me about the evolution, the status of the bug that you (or a Product Manager or anyone else in Zendesk team) raised with the complete items I already provided. I guess external clients have no access to your tool to raise then follow the bugs.
Kind regards,
Olivier (NEOFI)
Thank you for the info and apologies I was not aware you already had a ticket open!
It looks like an agent did respond to your request. Take a look at the most recent reply from our agent. Email was on Nov 4th. If you have further questions, you can reply to the email chain for that ticket and it will create a new followup ticket as well!
Hi. Is it possible to define a segment with exclusion logic rather than inclusion? I have an article that should be visible to anyone signed in who is NOT in one of four specific organizations. I see how to create a segment containing all other current organizations. That would work for now... but as we add organizations, I would have to manually update my "all other" segment. Is there a way to apply "not" logic so I wouldn't have to do that? Thanks.
Interesting use case, Kreg!
I couldn't find any feedback regarding this in our Product Feedback regarding Guide, so I encourage you to share this feedback regarding user segments here: Feedback - Help Center (Guide)
Thanks for sharing!
Hi Team ,
Our Organization needs to set different user permissions in Guide for :
Any advice on how to set this configuration please?
Thanks very much
Hello,
It says you can add up to 50 additional individual users to a user segment. What if you add a tag to a Customer's (user's) contact information and use the same Tag in the Users and organizations matching ALL of these tag field? How many users can you tag?
Also, for this particular user segment, I selected Signed-in users(Admins, Agents, End Users) since most of our users will not be admins or agents to our Zendesk account. Please let me know if this is the correct option/reasoning.
Thank you so much.
Hi all!
Is there a way to un-gate specific articles created so they can be fully viewed by anyone regardless if signed in?
Thanks!
Noelle Cummings
Yes! Permissions are article-by-article. Just set the Visible To permissions to "Everyone"
Noelle Cummings when viewing article settings, you can change the "Visible to" to be "Everyone". This would give access to anyone regardless of sign in status. :)
Is it possible to segment based on:
We're provisioning our end users to Zendesk via SCIM, so ideally we'd like to limit HC article visibility to a specific department or team, which can be determined either by the values in their standard/custom fields for Department, or an externally populated group provisioned to Zendesk.
We're unable to use organisation to distinguish between teams, as Org membership is determined by email domain, and all users share a common domain suffix.
Hi Brad Bazley! For user segments, it depends on if you are creating one for Signed-in users (which includes End Users) or Staff (which are Admins and Agents only).
For Signed-in users, you can filter by tags (either organization or user), organizations, or by listing individual users (there is a limit). You can't filter by Group here, because End Users cannot be assigned to them.
For Staff, you can filter by tags (either organization or user), groups, or by Individual users.
Thanks for the clarification, Sam!
We're trying to limit visibility for signed-in users, so I understand your point re: groups only being relevant for Agents/Staff.
For Signed-in users, we'd ideally like to segment based on values contained in the User Fields. It doesn't look like these fields can create tags, so what would be the best option here?
If our only choice is to segment based on Organisation, is there any other automated means of associating a user to an Org (i.e. Org = Department, with users provisioned by SCIM to the relevant Org based on their "Department" attribute value from the source identity provider?
End up going through Google Android developer and you actually get to learn the coding process whether it's a lot easier and it doesn't identity provider and self back check with a Google account
Hi! I do have a question that I am hoping you can answer. I would like to hide and show contents based on the customer's location but in the attribute, it doesn't include 'location' as one of its options. Can this be done in other ways?
There are some articles that we wish to hide for our US customers and we would like to create a user segment where the attribute is based on the location of our customers. How do we go about this?
Hi!
Is it possible to increase the " maximum number of 200 user segments"?
Hi Andy! That is evaluated on a case-by-case basis, from what I understand. Have your account owner reach out to our support team with the request and they'll have the appropriate follow-up questions for you.
Hello!! I am trying to create a Community of Moderators. Once I go threw all the steps I move down to the drop-down arrow to add my user segment name but only a few appear so I type out the name of the segment and it doesn't appear. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong at this point. I would love some guidance to clear this up. Thank you. Also want to add that the user type is Staff not signed end user.
Hello - our company is looking to use user segments to gate our Zendesk Help Center. We would like to add all organizations to a single Segment. Why is the limit only 50 orgs per segment? Is there a workaround?
I have confirmed it with our developers and 50 is a hard limit that can not be changed and for which we do currently not have a workaround.
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