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
Hi there,
It says in the article that you can "apply user segments to a help center", but I can't see how to do this.
How can I apply the user segment to the entire help center rather than by individual articles?
I would like to restrict the whole help center to internal signed in staff, by default, and then grant certain additional access to customers with user segments but without retroactively updating all the existing articles.
Thanks,
Steven.
Hi Steven Hampson. Please find a screenshot attached - the hidden characters in the URL have to be replaced by your own information = Company name or used name for the declaration of the domain, id.... It may help you. Regs,
Thanks Olivier Degardin! This shows me how to create the user segments, but what I can't see if how to apply the user segments to the entire Help Center all at once.
Hi. I guess guys from Zendesk team may be in position to help you before Christmas! From my understanding following your questions, here are some steps to follow:
1/ from Admin Center
https://[YOURCOMPANY].zendesk.com/admin/people/configuration/organization_fields
2/ from an article (Help Center) to modify/edit
3/ 'Visible to' - choose 'Signed-in users' or another segment?
Regs,
Hi,
I am trying to create a user segment that includes all of our staff except for those in the Light Agent role. Is this possible?
I could do it by.creating a segment that includes all groups except our light agent group but we are provisioning users via SCIM so every time we add a new agent user group we would need to remember to add that group to the user segment which is not ideal.
Thanks.
Is there still a limit of 50 organizations in a segment?
I was planning to map our organization concept in our SaaS product to Zendesk organizations and then I'd only have to worry about managing/syncing organization membership across both systems.
With a limit of only 50 organizations I think I'm better off using Organizations only as a condition for triggers, automations, views, etc. in Zendesk Support. And rely solely on user tags (rather than Org membership or Org tags) as the basis for user segment membership and permissions in Zendesk Guide.
This seems to complicate our new user onboarding in our SaaS product. Now instead of leveraging an existing concept (Company/Organization) as the basis for content permissions we have to have new user creation also add a user tag to the linked Zendesk end user profile.
Am I missing something here or is that going to be my best approach given this limit of 50?
Edit -- Ok wait, I think I've created a problem for myself that doesn't exist. We'll be creating Zendesk Organizations and setting the appropriate tags to the orgs upon creation. And then I'm going to be building my user segments based on the and/or presence of the Org tags. So the limit of 50 orgs will not in any way restrict this setup.
Ronald - can you please feedback if the above workaround of using Tags has worked to overcome this hard limit restriction of 50 orgs per each user segment?
Hi Raghu Kavi --
Yes and no but I would say mostly yes. I think it really depends on what you need to accomplish in terms of content permissions and how you intend to onboard end-users into the support environment.
Here's a little more about my use case and approach -
SaaS product with two distinct support cohorts: Application Support and Operational Support users. More specifically, users of the application itself and the support teams who support the consumer services built in the SaaS product.
So that's two User Segments - Application Support & Ops Support
In the Zendesk Organization I've added two checkboxes: one that adds a tag for application support content and one that adds a tag for ops support content. And built the user segments off the presence of those tag(s). And then users in these organizations inherit their content permissions based on the permissions set on the organizational level. Since I'm defining the user segments on the tags set on the organizations rather than by the organizations themselves the 50 orgs per segment limitation is a lot less problematic.
Things become a bit more complicated when I need to onboard a new account which has some users that should see only Application Support content and some users that should see the Ops Support content. For these organizations I have to use user fields to add the appropriate tags to inform the content segment memberships. That's not ideal but since I have to do a bulk import anyway I can set the user fields accordingly during the bulk import.
Another use case we have is hiding content that is specific to beta features that are not available to all accounts (organizations) yet. For those I thought I might not need to a new tagging concept as we may not ever have more than 50 organizations in a beta at any given time. But if we did, the 50 orgs wouldn't be a limitation -- just have to be very thoughtful about how to use org tags and/or user tags to define the content segments.
Ronald - thankyou . Using tags we were able to overcome the limitation of 50 orgs per user segment.
I am in the same situation as Kreg Sherbine. I have an article that should be visible to any logged-in person who is not in one of the specific TAGs. Ideally, there should be the possibility to define segments with logic for exclusion and inclusion of TAGs, organizations, and users
Nana Puccetti An approach you could explore would be using javascript to hide articles rather than permissioning the content with the proper user segment memberships.
You could add a custom Organization field (checkbox) called something like "hide content". When the checkbox is checked it would set a tag like hide_content on the Organization. Or set a user tag but it would probably be easier to do this at the Org level if possible.
Then you'd add a function to the script.js file of your help center. The function would check the HelpCenter object looking for the specified Org tag (or user tag) hide_content. If it finds that tag in the current user's HelpCenter object you can then hide the URL of the articles based on a partial string match of the article URL using jQuery hide method.
Here's an article that goes into some of this in more detail: https://www.screensteps.com/articles/customizing-your-help-center-with-javascript
It's a bit more of a workaround than a proper solution but it works and once it's setup it's really not very hard to maintain.
Edit - I just realized that article is quite old but I've successfully used this approach in Zendesks for the past 10 years in various forms. I don't think this configuration is "officially supported" by Zendesk but sometimes it has been the only way to accomplish certain things.
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