Understanding tags and ticket fields

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20 Comments

  • Madeline Kraft

    We have a field with values that do not match up with the corresponding tag. At some point, our team updated the field values without reviewing tags, so there are mismatches between the two. This is making our reports on this field confusing because the tags are completely different than the field values.

    What I am wondering is how we should go about making the update to our tags so they align with the field value. My understanding from this article is that we will lose the historical data if we simply update the tags to better align with the field value. Is this accurate? Is there any way to keep the historical data based on the field value itself? 

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  • Giuseppe
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Hi Madeline,

    If you're using Explore, you can create a report solely based on the ticket field value, regardless of the tag that it's associated with. Assuming that the correct values were still selected in your tickets (even if if they were associated to an incorrect tag), they should still show in Explore. Here's an article about this - Reporting with custom fields. In other words, as long as the correct value in the ticket field is being selected in your tickets, then Explore should reflect these values.

    I understand you're planning on correcting the tag associated with the ticket field, however, you are correct in saying that this could further skew your data, especially for your already closed tickets. Changing the title/value of the field to align with the tags will change the values shown in the ticket and in the Explore data I showed above. On the other hand, moving the tags around for dropdown fields will also cause data to be changed as well (i.e. the actual ticket field values will change depending on the tag).

    If you plan to do this, I recommend reviewing this article first to emphasize its impact - Understanding how creating, deactivating, or deleting ticket fields impacts tickets

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  • Emmanuel Lepessec

    Hello

    If I understand well, there is no way do "disable" values in a drop-down list, so that we may change the proposed values at ticket creation without loosing historic data?

    What we want to do is : continue using the same field, but propose some new values to our customers, that better fit our needs and their understanding. At ticket creation, we would like our drop-down list to display only the new values, and not show the old ones. But we don't want to loose data from old tickets. How do we do this ?

    Thank you

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  • Heather Rommel
    Community Moderator
    Zendesk Luminary
    The Product Manager Whisperer - 2021

    Hi Emmanuel Lepessec,

    What I've done in the past is change the name of the option but left the tag alone. In this way the old values will be merged with the new values because really the tag dictates it in reporting. 

    Only do this if the intent of the value is the same! 

    Sincerely,

    Heather

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  • Emmanuel Lepessec

    Hi Heather

    Thank you for your reply. :) Yes that could be a solution, but unfortunately our old values are really too different from the new ones... This is particularly a problem on one of our lists which contains far too may options for the moment, and we want to reduce the number of choices.

    I think we don't really have the choice: we will need to create new fields, and make the current ones "agent only", so that they appear only in the backoffice.

    But, as we also need to synchronize with another support platform from one of our partners, and as we don't want to ask them to create new fields either, this causes us another problem...

    Our situation is not simple... :)

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  • Emmanuel Lepessec

    Hi again

    Still stuck... I don't want to change the values nor the tags in thousands of existing tickets, where I have quite a lot of them still open. I would like to propose new values though, to better qualifiy my tickets, so I thought I would start using new fields. But how to handle transitions between "old" tickets and "new" ones? I have to make my new fields visible in order to use them, but I can't hide the old ones, as they must still be seen by my customers, at least till their tickets are closed. Which results in a quite confusing display...

    I just can't figure out how I could solve this in a simple way...

    Regards

    Emmanuel

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  • Ian Morgan

    Hi Emmanuel Lepessec

    Just a suggestion and something you may have already tried. Have you thought about using triggers? 

    Eg.

    Condition

    If ticket less than solved, ticket updated and tag = old_tag

    Action

    new field --> new item

    This would update the customer fields from old to new. This assumes that the new fields are representative of the old fields.

     

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  • shelley

    Can you add more than one tag in the checkbox field (field option section)? If so, how do you enter multiple tags? Thanks

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  • Zsa Trias
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hello Shelley,
     
    There could only be just one tag associated with a checkbox field. 
    If you need to add more tags, I would suggest creating a business rule that would place an additional tag/s on a ticket if the tag associated with the field is present.
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  • Karen Macey-Mort

    Hi, 

    Is there any way to turn this functionality off? We don't need this for all of our fields, for example we have picklist fields with yes/no answers so we don't need "yes" and "no" saved as tags.

    Thanks,

    Karen

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  • Dane
    Zendesk Engineering
    @Karen,
     
    I definitely understand your use case for this. However, it is by design and cannot be disabled. 
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  • antonio.lozano

    Hi everybody, 

    Anyway workaround in order to assign tags to a free text custom field ? 

    Our field would be something like :  Customer Name. It would be great to be able to automatically assign a tag as : customer_name_XXXXXX

     

    Best 

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  • Nancy

    Hi,

     

    We just found out that there's an update on the ticket field/tag rule and it's really bothering us - we can no longer use slash (/) for our ticket tags. However, there are several tag we've been using for years which contain slash, removing the slash now will affect our data and make it really difficult for us to keep tracing certain tags.

     

    Is there any way to rectify this or if we could setup something to make the system automatically recognizes the two tags (with slash or with out slash) as the same one? Thanks!!

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  • DJ Buenavista Jr.
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hi Nancy,
     
    Are you referring to the tag in the custom ticket field? If so, then I checked this and I'm not getting any errors using "/" and I was able to save this without any issues.
     

     
    Thank you!
     
     
    Kind regards, 
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  • Nancy

    Thanks DJ!

     

    Looks like we're only receiving this error message on 5/9, not sure if there's any change in the system or not, it's now resolved, thank you!

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  • DJ Buenavista Jr.
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hi Nancy,
     
    We haven't got any reports of any issues last 5/9, but it could have been a minor hiccup or issue. I'm glad to hear that everything is working now. 
     
    Please don't hesitate to reach back to Zendesk Support if you have encountered the following issue again.
     
    Have a great day ahead!
     
     
     
    Kind regards, 
    1
  • Rudolph Beaton
    Zendesk Luminary

    Given that changing the ticket tags wipes the ticket field selection from all tickets, the recent change the ticket field UI to automatically edit the tag when you edit the ticket field name is a big mistake. This change makes it very easy to accidentally wipe data and Zendesk should revert this change.

    The rest of the changes to the ticket field UI look great, though.

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  • Hi, 

    I've been having trouble with this because we don't necessarily need the custom fields to be updated when a ticket is tagged, it is affecting our flows and preventing us from creating reports on important metrics, it would be great if custom fields could be manually updated by our agents only, but we don't have this option at the moment. 

    I think that ideally, fields shouldn't be auto-updated or changed, or cleared because of tags, unless there's a trigger. 

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  • Jennire Araque

    I am getting the error: The tag 'other' is already used in a custom field drop-down, multi-select or checkbox.
    This is expected when attempting to add a tag that is already in use in an org. 


    My question is: what is the suggested method to finding where a specific tag is used? scanning every field in an org is not scalable and the tag is not visible in the 'top 100' tags. 

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  • Dane
    Zendesk Engineering
    Hi Jennire,

    There's no native way to determine where the tag is being utilized. However, you can use List Org API or List Ticket Fields API to perform a call and manually search for the tag.
     
    Refer to the screenshot below.


     
    I have used Postman to initiate the Ticket Fields API call. Once the list has been extracted, I manually searched for the smstag tag and I was able to identify which ticket field is using it. You can use the ticket field ID and search it on the Ticket Fields section in the Admin Center.

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