It's probably no surprise that our Zendesk Customer Support team has a fairly big and built-out instance of Zendesk Support. This instance includes hundreds of agents, business rules, macros, custom fields, tags, and organizations.
A critical part of this instance is our humble About field. About is a custom ticket drop-down field containing over 200 values covering everything from Authentication to Zendesk Messaging. Even if you are closer to ticket #10 than ticket #1000000, Zendesk recommends that every Zendesk customer consider putting in a basic custom drop-down ticket field.
One of the most common questions that any customer support team needs to answer is, "What are my customers asking about?" If you start categorizing your tickets now, that will be incredibly useful data to have when it’s time to look back.
In this article, you'll learn basic and advanced steps for getting going with an About field of your own. This article contains the following topics:
The Basics
Setting up an About field
- In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Fields. - Click Add field, then choose Drop-down and start adding values.
- You’ll notice that each option gets an associated tag so you can easily build out Triggers and Views. See Adding custom fields to your tickets and support request form.
Organizing your About field
If you just have a handful of options, then this part isn't necessary. If you have over 200 like we do, then this becomes a necessity!
- To create a 'folder' in your about field, use double colons to separate out the different levels.
For example, Billing::Refunds, Billing::Invoices will first give you the option to select Billing and then give you the related child options - Here's what it looks like:
Going further
Reporting on your About field
Once you’ve solved a bunch of tickets and are ready to build out your reports using your new field, we’ve got you covered in our powerful analytics tool, Explore. See Reporting with custom fields.
Correct and complete data
Quick and easy tip! When building out macros about a specific subject, don't forget to add the related About field value as a macro action. That will help ensure consistent and complete data.
Also consider making the About field a Required field. That means agents have to fill it out before setting a ticket to Solved. About data will be more useful if it's applied to every ticket.