It's probably no surprise that our Zendesk customer service team has a fairly big and built-out instance of Zendesk Support. There's hundreds of agents, business rules & macros, custom fields, tags, and organizations.
All that comes together in the beautiful dance that is support. Some do heavier duty than others, and there's maybe none more critical than our humble About field.
About is a custom ticket drop-down field containing over 200 values covering everything from Authentication to Zendesk Chat. Even if you are closer to ticket #10 than ticket #1000000, I always suggest that every Zendesk Support customer consider putting in a basic custom drop-down ticket field. One of the most common questions that any customer support team needs to be able to answer, is what their customers are asking about. If you start categorizing your tickets now, that will be incredibly useful data to have when it’s time to look back.
I this article, you'll learn basic & 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
- Click the Manage icon (
) in the sidebar then click Manage > Ticket fields . - On the next screen, click Add custom field, choose Drop-down list, and start adding values.
- You’ll notice that each option gets an associated tag so you can easily build out Triggers and Views . For more information, 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.
- ex. 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 field Required . That means agents have to fill it out before setting a ticket to solved. This data will be more useful if it's applied to every ticket.
5 Comments
Hi,
Is there an easy way of displaying the "folder" name of a dropdown field in the agent workspace?
For example, if the About field has the following options:
Now if "Subscription::Other" is selected, the field will only show "Other" and it will be hard to distinguish what's the main topic.
This is also true for your example with 200 options, since not every specific option is easy to understand what's its folder.
Also this goes to reporting that will show the full name (with colon) and for triggers where I would like to use a condition according to an entire folder.
Is there any way of achieving this without creating a separate read-only field for the folder with many triggers (that need maintenance whenever something is added/changed) to change the folder field according to the About field?
Thanks.
What you could do is edit the field values to include the category name in the name of your items.
For example:
That way the field will show as "Billing/Payment", etc.
Editing the field names, once they've been previously saved, won't affect the tags associated with each value, so changing the names won't adversely affect any reporting or triggers, views, macros etc. that may use that value.
Thank you @...,
this will indeed solve the visual part of the issue.
However, if I want to create triggers based on the folder name, is there an easy method of doing so?
For example, if topic is Billing - assign ticket to Accounting group.
The only method I can think of is creating that read-only "topic folder" field and creating triggers that will populate it according to which sub-topic was selected (which means a condition for each of the 200 options, and if we add any later on, we have to remember to update those triggers).
You're correct, it's true that triggers won't be able to make use of the "folder" name, so that in triggers you'd need to list each folder option as a condition (using the "Meet any of the following conditions" feature).
That being the case, another option could be to use Conditional Fields. In that case, you'd have one dropdown with the "folder" options, and then separate fields for each "folder" option, each of which would only be displayed when its associated folder option was chosen: Creating conditional ticket fields
I think no matter which route you go, there's going to be some maintenance required.
Thank you for the answer, Dave.
The issue with conditional fields is that we would need a different field per folder.
This means that if the About field for example has 10 topics, this means 10 custom fields.
This affects also the complexity of reporting later on (complicated formulas etc.)
I hope there would be a better solution for this in the future.
Thank you.
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