Using custom fields

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Custom fields provide a way to store additional information about tickets, organizations, and users. The custom fields are visible to all team members, and can be used in business rules and reporting.

This article contains the following topics:

• About custom fields
• Accessing the custom field pages
• Understanding custom field statuses

Related articles:

• About custom field types
• Reporting with custom fields

About custom fields

The numerous types of custom fields provide the flexibility necessary to capture a variety of customer, ticket, and organization details. You can create the following types of custom fields:

• Drop-down
• Text
• Checkbox
• Number
• Multi-line
• Multi-select
• Date
• Decimal
• Regex
• Lookup relationships

Not only can the additional information captured by custom fields be useful for agents to see, but you can also use custom fields in the following ways:

• Triggers and automations
• Placeholders to reference custom fields in macros, ticket comments, and notification messages
• Search
• (Professional and Enterprise plans) Reporting

Custom user and organization fields are visible only to team members. End users can't see them. However, admins can make ticket fields visible to end users in addition to team members.

Important: When you name custom fields, don't use reserved system or feature names such as "channel." These names are reserved by Zendesk and won't work in custom fields.

To get started with custom fields, see:

• Adding custom fields to your tickets
• Adding custom fields to users
• Adding custom fields to organizations
• Defining a custom object's schema with custom fields

Accessing the custom field pages

The custom field pages are located in Admin Center and provide a list of existing custom fields. You can also see information about each field, search, filter, see the status of the fields, add new fields, edit the order of fields, and export a CSV of your custom fields.

To access the User fields page

• In Admin Center, click People in the sidebar, then select Configuration > User fields.

To access the Ticket fields page

• In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Fields.

To access the Organization fields page

• In Admin Center, click People in the sidebar, then select Configuration > Organization fields.

To access the Custom objects page

• In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Custom objects > Objects.

  When creating or editing a custom object, use the Fields tab to manage the object's custom fields.

Understanding custom field statuses

Each of the custom field pages is divided into two tabs: active and inactive. This provides an easy way to see which fields are currently in use and which have been created and used previously but aren't in use at the moment. By making a custom field inactive, you preserve the data stored in the field and can reactivate the field at any time. In most cases, when you delete a custom field the data stored in the field is also deleted.

Custom fields for custom objects work a little differently because they define the object's schema. Therefore, all custom fields for a custom object are always active. You can delete a custom field for a custom object if you no longer need it, but you can't deactivate the field.