When you contact Zendesk Customer Support, you indicate the urgency of the issue by selecting a business impact from the widget's ticket form. This article explains how to identify the urgency of your issue.
Once you’ve indicated the initial urgency, our Customer Support team will continue assess the impact as we process your request in order to provide you with the correct level of support.
Internally, Zendesk Customer Support refers to this as Business Impact, and uses this level of urgency to help determine the order in which to process tickets. This helps to ensure that critical issues are resolved as quickly as possible.
This article contains the following sections:
Understanding how Zendesk defines business impact and urgency levels
When you create a ticket you’ll be asked to assess how the issue is impacting your business, as seen below in our widget.
Level 1 - We can’t sign in or use Zendesk
This level indicates the highest criticality, and should be used in any scenario where you’re completely unable to use Zendesk to communicate with your customers.
Level 1 issues are ongoing, require immediate resolution, and have no reasonable workaround until the issue is resolved. Any incident where you are concerned about the security of Zendesk data should also be marked as level 1.
Sample scenarios
- All agents are unable to sign into Support
- All agents are experiencing one-way audio issues during calls
- Your Chat widget is not loading for end users
- End users are not receiving ticket updates
- High-risk security vulnerabilities. Example: Single sign-on (SSO) is not working.
Level 2 - A major feature is broken
Level 2 indicates high urgency and should be used when your ability to communicate with your customers or perform normal business operations is significantly degraded.
Level 2 issues require immediate resolution, and may have workarounds but require significant effort to maintain normal operations. Level 2 issues do not take priority over Level 1 issues.
Sample scenarios
- Triggers or automations are malfunctioning
- Reports won’t load for any agents or admins
- You’re experiencing significant latency, such as a pause greater than 10 seconds, while using Zendesk
- You’re encountering errors that don’t prevent ticket updates, but confuse your agents
Level 3 - I have an issue that’s slowing me down
Level 3 indicates moderate urgency and should be used for issues that slow normal business operations.
Level 3 issues require timely but not immediate resolution, and workarounds exist that you can perform without much effort. Level 3 issues are typically responded to in 1-2 business days.
Sample scenarios
- You can’t export using XML format
- Call recordings take longer than normal to post to a ticket
- You experience a short delay when you submit an ticket update (up to 5 seconds)
- Explore reports are failing to export (workaround is to access reports directly and take screenshots)
Level 4 - I have a question
The issue or request is informational in nature and its resolution will not directly impact current business operations.
Sample scenarios
- Your reports have unexpected or mismatched results that you need help understanding
- You have a request for information on a new channel or workflow that you don’t yet use
- You are unable to enable a sandbox
- Markdown in tickets is does not render correctly
Understanding how Zendesk uses urgency to prioritize tickets
We want to ensure that any issues you encounter using Zendesk are resolved in a timely manner, and this includes prioritizing issues that completely impede your business over those that don’t.
Plainly put, more critical issues will appear at the top of our queue, so we can immediately begin troubleshooting with you in real time. You can expect responses to Level 1 or Level 2 issues to be sent to you live through our widget. If you need to leave the conversation or step away, we can always communicate updates through email instead. Level 3 or 4 issues will be responded to through email so that our Customer Support team can research potential solutions for a thorough response.
You can always return to our widget to continue a conversation with us or open a new conversation for a separate issue. For more information, see the article: Contacting Zendesk Customer Support.
Zendesk customer support is responsible for ensuring that ticket priority is aligned with business impact appropriately, and can increase the priority if it is set too low.