On May 30th, we hosted the inaugural event in our Post-Relate Community series, focusing on Zendesk Custom Objects. This exciting kickoff featured a panel of Zendesk product experts and developers who showcased the latest features and updates from Relate. Attendees had the unique opportunity to participate in a live Q&A session, ensuring their questions were addressed directly by the experts.
The event provided an in-depth exploration of various topics, including object triggers, integrating custom objects into help centers, and enhanced reporting capabilities for custom objects. Additionally, participants were treated to an exclusive live preview of the highly anticipated multi-select fields, designed to significantly enhance the agent experience. This event marked a significant step in our ongoing commitment to keeping the Zendesk community informed and engaged with our latest innovations.
For those who couldn't attend, we have made the event recording available, along with a compilation of the top questions from our Q&A session. You'll also find valuable resources, including the presentation deck and other materials from the event, to help you further explore and implement these new features in your Zendesk environment.
Event Recording
Top Questions from Our Q&A
1. How do I implement Custom Objects from a beginner perspective?
Answer: We recommend starting with Understanding Custom Objects and Planning your Custom Object Workflow. After you have a plan and place you can turn on the feature and start creating your custom objects.
2. What are the best practice to access custom objects via api for use in other AWS services?
Answer: We've got a full suite of API's available for custom objects! There's lots of best practices - but most of them can be found in our documentation at developer.zendesk.com.
3. Are Custom Objects available for all license types?
Answer: Custom Objects are available for all Zendesk Suite Plans but only Enterprise Zendesk Support plans.
4. Are custom objects able to link similar assets together? For example will there be prompts of other tickets logged with the same type of asset?
Answer: There are many ways to view the relationship between custom objects and other records within Zendesk. Using the Custom object records page in Support is a good way to view all tickets associated with a specific custom object's record.
5. What does the deletion flow look like for custom objects?
Answer: Deleting a record, such as a user, that is related to a custom object's record doesn't affect the custom object or it's record.
6. With the security add on and data retention. How does Custom objects get impacted if the ticket gets deleted due to the schedule?
Answer: A ticket being deleted won't affect any related custom object records. They will continue to exist unchanged.
7. What is Zendesk's stance on using webhooks?
Answer: We understand how valuable webhooks can be for unlocking more advanced functionality for custom objects. As with any external services, we can't make guarantees about how they'll work. So, if you do use webhooks with custom objects, just be aware of the potential for race conditions or other complexities that could occur.
8. Will we be able to surface custom objects related to a user's organization in the help center?
Answer: We'll have the concept of filtering by organization in Help Center; however, filters aren't the same as restrictions, so end users would still potentially have access to all of an object's records via the API. For that reason, even with filtering in place, we recommend avoiding giving end users access to custom objects that contain any sensitive data.
9. Will custom objects in guide be capable of being filtered by the user's org, similar to how it can be done on the agent's form now?
Answer: Yes, that's the plan for the user-interface experience. However, filters aren't the same as restrictions, so end users would still potentially have access to all of an object's records via the API. For that reason, even with filtering in place, we recommend avoiding giving end users access to custom objects that contain any sensitive data.
10. Is there any way to create a report on custom object records themselves in Explore?
Answer: We consider integrating with Explore to be a huge value add - and it seems like the community agrees with us! We're working on it, but we want to make sure that what we deliver is a top notch experience.