About approvals and how they work (EAP)

What's my plan?

Approvals are also available on all Employee Service Suite plans.

Note: Approvals are currently in an early access program (EAP). You can sign up for the EAP here.

Approvals are requests that agents make on behalf of other agents and end users. Agents send requests to approvers. Approvers are other agents or end users who have the authority to review the request information and make a decision.

You can use approvals to:

• Increase agent efficiency: Approvals in Zendesk remove the need for manual interventions or dependence on external applications.
• Ensure compliance: Track approval decisions within Zendesk to ensure adherence to your organization’s compliance policies.
• Maintain quality control: Add an approval step into your organization’s standard operating procedures to uphold quality assurance.
• Provide transparency: Requesters and approvers have visibility into the status of approval requests.

This article provides an overview of approvals and how they work in Zendesk. It describes who can make approval requests, who can approve requests, and examples of how approvals are used in both customer service and employee service cases.

This article contains the following topics:

• About the approval request process
• Understanding who makes requests and who approves requests
• Approval request examples

Related articles:

• Creating and managing approval requests (EAP)
• Responding to an approval request (EAP)

About the approval request process

The main steps of the approval request process consist of the following:

1. An agent creates an approval request from a ticket in the Agent Workspace.
2. The agent then sends the request to an approver. An approver can be either another agent or an end user.
3. The approver receives an email notification
4. The approver then responds to the request by approving or denying.

   End user-approvers respond to requests from the help center, while agent approvers respond from the Agent Workspace.

5. The agent who created the approval request receives the approver’s response.

The image below illustrates an overview of the approvals workflow:

There may be times when the request process doesn’t follow these exact steps. For example an agent may withdraw a request before or after it’s approved.

Understanding who makes requests and who approves requests

Agents make approval requests on behalf of other agents and end users. They create requests on tickets they’re working on from the Agent Workspace and send them to approvers.

Agents may want to create a request when there is a ticket assigned to them that requires approval from someone else. For example, tickets requesting access to software or tickets requesting refunds beyond a certain threshold. See Creating and managing approval requests to learn more.

Approvers are users who have the authority to review approval request information and make a decision. They respond to requests, but are not acting to solve an issue.

Both agents and end users can be approvers.

• On the Zendesk Employee Service Suite, all agents and end users are employees of the same organization. In this context, agents are employees with an agent seat and can access the Agent Workspace in Zendesk Support to respond to approvals.

  End users, or employees without an agent seat, have access to your organization's internal help center where they can respond to approvals.

• On the Zendesk Suite, agents respond to approval requests from the Agent Workspace. In this context, end users are requesters and are generally not part of the same organization as the agent. However, end users, or requesters, can still approve requests.

See Responding to an approval request to learn more.

Note: For end users to be able to respond to Approval requests in your help center, you must update its theme. See Updating your theme with EAP features.

Approval request examples

Approvals are available on both the Zendesk Suite and Zendesk Employee Service Suite. Depending on how your organization uses Zendesk, you can use approvals for both customer service and employee service needs.

Some examples of how you may want to use approvals include:

• Software and hardware procurement and access
• Employee promotions or job changes
• Long-term leave requests
• Payroll issues
• Refunds

For example, say your organization uses the Zendesk Employee Service Suite. A new employee in your company needs access to software and opens a ticket. An employee with an agent seat can create an approval request on the new employee’s behalf in the Agent Workspace and send it to an approver for review. In this example, the approver could be the new employee’s manager or another employee in your IT department. The other employee may or may not have an agent seat.

Alternatively, if your organization uses the Zendesk Suite, you can also request approvals to resolve customer service tickets. For example, an agent has been assigned a ticket requesting a refund. They need authorization to proceed with the refund so they create an approval request and send it to an approver in your organization. The approver in this example may be the agent's team lead.

In all of the examples above, the approval decisions are tracked in the approval request on the ticket and in messages on the ticket conversation so that you can keep track of approvals in your organization.