Summary: ◀▼
Approvals let you request and track authorization from agents or end users within ticket workflows, improving efficiency and compliance. You create approval requests for review by designated approvers who respond via the Agent Workspace or help center. Approval status is tracked on tickets and can be reported on. Use approvals for tasks like refunds, access requests, and employee changes to maintain quality control and transparency.
Approvals are requests that are made on behalf of other agents and end users. When an approval request is created, it is sent to the assigned approvers. Approvers are other agents or end users who have the authority to review the request information and make a decision.
- Increase agent efficiency by removing the need for manual interventions or dependence on external applications.
- Ensure compliance by recording approval decisions within Zendesk to ensure adherence to your organization’s compliance policies.
- Maintain quality control by adding an approval step into your organization’s standard operating procedures.
- Provide transparency on the approval request's status to the approval requester, approver, and the assignee of the associated ticket.
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:
Considerations for approval requests
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Limitations.
- A ticket can have a maximum of 50 inactive approval requests. When this limit is reached, no new approval requests can be created for the ticket.
- Approval requests can be opened on tickets with a status of new, open, pending, or on-hold only. Approval requests can't be created on solved or closed tickets.
- Agent approvers can respond to approval requests with a comment. Each approval request can have a maximum of 40 comments, and each comment on an approval request can be a maximum of 500 characters.
- When creating an approval request you can select up to five approvers. If you select more than one approver, this is considered a parallel approval, and separate approval requests are created for each approver within a parallel approval block. For parallel approvals, the request is considered approved only when all approval requests within the block are approved.
- Approval status ticket field. For accounts that have more than one ticket form, the approval status field must be manually added to ticket forms.
- Help center requirements. For end users to be able to access approval requests assigned to them, your help center must be on the latest version of the standard Copenhagen theme or you must manually update your custom theme.
- Permissions. On Growth and Professional plans, admins and agents automatically have permission to create approval requests. On Enterprise and Enterprise Plus plans, admins and any custom roles created after approvals is turned on have permission to create approval requests by default. However, existing custom roles when approvals is turned on won't have permission to create approval requests until the role's permissions are updated to select Create approval requests. See Permissions that agents in custom roles can have.
-
Parallel approvals: When multiple approvers are
selected during the approval request creation
process, a parallel approval block is created, which
contains separate, but identical, approval requests
for each selected approver. All approvers are
notified at the same time and can review and respond
to the request assigned to them at the same time.
For a parallel approval request to be approved, all
requests within the block must be approved. If a
single approver within the block denies the request,
the parallel approval request as a whole is
denied.
If, instead, your workflow requires multiple approvals that must be done sequentially, you must create a separate approval request for each approver, one after the other.
- Action flows and APIs. Approval requests can be created through the Approval Requests API and action flows regardless of whether agents are allowed to manually create approval requests. Approval requests created through the API and action flows can be withdrawn by admins and some agents, depending on their permissions. Approval requests created by the API have a Sent by value of API; approval requests created by action flows have a Sent by value of Action flow.
- Group approvers: Groups of agents can be assigned as an approver if they have 30 members or less. When a group is assigned as an approver, only the first response from a member of the group is recorded.
- Approval requests in Slack: Approval requests can be surfaced in Slack to make it easier for assigned approvers to respond quickly. From Slack, approval requests can be approved, denied, or responded to with comments, but can't be created or withdrawn through Slack.
Understanding the approval request lifecycle
The main steps of the approval request process consist of the following:
- An agent creates an approval
request from a ticket in the Agent Workspace.
Within the request, the agent designates other agents,
groups of agents, or end users as the approvers. If more
than one approver is selected, an approval block containing
separate copies of the approval request for each approver is
created.
After an approval request is created, the ticket associated with it can't be closed until all approvers respond or the request is withdrawn.
- All approvers receive email notifications that they have an approval request to review.
- The approvers then respond to the
request by approving or denying. Agent
approvers also have the option to respond with comments.
Agent approvers respond to approval requests in the Agent Workspace or, if configured, Slack. End user-approvers must respond to requests from the help center.
- The ticket assignee receives email notifications for all
responses to approval requests. Additionally, the following email notifications are also sent:
- For group approvers, other group members are notified of the first response received.
- For parallel approvals, in addition to email notifications for each individual response in the approval block, the ticket assignee also receives an email confirming the successful approval after the request is approved by all approvers.
- When a single approval request is withdrawn, the approver is notified.
- When an approval block is manually withdrawn,
all approvers who have approved or denied the
request are notified, but approvers who haven't
responded aren't notified.
If any approver in an approval block denies the request, all pending requests in the block are automatically withdrawn and the pending approvers aren't notified but can see the denial reason as the reason their approval request was withdrawn.
The image below illustrates an overview of the approvals workflow:
Understanding who makes requests and who approves requests
Approval requests are always created by agents. Typically, agents submit approval requests on behalf of other agents and end users when a ticket assigned to them requires approval from someone else. For example, tickets requesting access to software or tickets requesting refunds beyond a certain threshold. When the agent creates requests on tickets they’re working on from the Agent Workspace and sends them to approvers.
Approvers are users who have the authority to review approval request information and make a decision. They respond to approval requests, but are not solving the ticket. Both agents and end users can be approvers.
- On Zendesk Employee Service Suite Growth plans and above, 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 Customer Service Suite Professional plans and above, agents respond to approval requests from the Agent Workspace. In this context, end users are the requesters and are generally not part of the same organization as the agent. However, both agents and end users can still be approvers, with agents responding to requests in the Agent Workspace and end users responding through the help center.
See Responding to an approval request to learn more.
Approval request examples
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 Employee Service Suite. A new employee in your company needs access to software and submits a service request through the service catalog. An employee with an agent seat can create an approval request associated with the service request's ticket on behalf of the new employee 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 Customer Service Suite, you can 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 end user's refund, so the agent creates an approval request and sends it to an approver in your organization, such as 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 the ticket events so that you can keep track of approvals in your organization.
Reporting on approval requests
When approval requests are turned on for an account, a new ticket field is created: Approval status. This field automatically reflects the status of an approval request associated with the ticket and can be used in Explore reporting. See Reporting with custom fields.