Views: Best Practice
Views are the primary way of managing tickets in Zendesk. The tickets displayed in a view respect an agent's ticket privilege, so agents only see the ticket that they are authorised to process.
When creating views, you should keep in mind the following.
Shared views
Shared views are visible to all agents or all agents in a group. Before making a view shared, you should ensure that it is relevant to all the agents. The number of shared views listed in the sidebar is limited to a maximum of 12.
To see more views, the agent must go to the Manage View screen- click 'More' at the bottom of the views list.
Adding more shared views cause agents to miss important information and may clutter their screen.
For example, if you create a view that includes a condition based on the ticket group, there is little value in making the view shared to all agents as agents with no access to the group will always display no tickets.
Home screen views
Zendesk provides default views from the agent home screen:
- Tickets requiring attention
- Tickets assigned to you
- Tickets assigned to your groups
- Satisfaction statistics
While these views cannot be customized, they do provide ticket details to all agents. To access the default views, click the home button on the sidebar:
There is no need to create additional views to duplicate these details.
Titling views
Always give clear and accurate descriptions to view titles. For example, ' Urgent, Unsolved Tickets' could describe the ticket conditions that make up the view. It would be misleading to name the view 'Unsolved Tickets' or 'Urgent Tickets'. It would be unhelpful to name the view 'Ticket Listing'. If you later modify the conditions in a view, you should consider modifying the title of the view to reflect the new conditions.
Formatting views
Once you have created your view conditions, always consider the ticket fields that are most relevant to the view. If your view concerns old tickets, you may want to include the request date or the date when the ticket was last updated.
Adding too many columns makes the screen cluttered and difficult to read. For example, if your view only includes urgent tickets, you may not want to include the ticket priority in the formatting, as you know from the view title that all tickets listed are urgent.
Sorting within views
You can apply a different sort order when formatting the view, but normally views read easier when sorted left to right. For example, if you create a view to review agent performance, you may want the assignee as the the first column and sort by assignee.
If you have many fields in your view and some with long descriptions, you may find the view clearer by grouping tickets. For example, grouping by assignee will place a heading of the agent's name then list tickets under each agent. The view will be sorted by assignee then by the first ticket column or the field you specify when formatting.
Agents can re-sort a view by clicking on a column heading. This toggles the sort order from descending to ascending on the selected column.
Reviewing views
From time to time, you should review your use of views and your group's use of views. To ensure that priority items are visible to agents when processing:
- Views that are used most often should be placed near the top of the view list
- Views that focus on urgent tickets should be in near the top of the list
- Views that are infrequently used or that deal with low priority tickets can be placed lower down the order
- Views that are no longer required can be inactivated or deleted
This presents the most important views to agents while processing tickets where they are more likely to see and act on priority tickets. At most, the first 12 shared views and first 8 personal views are displayed on agent processing screen. Ensure priority views are within that range.
If you are responsible for a group of agents, ask which views they use and find most useful. Establish if the views need to be refined or new views added.
Bookmarking views
For views that are not visible to agents in the sidebar, you can bookmark its URL from the view edit page. When editing a specific view, look for the 'Permalink Copy to Clipboard' link.
The resulting URL will be in the format:
Using this URL will return you to the view edit screen.
You can also create and bookmark a URL to take you directly to the view ticket listing. Take the number at the end of the edit view URL,123456 in the above example, and use it in the following URL:
Reporting from views
You can export ticket listings from views to a comma separated values (CSV) file. Open the file in a spreadsheet or any reporting tool to further analyze tickets. However, once a ticket has been closed for 120 days it is archived and will no longer appear in any view. Consequently, ticket views are not designed to export tickets over long date ranges for reporting. Views are intended for actively managing tickets.
Zendesk provides other tools for export and reporting, such as Insights, and you should not rely on views for extracting tickets in this way.
Avoid large complex results
Views will only ever display 30 tickets per page at a time. If your view returns hundreds of tickets the results will be spread across many pages. Consequently, you are unlikely to review all the results. If you find you that you routinely only look at a subset of tickets, consider refining the view's conditions to restrict results and simplify the query.
- Add more criteria to the 'meets all conditions' section
- Remove criteria from the 'meets any conditions' section
If you find that your view is slow to refresh, consider removing conditions that include search for:
- Null values, for example, 'Ticket Assignee is '-'
- Is not' values, for example, 'Ticket Assignee: is not: 'Phil'
- Strings, for example 'Ticket Description: Contains the following string: 'Willow Farm'
- Words
- Tags
Review the audit log
Administrators on the Zendesk Enterprise plan can review their audit log for changes to views. Check to see if agents are maintaining their views and look for any updates to shared views.
Extending views
If your need for views is particularly demanding, there is Quickie, by Lovestock & Leaf, a free app on the Zendesk Marketplace to organize and access views. Apps must be installed by your Zendesk Administrator.
Webinar
For an in depth look at views, check out this webinar .
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Thanks for the tip, Graeme! :D
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Great info here! Thanks for posting this, Graeme.
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The global view "all unsolved tickets" as depicted above disappeared today. How do we get it back?
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@Graeme
Can you test the theory, "By default, views are sorted from left to right in column order." I cannot seem to replicate that.
Screenshot below is, "Order by > Assignee":
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@Aaron
Thanks, Text updated.
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Hi!
Is there anyway to have the "your views" sit at the top of the page instead of the "views" list (in the navigation on the left)
Thanks!
Christina
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Christina
That is a great suggestion, but unfortunately that is not possible at present.
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Hi,
Several times now, views that I have created and use daily disappear. I have not deleted them. Can someone tell me why they randomly are erased?
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Hey Catharine -
Thanks for your question. How many views are you trying to use? You can only see 8 at a time in the Agent interface, so it's possible that they're still there but getting bumped from your sidebar.
If this is the problem, here's a great article from the Knowledge Base on using views to manage ticket workflow, which includes info on how to reorder, sort, and filter your list of views.
Let us know if this helps, or if you're still having trouble.
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"The number of shared views listed in the sidebar is limited to a maximum of 12."
This is arbitrary and your work around of editing the copy to clipboard link to actually view them is an absurd thing to have to do. There are these crazy things called scroll bars that exist. We use them to see more data off the page. In this modern world folks are used to them. and in fact will appear on that sidebar when you have additional "My Views" if you screen is not large enough.
So get rid of the arbitrary 12 view limit and folks won't wonder why things seem to disappear or be annoyed every time they need to look a public view that is not in the top 12
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It would be great if you were in multiple groups you were given the choice of which "group" views you wanted to see. the limit of 12 is horrible when you cannot customize it and must monitor multiple views at once, some having a much higher priority over others. Its a bit absurd that I have to keep bookmarks of all my views or go into the view all to search them (which doesn't display ticket count next to it without entering the view). Please consider adding this option. 12 views may be great for low end users but for those of us responsible for multiple things it is a nightmare.
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> Views that are used most often should be placed near the top of the view list
That makes sense, so how do we determine which views are used most often?
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Jim
i do not believe there is a metric that counts the number of times a view is used. So, it comes down to discussion with Agents around what views they are using and the views they should be using. That will vary from business to business. Understanding your own Agents and business needs is critical.
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I agree with Jenn, why is there a limit of 12? I do not understand. Let us (customers & users) decide what works best for us please. I also really need more than 12.
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Quite surprised to see that there are many different topics regarding this issue, some dating back several years and closed for comment now.
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Hi Chris,
They're closed for comment as we have been redirecting everyone to the conversation on how you use views, as noted in the official comment.
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