Workaround: Adding a name field to your Help Center ticket form

We've seen multiple people struggling with the fact there isn't a out-of-the-box way to display the name field in the ticket form. Today we'd like to share the workaround which we use to meet our customers needs when we're implementing Zendesk.

The current problem with email addresses is they often don't contain the full name at all, sometimes it's even worse when your organisation is dealing with consumers because they often use nicknames in the email addresses. Now this means agents have to update the users which submit a ticket via the webform on the Help Center. To solve this issue we've created an easy to setup workaround which is using the Zendesk API and doesn't require any changes to the templates of your Help Center*. Before proceeding you need to make sure you've added a custom ticket field .

1. Go to the Zendesk Admin by clicking the Admin gear icon and navigate to Extensions (under Settings).
2. Press Add target and choose URL target .
3. Make sure to fill in the following values, replace the {{ticket.ticket_field_00000000}} with the custom ticket field which holds the Name of your user and replace {{subdomain}} with your Zendesk subdomain.
   Title Update requester name
   URL https:// {{subdomain}} .zendesk.com/api/v2/users/{{ticket.requester.id}}.json?user[name]={{ticket.ticket_field_00000000}}
   Method PUT
   Attribute Name value
   Basic Authentication Your Zendesk account
4. Choose Create target in the dropdown and press Submit .
5. Navigate to Triggers and click A dd trigger .
6. Add the following to Meet all of the following conditions:
   Ticket: Is... Created
   Ticket: Channel Is Web form
7. Add the following to Perform these actions:
   Notifications: Notify target Update requester name
   Message: update name
8. Press Create trigger

* This change could result in having two name fields on the Feedback Tab.