Add feature for the ability to approve help center registrations

We have been struggling with this for almost 10 years now. We have had to lock down our Help Center, and have customers request accounts via a form completely outside of Zendesk. I would LOVE to see this capability included in Zendesk!

Chandra Mullineaux - Thanks for replying and sharing your take on this. I'm curious how you have your current setup configured. So a web form is filled out containing basic information about the customer, and then you create the customer/user for them and send a password reset link? If that's the setup, a few follow-up questions:

1. When they fill out the form, does it create a ticket and you use tickets for when needing to create customers?
2. How do they actually login to the Help Center once you set up their user?
3. Do you not over-promote the URL (like via your website) and instead you just provide the URL when you're completing a registration for someone via the ticket?
4. Does your Help Center login page still allow self-registration to where if people got to it, they could still self-register and get in?

Hi Jake -

We are a B2B shop and we need to get approval from the customer's organization before we are able to create a user account and allow a person to submit tickets on behalf of that organization.

I'll try to answer your questions in order:

1. We have a button on our HC that says "Request an Account." This button links to a Google form. We use JavaScript to hide this button from users who are already logged into the site. When a user fills out the Google form, it sends an email to our Zendesk HC email address, which creates a ticket. We have a Trigger set up to automatically route these tickets to a specific group who handles these new account requests. One of the fields in our Google form asks the user what organization they work for. When we receive the ticket, we look up that Organization record and find the person(s) designated as the "key user" for that Organization and email them (manually) asking for approval to set up the user account.

2. Once we get the approval from the key user, we set up the user account and use the Reset Password link on the Security tab to send the user a confirmation / password reset email.That email contains a link to the HC and allows them to set their password. We then change the requester on the account request ticket from the dummy user we set up at the Gmail address that hosts the Google form to the actual new user, and then use a Macro to send them another confirmation email with additional details about using the site.

3. We do have a link to our support site on our main website, but users aren't able to submit tickets unless they have an account. We have both Log In and Request Account buttons at the top of our HC, and we use JavaScript to swap them out for a Submit a Ticket button once the user is logged in. 

4. We have our HC completely locked down, which means users are not able to self-register at all. One of the down sides of this is that if a customer CC's a person who does not have an existing account, and that person replies via email to the ticket, that email will go to the Suspended Queue in Zendesk. We then have to manually relay the message to the agent who has the ticket, unless the key user for the Org wants us to create an account for that person. Also, if a person who doesn't have an account emails our Zendesk HC email address, it goes into the Suspended Queue.  

I hope that helps. I know our process is pretty convoluted due to the requirement that we get approval from the Org before creating an account, but you might be able to use some parts of this.

Hi Chandra,

Wow, thank you so much for the thorough reply, this is great information for us to consider.  Appreciate you taking the time to expand and share your own setup. Final follow-up question - how do you go about modifying the HC login page to have that "request an account" link and hide the standard self-register/sign up link that shows on the HC login page? Based on my limited research I'm surprised to hear of this setup, I thought the HC login pages couldn't be customized (even not being able to brand for your company). 

Since we have our HC locked down, there is no registration link on the sign-in page. It's been several years since we set it up, but I believe the setting is in Admin Center under People > Configuration > End Users > Anybody can submit tickets (we have this disabled). 

Our custom Request an Account link is in the main header area of our HC, but not on the Log In page.

Hey folks, thanks for leaving your feedback and apologies for it taking so long to reply to you. I understand that you'd want to implement an approval process for end users signing up to your help center, to better control who has the ability to post and view article. I added some reference articles below on what our current capabilities are, but I can see that it doesn't get you all the way there in terms of adding in that approval process for end users. It's not currently on our 2024 roadmap but I've added this to our internal tracker to monitor feedback, and I'd like to invite anyone else that comes across to post to continue to add their use case. 

There's some capability to restrict your help center to a specific segment of users; Restricting help center access to signed-in end users. You can also add users yourself to only allow those to have access; Adding users to a closed Zendesk Support.