Recent searches
No recent searches
What is the Custom Objects in Guide and Explore EAP?
Posted Sep 12, 2024
At Zendesk, we continue to expand on the capabilities that we enable you to do with your business data in Custom objects. This EAP covers 3 major features:
Feature 1: Custom Objects in Guide (Help Center)
This is a highly anticipated upgrade to what you can do with custom objects. With this feature, you can surface Lookup relationships in a Ticket pointing to a custom object onto Guide Help-center with just a few clicks. We are giving you early access to this feature in our latest Guide theme (Version 4). Check this article to know more about Guide themes
Sample Use cases it unlocks:
- Product/Service Catalog: Customers could list of products or services from a long list, when submitting a ticket.
- Asset Request/Replacement: Employees can select one of the Assets they currently possess as they submit a ticket for Replacement.
- Service Orders: Customers can choose one of the devices they have registered so that they can submit a Service request for that device.
Why is this important:
- It opens up considerable opportunities for process automation while simplifying trigger setup. For example, you can now route all the tickets coming for iPhone 11, iPhone 12, iPhone 13 etc. all to the iPhone team with just one trigger without an Agent triaging the ticket
- It opens up opportunities for ticket deflection. Customer selects a device which is not within warranty. Zendesk can automatically respond back to the customer without an Agent triage.


Feature 2: End user permissions on Custom objects
With this feature, we are enabling you to surface custom object records to your end users via API. This enables to you to build powerful custom experiences in Guide and Messaging channels enabling better self service.
Sample Use case: Display all Assets that the customer has registered in a Guide custom page

With great power comes great responsibility. Once you enable permissions for your customers, they will have access to all records in the custom object via API. Hence we recommend not to surface any sensitive data to customers.
Feature 3: Expanded Reporting on Lookup relationships in Explore
This is yet another highly requested feature. With this feature, you can build reporting on your Tickets with related Objects as attributes.
Sample Use cases:
- Count of Tickets where Related Order→Status = "Delayed" OR "At Risk". Here Related Order is a Lookup relationship in Ticket pointing to Order object. And Status is a field in the Order object

Useful resources
0
9 comments
Jarrad Test
Ashwin Raju excited to see and test this out! Based on the video/GIF in the article, it seems these will be a dropdown field. Are there any plans to make this ‘searchable’ for End Users?
0
Stephen
Hi Ashwin,
This seems really exciting. I was curious if there are plans around being able to expose a Lookup Relationship field containing Organisation data to End-Users?
I understand the concerns around exposing this, but we have a use case where we would ideally like to be able to use the Organisation field on an internal company Help Centre for certain request types. This would allow us to pull data from that Organisation into a ticket and provide greater level of information for our teams to work with.
0
Ashwin Raju
hi Jarrad - They are searchable.. Try it out and please do share your feedback. I have enabled your account.
0
Beth Chamberlain
Allowing end users to use our lookup fields would solve several use cases for us, but we are using a custom Guide theme, so we cannot turn on this feature. When will this feature be available outside of the Copenhagen theme?
0
Ashwin Raju
hi Beth.. We are enabling all the previous versions of Guide as we look to release the feature this quarter (target date: Early Nov). This should ideally include most of the custom themes, unless there is considerable customization that limits it. I will get back to you around your specific guide instance.
0
Ashwin Raju
hi Stephen - I totally missed your question.. My apologies for that..
At this point, we are not looking at exposing Lookup relationships that point to Tickets, Users, Organization. Nor are we looking at Anonymous users.. We want to ensure that we build sufficient permissions before we can safely enable these scenarios.
0
Ashley Williams
Is there any documentation / detail regarding which in-Object field types are supported with Feature 3 in Explore? This documentation seems to just suggest ‘fields’ but, having tested a bit, other lookup relationships aren't supported and I think dropdowns only seem to be returning ID values rather than real values?
0
Wojciech Smajda
Hi Jarrad,
Thank you for your enthusiasm about our new feature! Currently, we don’t have plans to make the dropdown fields searchable for end users in the short term. However, we appreciate your feedback and will consider it for future updates.
0
NSK)管理者
I fun your solution for lookup relational field on Zendesk.
Thank you very much, so.
For 2nd seirvice, please tell me the following question.
I cannot choice the "Customers can edit" on Permissions if its field type is lookup relational field.
I'm understanding that standard lookup relational field permitted "Agents can edit" only.
My understanding is right?
Let me know how I set "Customers can edit".
0