What is the Custom Objects in Guide and Explore EAP?

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

1. Demo video
2. Sign up for the EAP
3. How do I switch to the new Guide theme? 
4. How do I share feedback?