Chapter 3.  Creating Custom Fields

Being able to provide great customer support depends on a lot of different factors. One of them, without question, is having the necessary information needed to give the best possible answer. Therefore, it is a no-brainer that our end users should always receive the adequate tools, allowing them to supply us with these bits of information.

Equally important is that all these bits of information should be displayed in such a manner that our agents can encompass the exact nature of the request, as well as the surrounding circumstances. At the same time, we want our business rules to access these bits of information in order to make use of them.

There are user fields, ticket fields, and organization fields. In this chapter, we will cover all of them and analyze the different types of fields available for us and how we can use them in our project.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• What are fields in Zendesk?

• Standard ticket fields (system fields)

• Different...

What are fields in Zendesk?

Fields are, simply put, containers for information. You could say that users, tickets, and organizations are objects in Zendesk; each containing a range of fields to hold the information describing the object.

Let's have a quick look at an example field:

This field called Requester is a ticket field as it belongs to the ticket object. Every ticket requires a requester. In most cases, the requester would be an end user.

Another great example would be the Description field, which holds the initial text provided by the requester of a ticket. The content of some ticket fields is supplied by the end-user who created the ticket. In direct contrast, the Assignee field, holding the information about what group or agent the ticket is assigned to, is set within Zendesk. In this case, the end user does not supply the information:

Standard ticket fields

Now that we have a general understanding of fields, let's have a quick look at Zendesk's standard fields for tickets.

The...

Creating custom fields

So now that we have a better understanding of fields in general and what types of fields there are, we can move to creating our own custom fields.

Before we do so, however, let's decide what custom fields we will need by reviewing our flowchart and road map:

Looking at our flowchart, we can see a few possible options when it comes to custom fields. We already know that we can create custom fields for users, organizations, and tickets. So let's divide our train of thought for now.

Custom user  fields

In Chapter 2, Agent Roles, Groups, Organizations, and User Tags, we decided to add the VIP user tag via the Zendesk API whenever a customer purchases a subscription. This still applies. But in order to visualize whether the user is a VIP, and to give our agents the option to upgrade a user to the VIP status manually without having to enter the tag, we should add a checkbox field. Setting the tag via API will still work fine and the checkbox will automatically be checked once...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about fields in Zendesk. You learned about the general purpose of fields and how we can create and utilize the custom user, ticket, and organization fields. You now know their overall place in our Zendesk setup and what to keep in mind when planning and adding custom fields.

In the next chapter, you will learn about different ticket channels and how to set them up properly. We will use our ExampleComp road map to continue the journey of our Zendesk customization.