Introduction

One of the first handy features any new Zendesk admin will enjoy fiddling around with is Ticket Fields. Ticket Fields allow your agents and customers, as well as automated sources like triggers and API calls, to populate your tickets with data that your agents can quickly refer to and which, en masse, gives your Explore reports the data they need to be truly insightful.

Challenge

But with so many possible data points to capture, we can quickly find ourselves with a messy and over-populated Agent Interface, overrun with Ticket Fields.

In a Zendesk environment with 50-100 Ticket Fields (typical for a small-medium business) only a few are ever going to be required on any given ticket. This means all the others are taking up precious space and, more importantly, providing an unwelcome distraction for your agents to navigate through.

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Too many unnecessary Ticket Fields makes for a messy UI

Our challenge, then, is to make sure that all the possible Ticket Fields an agent or customer could ever need are available to them, but only when they need them.

To do this, we’re going to use Zendesk’s brilliant Conditional Fields feature.

Conditional Fields - An Introduction

Conditional Fields allow us to tell Zendesk to hide certain Ticket Fields unless another Ticket Field has first been selected. For example, if one of your ticket fields is Country, we can program Zendesk such that the US State and UK Country Ticket Fields only display if the country selected is either USA or UK respectively. By default, only the Country Ticket Field will be displayed. If an agent or customer selects USA, the US State Ticket Field will appear, as it’s only just become relevant.

This saves us from having to continuously and simultaneously display every country’s state or county lists.

Hierarchies

It can be helpful to plan your Ticket Field hierarchies in a spreadsheet, as I have below.

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In the left hand column, put your parent Ticket Field. I normally set this simply as “Category”.  When a ticket first comes in, this is the only Ticket Field I want to display initially.

Reservation help, Membership and account, and Something else are the three values I want to be available for this Ticket Field.

Whichever Category value the user selects will inform which Ticket Field will subsequently display. For example, if they select “Something else” as the Category, then they will be presented with a Ticket Field which has five options; Information about item, item availability, Opening hours, Refund request and Something else (again). If they select one of the first four, that’s the end of the data inputting and storing in our Ticket Fields. If they select Something else once more, a new Ticket Field will appear, with the two options of Events and Jobs listed.

This is what Conditional Fields are all about. There’s zero point constantly having a Ticket Field with Events and Jobs as its values constantly on display, if most tickets are actually about something entirely unrelated. Only show information when it’s relevant.

Check your Ticket Fields

The next step is a quick but important one, head to Admin Centre > Objects and Rules > Tickets > Ticket Fields or https://YOURDOMAIN.zendesk.com/admin/objects-rules/tickets/ticket-fieldsover

Look through your list and check that you have all the Ticket Fields you require. For the sake of keeping this article on topic, we won’t go into how to create Ticket Fields here.

Once we’ve checked they’re all there and up to date, it’s time to tell Zendesk which Fields are conditional on which!

Create the Conditional Rules

A lot of Zendesk admins get flummoxed at this stage. Try looking for the Conditional Fields settings under Ticket Fields, or even try searching for it in the Admin Centre, and you won’t find it. It’s strangely hidden.

To find it, within the Admin Centre, head to Objects and Rules > Tickets > Forms. The rationale behind this living here is that each Form has its own conditional rules. Find the form within which you want to set up Conditional Fields, click the three dots on the right and then select Conditions.

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You should be met with a pretty blank canvas.

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Do note the drop down setting in the top left. Here, you can choose whether the conditions you create apply to agents or end-users. You’d only want to use the end-users settings if you have a customer-facing form published in your Help Center. Otherwise, just leave it set to Agents.

Go ahead and click Add condition.

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The three fields are fairly self-explanatory, but let’s do a quick walkthrough.

Let’s imagine we want to create the example we used earlier (when selecting Something Else as the Category displayed a new Ticket Field called Something Else).

Clicking the first drop down will show you a full list of all available Ticket Fields in this form. It can be quite overwhelming if you have dozens and dozens, so refer to your hierarchy table to avoid confusion.

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Go ahead and tell Zendesk which Ticket Field you want the following conditional rules to apply to.

Tip: can’t see a Ticket Field you just created? Make sure you’ve added it to the Form first, just as you would normally.

Next, tell Zendesk which Value needs to be selected by the agent in order for the subsequent conditional field to be displayed.

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Finally, select the conditional Ticket Field that you want to be displayed. In our case, when the Category is Something Else, we want Zendesk to then display the Ticket Field that’s called Something Else, as this contains all the possible values that could fall under Something Else.

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Having selected your value, you’ll see a new field appear; Required.

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Just as with a normal, non-conditional Ticket Field, this allows you to set rules as to when, if ever, the agent must select/populate a Value for the Conditional Field.

For example, if you select Solved, it will mean that agents can update a ticket without filling out the Something Else field, unless they are solving it.

This is a great option as it means agents can answer tickets quickly whilst still information seeking, but it also ensures that every ticket solved by your team has all the data captured that you’ll need in order to produce reliable custom Explore reports.

‍Bulk Adding Fields

If you’re just starting out adding Conditional Fields to your Zendesk environment, it’s likely that you’ll need to add dozens if not hundreds of rules. In this case, make use of the “Add another” checkbox as it will save your new rule and open up a new conditional rule dialogue box with the first field already populated for you, saving you a fair chunk of time.

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Result

Save your changes, head over to the Agent Interface (refresh if you already had it open) and you should see something like this.

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As you can see, now, when we select Something Else as the Category, the conditional field Something Else appears, housing our further options to record which subcategory of Something Else applies to the ticket.

The final job, of course, is to go through and add conditional rules for not only all the other Categories, but also child conditional fields (e.g. Levels 2 and 3 in the example table of hierarchies).

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Summary

Conditional Fields allow Zendesk admins to gather as much information as possible from agents and end-users alike, all while providing a clean and slick UI that asks the exact right question and the exact right time. It can take hours to properly set up and test a new Conditional Field form but, once done, the results will be well worth it.