Working with ticket tags

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Tags are words, or combinations of words, you can use to add more context to tickets (see About tags). Depending on your support workflow, you might want to add tags to provide more context for the request so that tickets can be viewed and tracked, or processed by your account's business rules.

Agents can add or remove tags in tickets, create views based on ticket tags, and search for tickets by tags. Agents in custom roles can add and remove tags only if their custom role allows it.

This article contains the following sections:

Adding tags to tickets

Deleting tags from tickets

Creating views based on ticket tags

Searching for tickets by tags

Adding tags to tickets

Agents can manually add tags to tickets to add more context. Agents in custom roles can add and remove tags only if their custom role allows it.

Tip: Avoid manually adding tags for common words, such as 'and' and 'the.' These words will generate a high number of tags in your tickets, making automatic tagging a much less useful tool. If you've already created common words as tags, you can delete them.

The following video gives you an overview of how to add tags to your tickets:

Adding tags to tickets [0:54]

To add tags to a ticket

Create or edit a ticket.

Enter new tags, separated by a space, in Tags.
As you type the tag, note the following:

If the tag you are typing does not exist, it will be created when you press Enter.

If the tag you are typing exists, autocomplete displays suggested tags you can choose from.
For example, if you begin typing cust, the tags vip_customer and customer_feedback will show up; however, locust_street will not.

Note: If an existing tag hasn't been used in a ticket for 60 days, then it won't appear in the suggested tags list.

You can use only alphanumeric, dash, underscore, colon, and the forward slash characters.

You can't use special characters, such as #, @, or ! in tags.
If you try to add tags with special characters, they disappear when the ticket is updated.

Zendesk supports UTF-8 (Unicode). All languages supported by Zendesk can be added to tags.

You can create a tag with more than one word if the words are connected with an underscore, dash, or forward slash character.
Zendesk recommends being consistent with the character you use to connect multiple words in tags. Multiple words connected with an underscore will be treated as a different tag from the same words connected by a dash or forward slash. For example, a trigger that's configured to work on a ticket with a customer_refund tag will not work on ticket with a customer-refund or customer/refund tag unless all three tags are added to the trigger condition. They have to be an exact match.

There's no limit on the number of tags for a ticket, but there is a limit on the total number of characters in the Tags field.
This field supports up to 5096 characters. After you reach this limit, you will no longer be able to add more tags. None of your existing tags will be automatically removed.

Click Submit to create or update the ticket.
The tags are added to the ticket.

Note: It takes up to 24 hours for tags to appear in the tag cloud and for the tag autofill feature to take effect.

Deleting tags from tickets

Agents can delete tags on one ticket at a time. To delete tags that have been applied to many tickets, you need Admin permission. See Deleting a tag and removing it from all non-closed tickets.

Deleting a tag from a ticket only removes the tag from that ticket; the tag will still appear on other tickets and in your account as a suggestion. If a tag hasn't been used for 60 days, it no longer appears as a suggestion.

To delete tags from a ticket

Open a non-closed ticket. You cannot delete tags from closed tickets.

In the Tags field of the ticket, click the close box (x) for the tags you want to delete. The tag is removed from the ticket.

Creating views based on ticket tags

You can add tags as conditions in views, which enables you to quickly view all tickets that contain specific tags. Agents can create personal views for their own use. Admins can create shared views. You can also view all tickets where a tag is applied.

To create views by tags

In Admin Center, click Workspaces in the sidebar, then select Agent tools > Views.

Create a new view, or open an existing view for editing.

Add a Tags condition.

Choose the condition operator Contains at least one of the following.

Enter one or more tags (separated with a space).

Add any other conditions that you'd like (for example, adding a condition for open tickets).

Set the view formatting options as needed.

Click Add View.

Your new view is listed in the Views menu in Zendesk Support.

Searching for tickets by tags

You can search for tags contained in tickets and forum articles. Using the search box, enter the name of the tag and the search results will display all the tickets and forum articles that contain the tag.

You can further improve your search results for tags by using property keywords in your searches. For tags, the property keyword is called ‘tags’ and is used like this:
tags:installation

Your search results will contain only occurrences of the word ‘installation’ when used as a tag.

When searching for tags, you must use the exact tag string or your search will fail. For example. if you've got a multi-word tag called about_sales a search for sales will not return this tag. You need to search for the exact string: