Recipe: Using an About field to identify common issues

It's probably no surprise that the Zendesk Customer Support team has a fairly big and built-out instance of Zendesk. Our instance includes hundreds of agents, business rules, macros, custom fields, tags, and organizations.

For a complex, high-volume instance, an About field can be a critical part of the instance. It's a custom drop-down ticket field that agents can use to categorize tickets based on subject. When we first built our About field at Zendesk, the drop-down contained over 200 values, covering everything from authentication to messaging.

Even if you are closer to ticket #10 than ticket #1000000, you should consider adding a basic drop-down About ticket field. If you start categorizing your tickets now, you'll have incredibly useful data to when it’s time to look back.

Tip: At Zendesk, we've replaced our about About field with the intent field, which provides an AI-powered prediction for what a ticket is about. Intent is part of intelligent triage in the Copilot add-on. If you have the add-on, you might consider this.

This article contains the following topics:

Creating the About field

Tracking issues based on the About field

Watch the following video for a tutorial on creating a custom About field:

How to create a custom ticket field (4:05)

Creating the About field

Start by creating the About field, making sure to carefully organize your drop-down options.

To create an About field

In Admin Center, click  Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Fields.

Click Add field.

Select Drop-down as the field type, then start adding values.
Use double colons to separate out the different levels, if need. For example, Billing::Refunds, Billing::Invoices will first give you the option to select Billing and then give you the related child options.

Select Required to solve a ticket so that agents have to fill it out before setting a ticket to solved.
About data will be more useful if it's applied to every ticket.

(Enterprise only) If you have multiple ticket forms, you need to add the About field to the ticket forms where you want it field to appear.

Click Save.

If you need more information about any of the options when you're creating your field, see Adding custom ticket fields to your tickets and forms.

Tracking issues based on the About field

You can create use reports and business rules to identify and track common issues based on your About field:

Reports. Once you’ve solved a bunch of tickets using the About field, you can report on your custom About field.

Macros. You can create macros for specific subjects based on common issues you're seeing in the About fields. Don't forget to add the related About field value as a macro action to ensure consistent and complete data.

Triggers and views. Each option in your drop-down field has an associated tag that you can use to create create triggers and views based on the About field.