Building an employee service catalog with Zendesk


The service catalog is a built-in feature of the Zendesk help center that lets employees submit service requests to internal teams like HR and IT.


What's my plan?







All Suites

Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus







Summary: ◀▼
You can create an employee service catalog to let employees request items like laptops through the help center. Add catalog items with descriptions, customize request forms with fields like justification, and set triggers to assign requests to the right team. Publish items for employee access and track requests. Extend the catalog with categories or custom implementations using the Service Catalog Items API.




The service catalog is a built-in feature of the Zendesk help center that lets employees
submit service requests to internal teams like HR and IT.
Here's an overview of how the service catalog works:


Zendesk admins populate the service catalog with services and assets that employees
commonly request, such as company laptops or leaves of absence.
Employees access and browse the catalog items in the help center.
If an employee wants to request a catalog item, they click it, complete a custom request
form, and submit the request.
The request becomes a ticket that can be assigned to the appropriate internal team to
fulfill.


This worfklow recipe shows you how to create a simple service catalog for employees.
Topics covered in this article:

Workflow goal
Who can use the service catalog?
Turning on the service catalog in your account
Adding items to the service catalog
Adding a custom ticket field to the laptop request forms
Assigning laptop requests to the IT team
Publishing the catalog items
Testing the employee experience
Extending the service catalog

Disclaimer: Zendesk provides this workflow article for instructional and testing
purposes only. It is not meant as an authoritive guide for creating a production-ready service
catalog.


Workflow goal

As an IT manager in a software development company, you are tasked with creating a service
catalog for employees for requesting work laptops.
The IT department stocks three types of laptops: a standard MacBook Air laptop for most
employees, an engineering-spec MacBook Pro for software developers, and a Dell XPS laptop
for Windows-specific use cases.
The service catalog should let employees request a new laptop using the help center:

After selecting an item, the employee must provide a justification for the request, such as
"New hire", "3-year refresh", or "Replacement for stolen or damaged":

After the employee submits the request, the ticket should be assigned to the IT team for
approval and fulfilment:




Who can use the service catalog?

The service catalog is available in all Zendesk plans except the Team plan. In addition,
your help center theme must support the service catalog. The service
catalog is supported in standard help center themes and themes that were customized after
July 31, 2025. If your help center uses a custom theme that was customized before July 31,
2025, you can update your custom theme to support the service
catalog.
For more information, see Considerations for using the service catalog.



Turning on the service catalog in your account

By default, the service catalog is not activated in Zendesk accounts. Zendesk admins must
turn it on.
The service catalog becomes visible in the help center the moment your turn it on. This
could be a problem if there's a long delay between turning it on and adding your first
catalog items. You might want to prepare to add your first items after turning on the
catalog by gathering all the approvals, item information, and knowledge you need.
To turn on the service catalog

In Knowledge admin, click Settings ( ) in the sidebar.
Under Service catalog, select Turn on service catalog.

Click Update.

After turning on the service catalog, the service catalog icon is added to the Knowledge
admin sidebar ( ). You can click this icon to create and manage service
catalog items.
For more information, see Turning the service catalog on and off.



Adding items to the service catalog

After turning on your service catalog, you can start adding items to it. For this workflow
recipe, you'll add three work laptops for employees.

To add the work laptops to the service catalog
In Knowledge admin, click Service catalog
( ) in the sidebar.
Click Create Service.
Add the following title and description for the first item: Title:

Standard laptop

Description:
13" MacBook Air configured as follows:

- 16GB unified memory
- 512GB SSD storage
- 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display

This is the title and description of the item that employees see in the service
catalog. You can use the editor toolbar to add bullets and format the text.
Click Save draft. The item won't be visible to employees until you click
Publish from the Save draft menu.
Repeat the process to add two other laptops,
as follows.

Click the Service catalog icon ( ) in the sidebar to go back to the start and create
a second catalog item with the following title and description: Title:

Engineering-spec laptop

Description:
16" MacBook Pro configured as follows:

- 32GB unified memory
- 1 TB SSD storage
- 16-inch Liquid Retina XDR display


Click the Service catalog icon ( ) in the sidebar and create a third catalog item
with the following title and description: Title:

Windows laptop

Description:
16" Dell XPS laptop configured as follows:

- 32 GB RAM
- 1 TB SSD storage
- 16.3-inch 2K display







Adding a custom ticket field to the laptop request forms

Creating a service catalog item automatically creates a ticket form to go with the item.
You can add custom ticket fields to the ticket form so that employees can provide more
details in the ticket about their request.
For laptop requests, the fields could include Need by date and Justification.
For simplicity, this recipe only includes the justification field that employees use to
specify the reason for the laptop request, such as replacing a laptop that was damaged or
stolen.
Because each type of laptop is added as a separate item in the catalog, separate ticket
forms are also created for each laptop. However, you can add the "Justification" ticket
field to all the laptop ticket forms. This is designed to give you maximum flexibility. For
example, your IT catalog might also include other hardware like keyboards and external
monitors. These items might not need a justification field, or the keyboard item might need
an ergonomic option field while the external monitor would not.
To add a justification field to the laptops, start by creating the ticket field, then add
the field to the laptop request forms in the service catalog.


Creating the justification custom ticket field


To create the justification custom ticket field


In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Tickets > Fields.
Click Add field.
On the Add field page, select the Text field. For simplicity, add a text
field instead of a dropdown menu.

Under Name and Display name, enter Justification.
For Description, enter Reason for the request.
Under Permissions, select Customers can edit.
Then configure the following customer-facing properties for the field:
Set the Title shown to customers to Justification.
Set the Description shown to customers to Enter the reason for
the request.



Click Save.

For more information, see Adding custom ticket fields to your tickets and forms.



Adding the justification custom ticket field to the laptop request forms

After creating the justification field, you can add it to the three laptop ticket forms.

To add the field to the laptop ticket forms
In Knowledge admin, click Service catalog
( ) in the sidebar.
Click the name of the Standard laptop item to edit it.
At the bottom of the page, click Add field and select Fields. A list
of your ticket fields appears in the sidebar.


Next to the Justification field, click the add icon (+) to add the field to
the standard laptop's service request form.
Repeat the procedure to add the justification field to the other laptops in your
service catalog.






Assigning laptop requests to the IT team

When an employee submits a request from the service catalog, the ticket should be assigned
automatically to the IT team. You can set up this automatic workflow with a ticket trigger
that routes tickets created with any of the laptop ticket forms to the IT group. To do this,
your IT team members must be agents in Zendesk and members of a group.


Creating a Zendesk group to handle service catalog requests


Note: This article assumes you have a regular Zendesk Suite plan. However, the Employee
Services Suite plan provides two IT groups by default: IT hardware support and
IT software support. If you prefer, you can use the IT hardware support
group for the rest of the article and skip this section.
Create a Zendesk group consisting of IT team members who can review and fulfill the
requests.
To create an IT group

In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Team > Groups.
Click Add Group.
For the Group name, enter IT team.
For the Description, enter Review and fulfill hardware requests.
Use the Team members panel to add your IT team members to the group.
Click Save.

For more information, see Creating groups.



Creating a trigger to assign laptop requests to the IT team group

Next, create a ticket trigger that automatically assigns tickets created with any laptop
ticket form to the IT team group.
A trigger consists of one or more conditions that cause the trigger to fire, and one or
more actions the trigger will perform when it fires. To assign laptop requests to the IT
team group, the behavior of the new trigger should be as follows:

The trigger should fire when a ticket is created with any one of the three laptop
service catalog forms.

The trigger's action should be to assign the ticket to the IT group.


To create the trigger

In Admin Center, click
Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Business rules >
Triggers.
Click Create trigger.
Set the Name to Service catalog tickets.
Under Description, enter Assign service catalog ticket to the IT team.
Under Conditions > Meet ALL of the following conditions, add the
following condition:
Ticket > Ticket | Is | Created


Under Meet ANY of the following conditions, add the following conditions:
Ticket > Service catalog form | Is | Standard laptop
Ticket > Service catalog form | Is | Engineering-spec laptop
Ticket > Service catalog form | Is | Windows laptop


Under Actions, define the following action:
Ticket > Group | IT team


Click Create trigger.

The conditions and action of your trigger should look as follows:

For more information, see Creating ticket triggers for automatic ticket updates and
notifications.




Publishing the catalog items

When adding items to catalog, employees can't see them in the help center yet because their
status is set to Draft by default:

When you're satisfied with your workflow setup and with the items in your catalog, you can
publish the items so employees can start using the service catalog to request laptops from
the IT department.

To publish the catalog items
In Knowledge admin, click Service catalog
( ) in the sidebar.
For each laptop in the list, click the item name to open the service item.
At the bottom of the page, click the arrow next to Save draft and select
Publish.


The items are now visible in the service catalog in your help center. Employees can browse
them and submit requests.



Testing the employee experience

Go to your help center and click the Services link in the top toolbar.

The service catalog appears:

Click one of the laptops, enter a justification for the request, and click the Submit
request button to submit the request.

After entering a justification and submitting the request, a ticket is created and assigned
to the IT team group.

A member of the group can open the ticket to review and fulfill it.

You can track the status of your request on your Requests page in the help center:




Extending the service catalog

Here are ideas for extending your service catalog:


Use categories to expand your catalog. For example, you could create an IT category
and an HR category. The HR category might contain leave-of-absence requests
(maternity/paternity, sabbatical, and medical) and other categories of requests.
Categories can be nested up to 5 layers deep. For more information, see Creating and managing categories for your service
catalog.
By default, employees can browse and request items from the service catalog in the
help center. You could also build your own custom implementation using the Service Catalog Items API. Building a custom
service catalog is useful if you want to host the catalog on an internal website such as
your company's IT site. For a hands-on tutorial, see Building a custom employee service catalog with
Zendesk in the developer docs.
Bookmark and share the docs with other internal teams interested in learning about and using
the service catalog:
Turning the service catalog on and off
Adding services to your service catalog
Accessing the service catalog
Submitting a service request
Editing and managing services in your service
catalog
Creating and managing categories for your service
catalog

Building a custom employee service catalog
in the developer documentation

Service Catalog Items API in the developer
documentation






{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "TechArticle",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/10464506112026-Building-an-employee-service-catalog-with-Zendesk",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/10464506112026-Building-an-employee-service-catalog-with-Zendesk",
"headline": "Building an employee service catalog with Zendesk",
"description": "You can create and manage an employee service catalog in the help center to allow employees to submit service requests for items like laptops, with requests routed to the appropriate internal team for fulfillment.",
"articleSection": "Workflow best practices and recipes",
"datePublished": "2026-03-24T20:47:27+00:00",
"dateModified": "2026-04-13T20:03:02.987001+00:00",
"inLanguage": "en-US",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/10464506112026-Building-an-employee-service-catalog-with-Zendesk"
},
"author": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk",
"url": "https://www.zendesk.com"
},
"publisher": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Zendesk"
},
"isPartOf": {
"@type": "WebSite",
"name": "Zendesk Help",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us"
},
"about": {
"@type": "SoftwareApplication",
"name": "Zendesk"
}
}
//
const ai_summary_style = document.createElement('style');
ai_summary_style.innerHTML = `#styled-article-body{padding:0 0 0}#article-body #docs-ai-summary{background-color:#f3f3f3;border:1px solid #d3d3d3;padding:10px 10px 6px;margin-bottom:16px}#article-body #docs-ai-summary #docs-ai-summary-toggle{font-size:.9em;font-weight:700;margin-bottom:4px;cursor:pointer;display:flex;justify-content:space-between;align-items:center}#article-body #docs-ai-summary #docs-ai-summary-toggle #up-triangle{margin-left:auto;padding-right:10px;display:none}#article-body #docs-ai-summary #docs-ai-summary-toggle #down-triangle{margin-left:auto;padding-right:10px}#article-body #docs-ai-summary #docs-ai-summary-content{font-size:.9em;padding-left:25px;padding-right:25px;margin-bottom:12px}`;
document.head.appendChild(ai_summary_style);

const toggleAISummary = () => {
const summary = document.getElementById("docs-ai-summary-content");
const upTriangle = document.getElementById("up-triangle");
const downTriangle = document.getElementById("down-triangle");
if (summary.style.display === "none") {
summary.style.display = "block";
upTriangle.style.display = "none";
downTriangle.style.display = "inline";
} else {
summary.style.display = "none";
upTriangle.style.display = "inline";
downTriangle.style.display = "none";
}
};

document.getElementById("docs-ai-summary-toggle").addEventListener("click", toggleAISummary);
//

