Understanding approvals and how they work

Approvals are requests that agents make on behalf of other agents and end users. Agents send requests to approvers. Approvers are other agents or end users who have the authority to review the request information and make a decision.


What's my plan?







Customer Service Suite

Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus










Employee Service Suite

Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus








Verified AI summary ◀▼


Approvals streamline ticket workflows by allowing you to request decisions
from authorized agents or end users. This feature enhances efficiency,
compliance, and quality control while providing transparency on request
status. You can use approvals for tasks like software access, refunds,
or employee changes. Track decisions with the approval status field.





Approvals are requests that agents make on behalf of other agents and end users.
Agents send requests to approvers. Approvers are other agents or end users
who have the authority to review the request information and make a
decision.
Incorporating approvals into your ticket workflow can:
Increase agent efficiency by removing the need for
manual interventions or dependence on external
applications.
Ensure compliance by recording approval decisions
within Zendesk to ensure adherence to your organization’s
compliance policies.
Maintain quality control by adding an approval step
into your organization’s standard operating procedures.
Provide transparency on the approval request's status to the
approval requester, approver, and the assignee of the
associated ticket.


This article provides an overview of approvals and how they work in Zendesk. It
describes who can make approval requests, who can approve requests, and
examples of how approvals are used in both customer service and employee
service cases.
This article contains the following topics:

About the
approval request process
Understanding
who makes requests and who approves requests
Approval request
examples
Reporting on approval requests
Approval request resources



Considerations for approval requests

Before using approval requests, consider the following limitations:
A ticket can have a maximum of one active approval
request at a time.
A ticket can have a maximum of 50 inactive approval
requests. When this limit is reached, no new
approval requests can be created for the
ticket.
Agent approvers can respond to approval requests with a
comment. Each approval request can have a maximum of
40 comments, and each comment on an approval request
can be a maximum of 500 characters.
For accounts that have more than one ticket form, the
approval status field must be manually added to ticket
forms.
For end users to be able to access approval requests
assigned to them, your help center must be on the
latest version of the standard Copenhagen theme or
you must manually update
your custom theme.
Approval requests can't be exposed to end users in
accounts with more than one help center. However, it's still possible to select them as an approver. If
you turn on approvals while you have multiple help
centers, train your agents to avoid assigning
approval requests to end users.
On Growth and Professional plans, admins and agents
automatically have permission to create approval
requests. On Enterprise and Enterprise Plus plans,
admins and any custom roles created after approvals
is turned on have permission to create approval
requests by default. However, existing custom roles
when approvals is turned on won't have permission to
create approval requests until the role's
permissions are updated to select Create approval
requests. See Permissions that
agents in custom roles can have.
Approval requests can be created through the Approval Requests
API regardless of whether agents are
allowed to manually create approval requests.
API-created approval requests can be withdrawn by
admins and some agents, depending on their
permissions. Approval requests created by the API
have a Sent by value of API.





Understanding the approval request lifecycle

The main steps of the approval request process consist of the
following:

An agent creates an approval
request from a ticket in the Agent Workspace.
Within the request, the agent designates another agent or an
end user as the approver. After an approval request is
created, the ticket associated with it can't be
closed until the approver responds or the request is
withdrawn.

The approver receives an email notification that they
have an approval request to review.
The approver then responds to the
request by approving or denying. Agent
approvers also have the option to respond with a comment.
Agent approvers respond to approval requests in
the Agent Workspace. End user-approvers must respond
to requests from the help center.

The agent who created the approval request receives the
approver’s response.

The image below illustrates an overview of the approvals workflow:


Note: It's also
possible for the agent who requested the approval and the
agent assigned to the ticket to withdraw an approval request
prior to the approver responding to it.




Understanding who makes requests and who approves requests

Approval requests are always created by agents. Typically,
agents submit approval requests on behalf of other agents and end
users when a ticket assigned to them requires approval from someone
else. For example, tickets requesting access to software or tickets
requesting refunds beyond a certain threshold. When the agent creates requests on
tickets they’re working on from the Agent Workspace and sends them
to approvers.
Approvers are users who have the authority to review approval
request information and make a decision. They respond to approval
requests, but are not solving the ticket. Both agents and end users
can be approvers.

On Zendesk Employee Service Suite Growth plans and
above, all agents and end users are employees of the same
organization. In this context, agents are employees with an
agent seat and can access the Agent Workspace in Zendesk
Support to respond to approvals. End users, or employees
without an agent seat, have access to your organization's
internal help center where they can respond to
approvals.
On Customer Service Suite Professional plans and
above, agents respond to approval requests from the Agent
Workspace. In this context, end users are the requesters and
are generally not part of the same organization as the
agent. However, both agents and end users can still be
approvers, with agents responding to requests in the Agent
Workspace and end users responding through the help
center.

See Responding to an approval
request to learn more.

Note: For end users to be able to respond to approval requests in your help
center, you must update its theme. See Updating your theme with EAP
features.



Approval request examples

Depending on how your organization uses Zendesk, you can use approvals
for both customer service and employee service needs.
Some examples of how you may want to use approvals include:

Software and hardware procurement and
access
Employee promotions or job changes
Long-term leave requests
Payroll issues
Refunds

For example, say your organization uses the Employee Service Suite. A new employee in your
company needs access to software and submits a service
request through the service catalog. An employee with
an agent seat can create an approval request associated with the
service request's ticket on behalf of the new employee in the Agent
Workspace and send it to an approver for review. In this example,
the approver could be the new employee’s manager or another employee
in your IT department. The other employee may or may not have an
agent seat.
Alternatively, if your organization uses the Customer Service Suite, you
can request approvals to resolve customer service tickets. For
example, an agent has been assigned a ticket requesting a refund.
They need authorization to proceed with the end user's refund, so
the agent creates an approval request and sends it to an approver in
your organization, such as the agent's team lead.
In all of the examples above, the approval decisions are tracked in the
approval request on the ticket and in the ticket events so that
you can keep track of approvals in your organization.




Reporting on approval requests

When approval requests are turned on for an account, a new ticket field
is created: Approval status. This field automatically
reflects the status of an approval request associated with the
ticket and can be used in Explore reporting. See Reporting with custom
fields.



Approval request resources

To learn more about turning on and using approval requests, see:
Turning approval
requests on and off
Creating approval
requests
Viewing and
withdrawing approval requests
Responding to an
approval request as an agent
Responding to
approval requests as an end user




{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "TechArticle",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8481179038490-Understanding-approvals-and-how-they-work",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8481179038490-Understanding-approvals-and-how-they-work",
"headline": "Understanding approvals and how they work",
"description": "You can use approval requests to manage and track authorization processes within ticket workflows by designating approvers who review and respond to requests, ensuring compliance and quality control in service operations.",
"articleSection": "Ticket management",
"datePublished": "2024-12-03T23:38:03+00:00",
"dateModified": "2026-03-17T18:14:24.425540+00:00",
"inLanguage": "en-US",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8481179038490-Understanding-approvals-and-how-they-work"
},
"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"