Ever found yourself in a situation where support tickets are flooding in, and you’re scrambling to figure out why?
Maybe you’re trying to get a clear view of how many customers reached out about a specific product, but your Zendesk reports just aren’t giving you the full picture.
And wouldn’t it be great if tickets could automatically land in the right team’s queue based on the information customers share in the contact form?
That’s where Zendesk ticket fields come to the rescue.
So, what are Zendesk ticket fields, you ask?
Zendesk ticket fields store crucial details about your support tickets, like the issue category, product involved, order information, or customer details. These fields can be customer-facing (appearing in your contact form) or internal for agents to fill out while working on a ticket.
Zendesk provides some standard ticket fields — like requester, assignee, and status — but you can create additional custom fields to capture the exact data you need. With the right setup, you can automatically route tickets, help agents resolve issues faster, and pull actionable insights from your reports.
For example, in ecommerce, you could create custom fields to ask for contact details, contact reason, and order number in your contact form:
If a customer submits a ticket with “Refund” as the contact reason and order number 12345, the ticket gets tagged with a “refund” tag and can be automatically routed to the refund team.
The agent can then immediately help with the specific order—with no need for back-and-forth just to get the order number.
When you analyze ticket volume, you’ll see exactly how many tickets are related to refunds based on tags, and if they make up an unexpectedly large portion, you can consider refining your processes.
But as powerful as this feature is, there’s a catch — if ticket fields are set up poorly, they can frustrate both customers and agents, slowing down resolution times and complicating the customer journey.
In this article, we’ll go over the best practices that will help you optimize your Zendesk ticket fields and avoid unnecessary headaches.
5 best practices for setting up and using Zendesk ticket fields
Here are five tips to help you configure Zendesk ticket fields efficiently and optimize your support workflows.
Cut what’s not necessary.
When setting up your Zendesk ticket fields, start by asking yourself: what data will help you make actionable decisions?
Every field you add creates more work for your support agents and can introduce friction for customers filling out your contact form. If you’re not going to use that data to make critical decisions or improve processes, it’s probably unnecessary. And unnecessary fields lead to a lose-lose situation with more steps for your agents, more frustration for your customers, and no real benefit.
Focus on fields that will help you extract meaningful insights or streamline business operations.
For example, do you really need customers to enter their country just to contact your team? Or do agents need to manually copy and paste customer feedback into a dedicated field when you could easily automate that with tags?
On the other hand, details like customer email, contact reason, order number, and browser version can improve resolution times and provide insights for business decisions.
Where possible, keep fields internal. After all, we’ve all been there — trying to contact a company but faced with a multi-page form asking for a ton of information. It’s frustrating, right? The simpler, the better for your customers.
And ideally, you’ll determine what fields you need from the start. Removing a custom field later in Zendesk has a downside: the data linked to that field won’t be preserved in existing tickets, including closed ones. So, plan carefully to avoid losing information down the line.
Choose the right ticket field type.
Selecting the right ticket field type is essential to keep your Zendesk setup both efficient and user-friendly. Here are the most common field types to choose from:
Text: useful for capturing short notes like customer names or order numbers.
Multi-line: ideal for longer inputs, such as detailed product feedback.
Drop-down: great for attributes with predefined options, for example selecting a product or issue category.
Multi-select: allows users to choose multiple options, for example, tagging tickets with various relevant topics.
Checkbox: perfect for simple yes/no questions, such as marking escalated tickets.
Numeric: useful for capturing numerical data, like bulk order volumes or order totals.
Date: designed for storing important dates like the last phone call or the next follow-up. (Pro tip: you can use date field values to set reminders for follow-up actions.)
Whenever possible, opt for predefined response options using drop-downs, multi-select, or checkbox fields. These fields automatically apply tags to tickets based on the selected value, which you can use to route tickets or generate reports. The best part? These tags persist even if you delete the field or option later on.
For example, imagine you have a drop-down list in your ticket form for customers to select the product they need help with. If you stop supporting one of those products and remove it from the list, the product name will remain in existing tickets as a tag. However, if you used a simple text field to capture product IDs and deleted the field or product options later, the information from past tickets would be lost.
Another advantage of using fields with predefined options is that they streamline reporting and save time. Agents or customers can select from a list with one click, rather than manually typing answers. It helps standardize data entry and makes reporting more accurate and consistent.
Take the example of refund reasons: if agents are manually typing different versions of the same reason, like “order refund” and “refund for return”, it can be hard to track how many refunds were issued for specific reasons like returns vs. damaged products. Creating a drop-down field to track refund reasons with predefined options ensures agents can quickly select the right option and makes reporting a breeze.
One thing to keep in mind when using drop-downs is that options should be as clear and concise as possible — long-winded options can display poorly confusing your customers and agents.
Set required fields for crucial details.
Some ticket fields should be required, while others can remain optional. Required fields ensure you collect essential data every time, especially for reporting and decision-making, while optional fields allow customers or agents to provide extra details that could help but aren’t always necessary.
For example, I used to work with a support team handling cancellation requests where agents were supposed to log the reason for each cancellation in a ticket field. However, the field was mistakenly set as optional. Analyzing the data, I found that over 30% of cancellation tickets didn’t have any reason assigned, meaning the company was missing out on valuable insights.
Once we identified this problem and made the field required, suddenly, the business had much more reliable and actionable data to work with.
Zendesk offers two key types of required fields:
Required to solve a ticket. This means a ticket cannot be marked as solved unless the field is populated. This is useful for internal data you want to capture during the support process, e.g. agents logging a resolution type before closing a case.
Required to submit a request. This ensures that customers or end-users cannot create a ticket without filling in this field, which is ideal for gathering key information upfront, like a customer’s order number or contact reason.
Keep in mind, though, that ticket form conditions, triggers, and automations can override these settings. So, make sure to check how your required fields interact with the rest of your account setup to avoid bottlenecks.
Route tickets based on ticket field values.
Ticket fields aren’t just for collecting data — they can also help make your support process faster and more efficient by automatically routing requests to the right user group or agent.
Drop-down, multi-select, and checkbox fields generate tags that can be used in Zendesk triggers, automations, and views. With drop-down and multi-select fields, ticket tags are automatically created based on the options you set when building the field. For checkboxes, you’re able to add a ticket tag when the box is checked.
One of the most effective ways to leverage these tags is through Zendesk triggers. Triggers are rules you set up to automate actions, like assigning a ticket to a specific agent or user group based on available ticket information like the category of the issue or the support channel.
For example, if a customer selects “Refund” in the “What can we help with?” drop-down field on your contact form, the system will apply the refund tag to their support ticket. And using triggers, you can automatically assign this ticket to the Billing team.
This type of automated routing ensures tickets get to the right people without any manual work, reducing customer wait times and helping your support team work more efficiently.
Automate what you can.
Setting up your ticket fields is just the beginning — true efficiency comes when you automate filling in those fields.
By automating routine tasks, you can streamline your operations, reduce human error, and free up your agents to focus on solving customer problems instead of manual data entry.
Here are some ideas for you to get started:
Automatically capture browser information. For less tech-savvy users, identifying their browser version can be a challenge. By automatically recognizing the browser version when customers submit tickets via your contact form, you can eliminate that step entirely. It’s a bit tricky to set up, but valuable. Here’s a guide to help.
Use Voice of Customer (VoC) tools to automatically analyze customer intent and apply tags. This way you can categorize tickets and understand what types of issues drive your ticket volume without needing your agents or customers to do it manually.
Use tools like Swifteq’s Ticket Parser Autofill app to create parsing rules and automatically extract key details—like order numbers, customer names, or product details— from ticket comments. This way, instead of relying on agents (or customers) to manually fill out fields, the app does it for you, speeding up ticket processing, reducing errors, and making your support team more efficient.
Streamline your support workflow
Properly configuring and auto-filling Zendesk ticket fields is just one way to enhance your support processes. But there are many more possibilities.
With Swifteq’s automation apps, you can effortlessly merge tickets, translate messages, and handle other routine tasks — allowing your team to focus on what truly matters: providing exceptional customer service.
Ready to take your customer support to the next level? Book a free demo today to discover how Swifteq can streamline your operations and help you deliver outstanding chat support.
Maryna Paryvai
Maryna is a results-driven CX executive passionate about efficient and human-centric customer support. She firmly believes that exceptional customer experiences lie at the heart of every successful business.