Zendesk glossary

Plan requirement

Subscription	Any plan
Access	Agent

The Zendesk words you will meet in your first month, in plain language, with the ones people confuse set side by side.

People

End user. A customer. Can submit and follow their own requests, nothing more.
Agent. A colleague who works on tickets.
Admin. An agent who can also change the configuration.
Light agent. A colleague who can read tickets and add internal notes but cannot reply to customers. Does not take a full agent seat.
Contributor. More limited again: sees only the tickets they are added to.
Account owner. One person per account, with rights nobody else has, including billing.
Organisation. A group of end users, normally one per customer company.
Group. A team of agents. Tickets are assigned to a group, an agent, or both.

Requester. The person the ticket is about.
Assignee. The agent responsible for it.
Submitter. Whoever created it, which is not always the requester.
CC. Someone kept in the loop by email.
Follower. An agent watching a ticket internally, invisible to the customer.
Public reply. Goes to the customer.
Internal note. Stays inside your team.
Side conversation. A separate thread off a ticket, for asking a colleague or supplier.
Follow-up ticket. The new ticket created when someone replies to a closed one.
Suspended ticket. Held back before it reaches your queue, usually as suspected spam.

Trigger. Runs the moment a ticket is created or updated.
Automation. Runs on a schedule, once an hour, based on time passing.
Macro. A set of changes an agent applies by hand.
View. A saved list of tickets matching conditions.
SLA. A promise about timing that Zendesk measures and flags.
Placeholder. A piece of text replaced with real data when a message is sent.
Tag. A label on a ticket, user or organisation that rules can act on.

These two	Differ in
Trigger and automation	When they run. A trigger fires on a change; an automation fires because time has passed.
Pending and on-hold	Who you are waiting for. Pending means the customer; on-hold means someone else.
CC and follower	Visibility. A CC is on the email; a follower is internal.
Label and content tag	Where they work. Labels help search find articles; content tags group them for readers.
Live chat and messaging	Persistence. A chat ends when the visitor leaves; a messaging conversation continues later.
Solved and closed	Whether it can reopen. Solved can; closed cannot, and produces a follow-up ticket instead.

Web Widget. The chat and help launcher you put on your website.
Help Center. Your public articles and request form.
Brand. A separate identity with its own help centre and email addresses.
User segment. A rule deciding which readers may see which articles.
Custom object. Your own kind of record, for data that is not a user, organisation or ticket.
Webhook. A message Zendesk sends to another system when something happens.
Sandbox. A copy of your account for testing changes safely.

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