What IT asset management in Zendesk does

Zendesk can track the laptops, phones and licences your organisation owns, and tie them to the tickets about them.

Zendesk can track the laptops, phones and licences your organisation owns, and tie them to the tickets about them.

What it holds

An asset is a thing you own and assign to someone: a laptop, a phone, a monitor, a software licence. Each has a type, a status, a location and whatever fields you define, and it can be linked to a user and to tickets.

Who it is for

Internal IT desks, above all. If your Zendesk answers questions from colleagues rather than customers, asset management turns "my laptop is broken" into a ticket that already knows which laptop.

It is not built for customer-facing support tracking products your customers bought. That is closer to a custom object.

What it changes in practice

• The agent sees the device on the ticket, with its history.
• Offboarding becomes checkable. Everything assigned to someone leaving is visible in one list.
• Repeat faults become visible. A device with four tickets against it is telling you something.
• You know what you have, which is usually the reason organisations start.

What it needs from you

An asset register is only worth having if it is accurate, and accuracy is a habit rather than a feature. Something has to keep it current when devices are issued and returned. Where nothing does, you get a register that was right in March and misleads everyone thereafter.

What you get without configuring anything

Switching it on creates four asset types for you: Hardware, Mobile, Desktop and Laptop. You can add your own types alongside them.

You do not need custom objects for this. Asset management is its own feature with its own record types, which is worth saying because the two look similar and people set up custom objects they did not need.

See also

• Turning on IT asset management
• Setting up asset types, fields, locations and statuses
• When to use a custom object and when a ticket field