Custom fields for users and organisations

Users and organisations take custom fields too, and that is often the simplest place for information about a customer.

Users and organisations take custom fields too, and that is often the simplest place for information about a customer.

Create one

1. Open Admin Center, then People > Configuration > User fields, or Organization fields for the other kind. They are two separate pages.
2. Add a field, pick its type and set the permission.
3. Save.

It appears on every user or organisation, and agents can fill it in from their profile.

Where to put a piece of information

• On the organisation when it is true of the whole company: contract tier, account manager, region.
• On the user when it is true of the person: their role at the customer, a preference.
• On the ticket when it is true of this conversation only.

Getting this right removes a great deal of repetition. Contract tier on the organisation is entered once; on the ticket it has to be right every time.

Rules can read them

Triggers, views and SLAs can all condition on user and organisation fields. That is how a premium customer gets different treatment without anyone remembering, and it is usually simpler than a custom object for something this shape.

Visible to customers or not

Fields have a permission like ticket fields do. An internal note about an account should not be readable by the customer in their profile, and that is a setting rather than a convention.

On Enterprise there is a second layer, between agents rather than towards customers. A user field is either visible to all roles or assigned per role, and editing end user fields at all needs the Manage user fields permission on the agent's role. Organisations split it further: Add, update, and delete organizations lets somebody change values on an organisation, while Manage organization fields lets them design the fields. Those are different jobs and it is worth giving them to different people.

Fields or tags

A field for something with a value, a tag for something that is true. Contract tier is a field. Being a beta participant is a tag.

See also

• Tags on users and organisations
• Custom fields on users and organisations
• When to use a custom object and when a ticket field