Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Enterprise |
| Access | Admin |
A worked example: modelling the products you support as an object, so tickets say what they are about.
Why not a drop-down field
A drop-down of product names works until you want to know more than the name: which version, which team owns it, whether it is still sold, what the documentation link is.
At that point every ticket carries a name and the knowledge lives in someone's head. An object holds it once.
Build it
- Create a custom object Product. Set the Name field to Require unique record name, so two records cannot carry the same product name.
- Add the fields the catalogue needs. Zendesk's own recipe uses Category and Style as drop-downs, Description as multi-line, Active as a checkbox, Colors available and Sizes as multi-select, and a lookup to an article. Yours will differ; the shape does not.
- Import your product list.
- Add a ticket field of type Lookup relationship pointing at the object.
- Narrow what the picker offers with Add filter. A filter can compare an object field with a ticket field, for instance the object's Category against the ticket's own product category, or test a static value such as a tag.
- Add a card so agents see the details in the context panel.
Two numbers to design around. An object can carry five lookup fields on Team and Growth and ten from Professional up. On tickets you may create up to forty on the ticket fields page, with the plan number applying to each ticket form. Filters do not work when the related object is an article.
What it then enables
- Routing to the owning group, read from the record rather than a rule listing every product.
- Tickets per product in reporting, from a controlled list rather than free text.
- Retiring a product by clearing Active on the record, so history stays readable while the picker moves on.
- The right documentation link in front of the agent automatically.
Copy the name onto the ticket
Add a trigger writing the product name into a ticket field as well. Redundant, and it makes reporting straightforward and freezes what the ticket was about even if the product record changes later.
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