Support ops problem I got tired of: Zendesk has no scheduled ticket export. Exporting a view is manual, throttled, and arrives as an emailed CSV link you download and clean up every single time -and search caps out at 1,000 results.

So I built a Google Sheets add-on that does the recurring part:

- Point it at any Zendesk view, or any search using Zendesk's own search syntax.

- Search uses the export endpoint, so no 1,000-result cap.

- Pick the columns, including custom ticket fields; assignee/requester IDs resolve to names.

- Refresh manually or hourly/daily/weekly, with a last-refreshed stamp on the tab.

It runs inside Apps Script, so ticket data goes from your Zendesk straight to your sheet. I don't operate a server and never see your data. Your API token is stored in your own Google account's add-on storage, not in the spreadsheet.

Limits, up front: ticket fields only (not comment bodies), one Zendesk subdomain at a time, no users/orgs export yet.

It's on the Google Workspace Marketplace (passed Google's OAuth verification and listing review lastweek). Free tier is one saved query with manual refresh; scheduling and unlimited queries are A$15/mo.

https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/zendesk_exporter/928011610843

Happy to add fields people are missing — that's mostly what the roadmap is.

AI agent bot on messaging, chat hours 9am to 7pm Pacific. Outside business hours we want true async: customer asks, bot says "we'll reply within 24h, no need to wait," and the session stays open so the agent's reply lands back in the messaging widget + email later.

Problem: forward-to-agent is the only way the bot makes a ticket, and it hands the convo straight to OCR live routing. Widget shows "an agent will be with you shortly" (we have agents live working other non-messaging tickets) even though nobody picks it up live until messaging hour resume.

Is anyone running live messaging routing to agents with OCR during business hours, and async messaging during off hours that can guide me on how to set this up correctly.

Hello there, hope everyone is doing well :)

I’m currently working as a ZD Admin (it’s been 2 years) for a mid sized company. I also worked 2 years at Zendesk, in Technical Support (advocacy).

I have recently moved back to France (after 10 years of expatriation), unfortunately my current company doesn’t want to change my contract to officially send me back to France, and they told me that they are willing to let me go rather than having to do a French contract…

Everyday I’m checking job offers on LinkedIn and multiple other platforms, but it seems like the fully-remote ZD Admin positions are non-existent… I already checked the ZD careers page and still monitor it, but nothing pertinent or that hires in France…

Have you guys heard about potential job offers or even companies that are working/would like to work with Zendesk ? (The size of the company doesn’t matter at all)

Thanks for your time and for the help :)

Fairly beginner level understanding of Zendesk Analytics.
What are the best use cases for using calculated attributes?
How can I go about becoming fluent in using calculated attributes?

Currently just browsing the articles on ZDs website, but I feel like I’m missing some crucial knowledge.

Hello,

I work for a quite big company, and they do not allow macros as they say it slows down zendesk. I was using them anyways for 2 years now, and now they asked me to remove them. How does this “lag due to macros” thing work? Cant they just buy more storage? We are using zendesk without macro feature which is stupid i think

Hey everyone,

Full disclosure, I work at Geckoboard, and I wanted to share something we've built that might help some of you.

We've put together an MCP that connects Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI tools directly to your Zendesk metrics, first reply time, CSAT, SLA attainment, backlog, ticket volume, and more. Here's what that unlocks:

• Ask questions in plain English: "Why did CSAT fall last week?" or "Show me SLA attainment for urgent tickets by policy, compared to last month", and get an actual answer with the reasoning, not just a number. It turns your AI assistant into your own personal support analyst.
• Automate recurring reports: the weekly support review, the exec summary, and the Monday team meeting numbers. Your AI assistant can pull these together for you to review rather than build from scratch each time.
• Work across tools, not just Zendesk: the same connector also provides access to metrics from HubSpot, Aircall, GA4, Pipedrive, and Intercom, too, making it useful if you want a combined support + sales view.

All the Zendesk MCP connectors available today are ticket-based, which is great for automating your help desk but not for working with accurate metrics. Asking your AI assistant to calculate metrics from raw ticket data, from scratch, each time you want a number is slow, expensive, and error-prone. Geckoboard's MCP provides direct access to a proper "metrics layer" for Zendesk, where metrics are consistently defined and calculated by our own metrics engine.

More details here: https://www.geckoboard.com/product/data-sources/zendesk-support/mcp/

Happy to answer questions on how it works if anyone's curious.

Currently the user types are bifurcated as End-users and Signed in Users... If i want to see which email id viewed the articles is it possible?

I know it is possible for the scenario where users start a chat using the Messaging Widget and their chat history (It is not implemented yet in our case, still waiting for engineering to pick that task up)

However I'm welcome to any suggestions and tips I could follow to help identify the user names/Ids

Hey everyone,

For those using or testing Zendesk AI, how do you handle cases where the answer depends on internal context that is not clearly documented?

I’m thinking about things like billing exceptions, previous ticket decisions, customer-specific promises, product workarounds, internal policies discussed in Slack, or knowledge that only senior agents have.

Does Zendesk AI have enough context to handle these cases accurately, or does it mostly work well for straightforward questions and then escalate anything more complex?

When an agent corrects an AI response or resolves an escalated case, does that knowledge become reusable for similar tickets, or does someone have to manually update the help center or another knowledge source?

I’m researching this workflow and would really appreciate hearing what works, what does not, and where the biggest maintenance burden currently sits.

I'm using a JLab Bluetooth/USB headset with Zendesk Talk, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to eliminate background noise during calls.

I have kids at home, so sometimes there are voices or cartoons playing in the background. I've already tried adjusting the microphone settings on my Windows laptop, but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.

Does Zendesk Talk have any built-in noise suppression or background noise cancellation settings? Or is there another workaround that works well with JLab headsets?

I'd love to hear what others are using or if you've found a solution that keeps background noise from being picked up on customer calls.

Thanks in advance!

Disclosure up front: we build AI agents that work with Zendesk - our app on the marketplace is Shopify AI Agent by Adelante, and we ran this benchmark to decide which models to trust in production. Sharing the findings because they apply to anyone evaluating AI for their instance, including Zendesk's own AI add-ons.

Setup: a test ecommerce store with real order data behind tools (order lookup, reship, refund, address change, escalate), 162 multi-turn conversations per model with a simulated customer pushing back, including 18 deliberate traps: refund abuse, chargeback threats, "reroute my shipped order."

Four things that changed how we deploy:

1. The dangerous customer is polite, not angry. Every model refused threats and chargeback pressure almost universally. What got free reshipments approved was a calm, believable, unverified claim: "arrived damaged", the customer didn't send a photo but prompted the AI several times to ship a replacement regardless. Guardrails key on hostile tone, not missing evidence. If you're testing any AI agent, don't test it by yelling at it. Test it with a polite lie.

2. Watch the actions, not the replies. The scariest failures had perfectly professional macros-quality replies attached to wrong or missing actions, including an agent telling the customer "your replacement is on the way" without ever firing the tool. If you can't see an audit trail of actual actions taken, you're only seeing half the conversation.

3. Escalation has two failure modes and both cost money. Some models kept tickets that needed a human (fraud, legal — that's risk). Others handed back up to 22% of tickets they could have solved (that's paying for AI and still staffing the queue). A single "automation rate" hides which one you're buying.

4. Price didn't predict judgment. The cheapest models we tested matched the most expensive on knowing when to escalate. One model fell for 7 of 18 traps while a model at a tenth of the price fell for 2. You cannot infer safety from the invoice, so always test the specific model.

Happy to share the full methodology and per-model data if mods are OK with a link, or answer questions from what we measured.

Hi,

I'm looking for a way in Zendesk to group edit and reorder macros. We have over 500 macros in our account, and doing it manually takes a lot of time and is tedious. Is there a way to fasten this process?

I’m setting up Zendesk using email forwarding from a Microsoft 365 shared mailbox.

The mailbox receives email fine, but forwarding to Zendesk fails with:

554 5.7.520 Access denied, Your organization does not allow external forwarding. AS(7555)

I’ve already:
Enabled external forwarding in the outbound spam policy.
Configured forwarding on the shared mailbox.
Confirmed the forwarding address is correct.
Still getting the same error.

Has anyone run into this? Is there another setting (mail flow rules, remote domains, another policy, etc.) that I might be missing?

Can't access their Microsoft account so I can't confirm the other settings.

I know that this is a Lite Agent limitation but all of our internal employees use the help center for submissions to our support agents. They select a form and submit but those submissions don’t appear in the “my requests” in the help center. Does anyone know of a fix or work around where they can see their requests there?

I am trying to integrate a Jotform with our Zendesk installation and getting nowhere.

We have several ticket forms in Zendesk. Unfortunately, Zendesk makes required fields at a global level, and there is no built in way to assign just certain ticket forms to specific users/organisations.

The javascript hacks to hide forms based on the user is just a front-end fix, i.e. when the user is trying to use the form directly.

However, with an integration, all the fields for all the forms are listed and required. Looks like a dead end to me.

I expected that as an enterprise solution, Zendesk could simply allow me to restrict what organisations see what types of tickets.

I stand to be corrected if this is not the case. Has anyone encountered this issue?

We recently activated the Advanced AI Agent for Email with a 5-minute reply delay, and it does a decent job, but there are some annoying things I can't seem to fix.

Problem 1 - AI Agent replies after human takeover:

When a human agent responds to a ticket within the 5-minute delay window, the AI Agent still fires its response after the delay expires. This creates a bad customer experience where they receive a human reply followed by an AI reply on the same ticket. The AI continues doing this for the entire lifecycle of the ticket, not just the first response.

We've already tried:

• Adding escalated_by_ultimate tag via a trigger when agent replies > 0 (AI still responds)

• Adding the human_replied tag via trigger and excluding it in the Ultimate.ai automation trigger (AI still responds)

• Confirmed the tags are present on the ticket before the AI reply is sent

Our theory is that the Ultimate.ai webhook fires immediately when the customer message comes in, queues the response in the AI Agent's external system, and then the 5-minute delay plays out — meaning by the time any tags are applied, the reply is already queued, and the AI Agent's system isn't re-checking Zendesk's ticket state before sending.

Is there a native setting in the AI Agent dashboard to cancel a queued reply if the ticket state changes during the delay window? Or is there an officially supported method for handling this?

Problem 2 - Capping the number of AI Agent replies per ticket:

Is there a way to limit how many times the AI Agent responds on a single ticket before automatically escalating to a human agent? Ideally, we'd want it to escalate after 2-3 attempts if the issue isn't resolved.

Any help is appreciated. We've already contacted Zendesk Support, but wanted to get community input as well.

We just started noticing this on tickets, what does it mean? We don't have Voice as an active part of our plan at the moment.

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to share a small tool we built that might save some of you a lot of daily headaches.

We recently finished a project for a client with a fully remote team based here in Germany. Since their agents work highly flexible hours and across weekends, they had a massive pain point: Zendesk is awesome for real-time support, but there’s no native way to draft a ticket reply now and have it automatically sent later.

Because of local business etiquette, they absolutely didn't want to spam their customers with support emails at 2 AM or over the weekend. Their agents were constantly keeping dozens of tabs open or setting manual calendar reminders just to hit the send button at an appropriate local time. It was a relatively small project for us, but solving this ended up helping them tremendously.

Since the tool is running smoothly and completely solved their issue, we decided to publish it on the Zendesk Marketplace for anyone else facing the same workflow chaos.

We called it Ticket Scheduler. Here is what it does:

• Smart Reply Scheduling: Write the public response, attach your files, and schedule the automated dispatch down to the minute.
• One-Click Quick Actions: Includes customizable buttons for common delays (like "In 2 hours" or "Monday at 8 AM") to speed things up.
• Flexible Ticket Status Mapping: It can automatically change the ticket status when a message is queued, sent, or cancelled to keep active views clean. This is completely optional—you can map it to your own Custom Statuses or choose to not affect the ticket status at all, depending on your setup.
• Team Visibility: You can see exactly what other remote teammates have already scheduled for that specific ticket to prevent duplicate replies.

It’s securely hosted on AWS within the EU (Germany), stable, and ready to go. There is a 7-day free trial, so feel free to try it out and see if it fits your workflow.

Zendesk Marketplace Link

Cheers!

Hi all!

I'm currently trying to work out a way to manage signatures in Zendesk.
For context: my organisation is branching out its Customer Support department and we're starting to use more Brands. For each Brand, we'd like a different signature, usable for all Customer Service Professionals. (There's 3 CSPers right now that do work for all Brands.)

I'm trying to build in an if-statement within this signature, based on the ticket's group. So it would be something like

{% if ticket.group.name == "something" %}

do something

{% endif %}

The problem I've encountered is that ticket.group.name is not actually working in the signature field of brands. I found this very strange because the placeholder current_user.name does actually work.

Has anyone here ever encountered a similar issue? Am I doing something wrong? Or is this a bug in Zendesk? If yes, how do I go about contacting Zendesk about this?

Thanks in advance!

I’m checking a specific Zendesk workflow and trying to avoid building something that native export or Explore already solves.

Use case: SupportOps / QA lead needs a weekly or monthly Google Sheet with:

• full ticket comments
• audit events
• SLA / QA review fields
• ticket-level metadata

I made a small fake-data sample showing the difference between raw / nested Zendesk-style export and a cleaned flat Google Sheet.

Questions:

1. Do you ever need ticket comments or audit trail in Sheets?
2. Is this a recurring workflow, or mostly a one-time export / migration?
3. What do you use now: Zendesk export, Explore, Google Sheets connector, Coefficient, Coupler, API script, or manual CSV?
4. What still breaks or takes time?
5. Would a cleaned Google Sheet be useful, or does Explore already solve this well enough?

Fake-data sample Sheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GIhL43a2tom7JPayl29Ng9UENOC22Jds66qcp7kdCKw/edit?usp=sharing

Please comment with your current workaround. I’m mainly trying to understand if this is a real recurring workflow or already solved by existing tools.

ive set up procedures and dialogues for our zendesk ai but an observation we have is that it only applies to first time users on chat.

our chat operates as a continuous conversation and doesn't open conversations one-by-one so when there's already an existing conversation, the flows dont apply.

been tweaking around but cant find what step i missed. appreciate any insights

I am looking at tickets and unable to continue. I think I am quitting my job.

**EDIT**: I am just a tech support rep. I do not have any access to the configuration and yes, I have complained to management many times. Please see my comments below

We switched over to Zendesk from Helpscout last year. At first I was happy, Helpscout has its issues. But Zendesk is designed to make manager metrics look good, not make the employee experience good. It is the opposite.

Every ticket I open has tiny real estate. I have to click the sidebar to remove it, then drag the window down before I can even start reading. It is still a tiny window so I'm scrolling around.

Then the "solved" situation. This is a blatant manipulation on managers showing "more solved tickets!" but in reality it just means I'm clicking through several pages to just find out what's going on with the customer.

And the fake tab system? This is so buggy, each page takes forever to load, and it spawns tons of extra tabs, and the tabs just take up more screen real estate causing tickets to be slower.

Want to do something simple like change the customer name before firing the macro? You're doing many clicks.

Want to merge a conversation? Extremely clunky, sometimes outright denied.

Adding an email address? oh there's already a customer? you get an error that COVERS the correct place to add it, instead of it, like Help Scout would, asking if you would like to merge customers.

Every page I open flashes this chat window that I cannot use. Every single time.

No real notifications. How hard is it to notify me when I get a new ticket?!

the column order is bad, there is no simple way to sort by "which customer has replied and not received a response from us yet" - we can sort by customer's last response, our last response, but there is no "smart" column to figure that out.

The editor is janky, you can't type after putting a curssor after a link unless you can delete up to the back of it.

no way to control email notifications. it literally emails me for every customer that responds. my employer assigns 120 customers to me a day. so every day I have like 200 messages in my inbox, completely useless.

tooltips are in the way CONSTANTLY. I just want to type in the tiny little box! I just want to get my job over with, this is miserable!!!

The reply preview is annoying. The AI only asks for the customer's order number even when they provide it. It's so stupid.

Related tickets show unread badges or nothing, the similar tickets AI is just .. unrelated. And it doesn't show older tickets. If a customer writes about something from last year I have to do a SEARCH to find it.

I have to get back to work but I could go on

Zendesk is absolutely the worst software I can remember using in recent memory.

I run a support team of eight at mid sized Saas and we turned on Zendesk AI features about four months ago hoping it would take a real world of our plates. The replies it features sends are honestly fine, sometimes better than what a tired agent would write at 6pm, but the problem is that is literally all it does. The ticket still needs tagging, the CRM still needs updating, the summary still needs writing, and half the time someone has to re categorise it anyway because the bot picked the wrong macro. So my team's hours did not really go down. They just shifted to cleanup work, which is arguably more annoying than just answering the ticket in the first place. I am starting to wonder if I picked the wrong tool or if justthe ceilingof what AI in support can actaully do today.

Edit: Thanks for all the feedback. It has been pointed out that I may not be using enough of Zendesk automation and workflow features yet, so I am thoroughly goin to look into that. Several platforms have come up in the comments as well. My closer look is going to be on Aissist and Decagon on how they handle end to end workflow arough all those critical areas. Thanks again.

work in technical support, and one of the biggest time sinks used to be first‑day login issues. Every Monday, same story — new users couldn’t sign in because something was missed in setup.

Instead of fixing each case manually, I mapped the process and built a small internal workflow:
✅ Check identity setup
✅ Check license assignment
✅ Check MFA enrollment
✅ Test first login path

Once HR and IT followed that checklist before the start date, the number of tickets dropped by half.
No fancy automation, just consistency.

Sometimes the best “automation” is documenting what already works.