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Zendesk Custom Objects - Part 4: End-User and Forms
Agent Efficiency Custom Objects Lookup Fields API Webhooks

Zendesk Custom Objects - Part 4: End-User and Forms

This is a four-part series on Zendesk's new Custom Objects feature. The articles cover setup, data import, using Custom Objects in forms and with agents, expanding user profiles, and displaying Custom Objects in Help Center forms.

Thomas Verschoren

Thomas Verschoren

— 10 min read

In this four part series we'll explore the new Custom Objects from an admin, agent and end-user standpoint.

Custom Object Series

  1. Introduction to Custom Objects
  2. Custom Objects and Tickets
  3. Custom Objects and Users
  4. Making Custom Objects available to End-Users

The first two articles showed you how to set up custom objects and how agent can interact with them. The previous expanded user profiles with Custom Objects and showed how you can use them to trigger different priorities based on linked records.

This article will wrap up the series by solving a missing feature in Zendesk: Showing Custom Objects in Help Center forms and make the selected record available to agents.

End-User access for Custom Objects and Lookup Fields (EAP Preview)
Zendesk’s Custom Objects, released last year, enable you to expand platform data, like linking assets or contracts to tickets. Initially, end-users couldn’t interact with custom objects, but a recent update allows you to add Lookup Fields in forms.
Internal NoteThomas Verschoren

Zendesk has released a native solution for this feature. The steps in this article still work, but I recommend migrating to the native solution!

Custom Objects for End-users

The previous Legacy version of Custom Objects allowed us to set permissions for both agents, admins and end-users. This way you could make the objects available as read-only elements for (anonymous) end-users and use the API to inject custom objects on your Help Center.

This new version of Custom Objects manages the permissions entire via the Admin Panel. We've previously used the permissions to give our agents edit rights to link Pokémon to a specific end-user in the previous article.

Sadly, with the migration to this new version, the ability to give end-users access to the objects has been lost. This is partially due to an inherit security risk with the ability for Custom Objects to link users and organisation via Lookup Fields. If not done carefully, this might make your entire customer list available in e.g. a Lookup Field on a form. For this reason, the end-user is currently not available out of the box.

There are scenario's where it would be useful to have these objects available though. Maybe you want your customer to select a specific device when filling out a form. Or you want to show a list of retail locations to handle a return, based on a Location Object in your Zendesk instance.

This article will show you a workaround to fix this limitation.

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