End-User access for Custom Objects and Lookup Fields
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.
When Zendesk released their Custom Objects last year, they made it possible to expand the existing ticket, user, organization objects in the platform with any data type you needed to enrich your ticket and agents experience.
You can use custom objects to store assets like computers or printers, you can store service contracts or purchased licenses, or you can use it to build fun demo's and store movies or Pokémon within the platform.
Custom objects can be linked to tickets via Lookup Fields and, when linked, will show more detailed detail right next to a ticket when an agent handles it. When linking – for example – service contracts you can see its duration and services within the contract. Or when linking an employees laptop you can see its type, operating system and warranty duration.
One element that was missing was a way for end-users to interact with custom objects. Where agents could fill in lookup fields in the ticket sidebar, you couldn't make these same fields available to end-users, like you can with regular drop-down or text fields.
In part 4 of my Custom Objects series last year I showed a workaround leveraging the Zendesk API, an external worker and modifications to the Help Center. But luckily, with Zendesk's latest Custom Objects release, this can now be done natively!
Thomas Verschoren
What's possible now
Mid summer Zendesk released the ability to use placeholders in macros that pulled data from Custom Objects. To demonstrate that capability I created a Custom Object to store movie details. If a visitor of my movie theater showed interested in a movie, we could use those placeholders to reply to their email with more information.
In that article I purposefully used email as an example to work around the fact that there is no elegant way to ask for that information in forms. Or at least not while filling in the ticket field that contains the movie without resorting to custom code.
Now, with this new Custom Objects for the Help Center release we can take an existing or new Lookup Field and give permissions to an end-user to view or edit that field from within a form or request page.
This way, I can ask a customer to select a movie, a trainer to select a Pokémon or an employee to select a laptop from a nice list.
You might wonder what the benefit of these kind of Lookup Fields is compared to regular drop-down fields. For one, Lookup fields can be filtered and only show those records that apply to the current user, organization or other condition.
Secondly, even though the customer still sees a list of options, your agents can see all related data to a customer's choice (warranty date, SLA type, movie genre,...) giving them more context when working on tickets. And the record editor in Agent Workspace is a lot nicer to work in than the dropdown editor in the Admin Center.
