Zendesk Tags Explained
Video
Tags are free text any agent, trigger or automation can add, and they end up carrying much of an account's logic. How tags show an account's stage on the ticket, and how a tag stops an automation from firing again.
Chapters
A field nobody sets up on purpose
Ticket fields such as status, priority and form are structured: the same dropdown on every ticket, configured in Admin Center. Tags are the opposite. They are free text, invisible to the customer, and any agent, trigger or automation can add one without an approval step or admin configuration.
Tags can also sit on users and organizations. With that setting on, Zendesk adds a user's tags and their organization's tags to the tickets they submit, where business rules and access settings can use them.
Tags on the ticket
This walkthrough opens two onboarding tickets. One carries smb, waiting_on_customer and post_launch_check_in, the other enterprise and go_live_validation. The account segment, what the ticket is waiting on and the onboarding stage are readable at a glance, without opening the conversation.
Tags as an automation's off-switch
Automations run on an hourly cycle and act on every ticket that still matches. The example notifies a manager when an onboarding ticket has gone more than eight business hours without an update. Its conditions skip any ticket already tagged escalated or notify_8_hrs, and its action adds notify_8_hrs, so the manager is alerted once. Without that tag, the same ticket would send the alert every hour.
The escalated tag covers the other case: a ticket already escalated some other way never produces a duplicate alert.
