r/Zendesk

I'm doing some research into how teams and Zendesk consultants handle Help Center customization, and I'd really appreciate some honest answers from people who actually work with Zendesk Guide.

From what I've seen, once you go beyond the standard Zendesk theme settings, you often end up working with HTML/CSS/JavaScript/Curlybars or bringing in a developer/agency.

I'm curious how this works in practice for you.

If you've customized a Zendesk Help Center, I'd love to know:

1. What kind of customization did you need?
2. Did you do it yourself, use an internal developer, or hire a freelancer/agency?
3. Roughly how long did it take?
4. Was the difficult part actually writing the code, or was it something else?
5. How often do you need to make significant theme/layout changes?
6. Have you ever bought a Zendesk theme instead of building one?
7. If you've used a freelancer/agency, roughly what did the work cost?
8. What is the most frustrating thing about customizing Zendesk Guide?

I'm not trying to sell anything here. I'm trying to understand whether this is actually a recurring problem or just something people deal with once during initial setup.

If you've done this work professionally, I'd especially like to hear your perspective.

Hello all!

I was reviewing all of our connections and it seems that the Jira integration (Zendesk support for Jira) we've been using for years (and still functions) has disappeared from the marketplace.

I've read that there were plans to sunset this after April of 2026, but I cant find anything from Zendesk about it.

If such app isnt maintained by Zendesk anymore, Im open to other free with the same functionality suggestions

Thank you in advance!

Hey folks,

As a builder in the B2B tech space, I've noticed how much sprint time is wasted when technical support teams have to play "detective" across 5 different tools just to understand what went wrong with an incomplete ticket.

I'm exploring a potential solution, a read-only workspace that automatically reconstructs the evidence timeline behind a Zendesk ticket (queries logs/DB, identifies verified facts vs user statements, and drafts a structured escalation for Jira/Linear).

Before building further, I really want to challenge my assumptions with people who live this daily, I would love your perspective and learn from your experience

> How much time does your team actually spend digging for context before escalating a complex ticket?

> What observability / logging tools do you rely on the most (Datadog, Sentry, Grafana, custom internal admin)?

Any feedback or thoughts on this would be hugely appreciated!

Solution (thanks to O-M_E-M) - scroll to bottom

Hi there,

We're moving to the Advanced AI Agent (as Zendesk are pushing people to do) and I'm trying to setup a simple flow for our chatbot.

If customer requests to speak to person, ask for their email address. That's it.

I've tried doing this via use cases (procedure and dialogue). With Procedure nothing seems to happen, there's no trigger (see Email Collection use case).

I've also tried using instructions to ask the bot to ask for an email address which it does ask but nowhere in the ticket is updated once a transfer and request for email occurs.

If anyone has advice it would be much appreciated! I also tried watching this video by Dominic the CX guy but got lost. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0-zt-m3ITQ

TL;DR: not sure how to make advanced AI chatbot ask for email and update ticket before transfer to human occurs.

SOLUTION

Creating Template

1. In AI agents section, go to Settings > CRM integration.
2. Go to Templates > Create template.
3. Select "Forms".
4. Add template details.
5. E.g. for my example, I had to create a contact email form to collect a name and email.

Template name - Contact Form

Input Field 1

Message type = Email (since we're collecting an email address)

Name = email (name that you see, not the customer)

Label = Please enter email (label which customer sees in chat for form)

5. Press "Add Field" to include additional section for name.

E.g.

Message type = Text, Name = name, Label = Please enter name

6. Press "Create"

7. Copy the shorthand of the newly created template by clicking the shorthand.

Editing use case "Escalation reply" (for my example)

1. Go to Content > Use cases.
2. Select "Escalation Reply" use case (which is a default use case by Zendesk).
3. Select use case (e.g. English (ENG)) and press "Edit".
4. Paste the shorthand in any text box which you wish to display the form (e.g. in my case I put it in the escalation reply form when the transfer to agent occurs). See below.

https://preview.redd.it/mh6bgbqu19kh1.png?width=383&format=png&auto=webp&s=95e82b7a41c02bfec135c4f9a6b309c53380d882

5. Publish the changes and test.
   IMPORTANT NOTE: the form doesn't work in the "Test AI Agent" section, it will just display the shorthand text. You need to actually go to your chatbot wherever you have it (knowledgebase or website) and test the scenario there.

https://preview.redd.it/9lksxtkxw2kh1.png?width=2465&format=png&auto=webp&s=09c3f7530586e07cdb48ffa6fb324285a2ba30fa

We have a Slack → Zendesk support workflow where customer messages automatically become tickets.

One edge case we keep running into is messages posted by bots/apps. For example, someone submits something through a Slack Workflow or another Slack app posts a message into the channel. Since Slack sees it as a bot message, our current auto-ticketing setup ignores it.

Ideally we want certain trusted bot messages to create Zendesk tickets automatically, the same way a normal user message would.

Has anyone dealt with this? Curious how you handle bot-to-bot workflows without manually creating the Zendesk ticket every time.

We're using Zendesk AI currently but we're running out of Automated Resolutions at an alarming rate and are struggling to justify the cost. Just after we renewed our ZD contracts a couple of months ago, we've seen a huge spike in volume and at this rate, we'll need to at least triple our ARs quota for the year.

A majority of the chats we're being charged for are super simple questions that the AI gives a quick reply and a link to a relevant KP article and rarely any followup questions. At the rate we're being billed, it'd be cheaper to handle these with humans than pay $1.5 per.

Is anyone using cheaper but still good quality alternatives?

Hello,
How does everyone measure SLA for live talk? The built in SLA’s don’t seem to work from everything I have read. Our numbers don’t seem to be matching.
Any help or ideas please

Hi everyone,

I’m curious how folks are organizing their Zendesk knowledge bases when balancing human agents and AI agents.

Much of the advice around deploying AI agents suggests that the knowledge you expose them to directly dictates their scope and response quality. If AI knowledge needs to be tightly controlled to ensure accuracy, does it make more sense operationally to maintain a single, permissioned KB or split them up?

For those who are already down the path of deploying AI agents, what setup has worked best for you?

• Unified KB: Sharing one KB across human and AI agents, restricting what the AI sees via permissions or labels?
• Dedicated KB: Creating a separate knowledge base tailored specifically for AI consumption?

Would love to hear how you’re managing this!

Hi all- im in a bit of a pickle trying to figure out a clean way to display a lot of data points for my stakeholders.
The main request is to show all the types of tickets we get within the org. The main issue is there are 20+ unique ticket groups (departments) each with a custom field called tasks. SH wants to see all these tasks with volume and resolution time avg per task.
As far as I could tell there is no clean way to have this all in one report. SH does not want to have to export and they wish to have it on a dash where they can easily adjust times/status/groups to the given need.
Ideally we want a pivot style table with groups and the tasks listed all in a single column but it doesnt look like that is possible?
Any help is appreciated!

Hi all!

Does anyone here work as a SE at Zendesk? I’m curious about the types of technical problems you typically solve and how much of the role is technical versus sales-focused.