Organizations

Maintained by:

Overview

Organizations are simply a collection of users in Zendesk (much like groups). We use them to also store metadata (synced from Salesforce), which is used to determine such things as SLA, ARR, etc.

How are organizations created?

Organizations in Zendesk are created automatically through our Salesforce and Zendesk integration (as well as the GitLab built sync script). This integration allows agents to see a customer's full Salesforce Profile within a live ticket in Zendesk. You can read more about what information we send to Salesforce and what fields are populated with information from Zendesk in the Support Ops handbook.

Please do not manually create organizations. This can break the ZD<>SFDC integration and cause users to receive incorrect SLAs. If you notice an organization needs to be created, please notify support-ops to rectify this.

Organization fields

Field Named	API Name	Data Type	Possible Values
Salesforce ID	salesforce_id	Text	*
Account Type	account_type	Dropdown	Customer, Former Customer, Prospect
ARR	aar	Decimal	*
Support Level	support_level	Dropdown	Starter, Premium, Ultimate, Basic
Market Segment	market_segment	Text	*
Technical Account Manager	technical_account_manager	Text	*
Account Owner	account_owner	Text	*
Solutions Architect	solutions_architect	Text	*
Number of Seats	seats_decimal	Decimal	*
AM Project ID	am_project_id	Text	*

Editing Organizations

As a lot relies on organizations being setup properly, this feature requires admin level abilities currently. If an organization needs to be edited, an issue should be filed using the Add Zendesk Organization Notes or Tags Request issue template.

Organizations with outdated information

If you notice an organization in Zendesk contains outdated information or the information doesn't match what Salesforce is displaying, this would indicate the sync integration has hit an issue. Luckily, we have the GitLab built sync script that runs every hour to rectify such issues.

In your due diligence, you would want to create an issue via the support-ops-project so support-ops can double check to ensure there is nothing blocking the sync.

Organization Notes

All organizations have the ability to have notes about them via the Organization page in Zendesk. These notes are automatically placed on a ticket (along with other organization informaiton) as soon as the ticket has an organization present. This is done via the Ticket::Internal Comment::Organization Info trigger.

What if an organization has multiple subscriptions?

This is an edge case Support-Ops and Sales-Ops are working on. The current solution is to apply the correct tag to the organization so it will get multiple plan tags on newly created tickets. As an example:

Jason Enterprises has a Gold subscription and a Starter license.

Salesforce has them as Gold, so the organization in Zendesk shows their GitLab Plan as Gold.

To ensure they get the proper support (and the ticket routes properly), we need to manually apply the starter tag on the organization.

Support engineers can request tags and notes be added to the org.

Once a ticket comes in, it may show in multiple views. The non-applicable tag needs to be removed so that it only shows in a single queue.

Organization Permissions

By default, organizations are setup so that the users within it can only see and comment on their own tickets. This security measure often doesn't work for some organizations though.

Because of that, we have the ability to setup Shared Organizations, a term meaning the users in an organization have heightened permissions and can do see and/or comment on tickets that are not theirs. For more information on Shared Organizations, review the Shared Organizations workflow.