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2. Handbook
3. Support Team Handbook
4. Support Operations Team
5. Zendesk Overview for Support Operations
6. Zendesk Organizations

Zendesk Organizations

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.

On this page

• Zendesk Organizations
  • Organization Fields
  • How does SLA get determined for an organization?
    • What is an organization has multiple subscriptions?
  • Organization Permissions
  • User Association

Organization Fields

How does SLA get determined for an organization?

This stems from the GitLab Plan field. It correlates as follows:

When multiple of these tags appear on the same ticket, it will apply the SLA policy that comes first (order wise). See Zendesk SLAs for more details.

What is 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.

User Association

NOTE:
This is a legacy feature and no new domains will be added to any organization.

By default, users do not automatically associate with an organization. To associate a user to an organization, this must be done manually by an Agent.

That said, if the organization has a domain set at Domains field in the organization record on Zendesk, then any email address that uses that domain will automatically be associated to the organization. This can create a bit of chaos though, as it does not use any measure to authenticate an email to the organization. It simply looks at the email address and used the domain portion of it (ie. the part after @).

When multiple organizations are using the same domain, it will not associate the user to both organizations. This is because users can only be associated with one organization (as per our setup). Because of this, they will be associated to the organization with the lower ID number. As an example:

Bob emails support from his email, bob@awesome-company.com

There are currently two organizations using the domain awesome-company.com:

Jason's Awesome Company (ID: 123) Nabeel's Awesome Company (ID: 119)

Because Nabeel's Awesome Company has a lower ID, Bob is associated with that organization.

Zendesk does not have a native way to determine if multiple organizations are using the same domain. As such, you must be careful about setting organization domain's.