Zendesk Advanced Search: A Comprehensive Guide

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Zendesk Advanced Search is a powerful tool that helps you quickly find specific tickets and resolve customer issues. It's a game-changer for customer support teams.

With Zendesk Advanced Search, you can search for tickets by various criteria, including tags, labels, and custom fields. This makes it easy to find tickets related to a specific product or issue.

Zendesk Advanced Search also allows you to use Boolean operators, such as AND, OR, and NOT, to refine your search results. This helps you narrow down your search to find exactly what you're looking for.

Advanced Search Techniques

To narrow down your search results, you can use data property keywords, operators, and search terms. Data property keywords restrict a search to one or more specific data properties.

You can search for specific data properties using keywords like "tags" or "created". For example, searching for "tags:vip" will list all users tagged as VIPs.

However, be aware that results will also include other data that match the term "vip", such as organizations with "vip" in their name.

Credit: youtube.com, Premium Plus x Zendesk Tips & Tricks: Mastering the Zendesk search function

Using operators like ": " and "<" can help focus your search. For instance, searching for "tags:vip created:<2015-05-01" will return results that contain the tag "vip" and were created before May 1, 2015.

When using multiple data property keywords, there is an OR search across the values you specified. This means that searching for "tags:silver tags:bronze" will return results that contain either the tag "silver" or the tag "bronze".

To perform an AND search on multiple data property keywords, wrap the keywords in double quotes. For example, searching for "tags:superman tags:is_awesome" will return only results that contain both tags.

You can also search for a specific ticket form and get results for all tickets where that ticket form is applied. For example, searching for "ticket form:Change Request" will return all tickets that use the Change Request ticket form.

Here's a summary of search operators:

Filtering Tickets

Filtering tickets is a crucial step in getting relevant results from your Zendesk advanced search. You can exclude closed tickets from your results by clicking the Filter menu and clearing the Include closed tickets check box.

Credit: youtube.com, How to Filter Tickets in Zendesk [2025 Guide]

The Filter menu is a useful tool for refining your search results. By clicking on it, you can toggle the display of closed tickets, which are identified by an icon () that can be hovered over for more information.

To sort your search results, you can click on the Requested or Updated column in the search results. This will toggle between displaying results in ascending or descending order by date.

Here's a quick rundown of the columns you can sort by:

  • ID, the ticket's numeric identifier.
  • Subject, the text from the ticket's subject line.
  • Requested, the date the ticket was submitted.
  • Updated, the last time the ticket was updated.
  • Requester, the name of the user who submitted the ticket.
  • Group, the group assigned to handle the ticket.

Date and Time Options

You can search for a time relative to the present time using time units like hours, minutes, days, weeks, months, or years. This is a great way to find recent records, like anything created in the last four hours.

To search within a specific date and time range, you can include both a start and end date. For example, you can search for anything created between August 1, 2014 at 11:59 p.m. (UTC) and August 4, 2014 at midnight (UTC).

Combined Dates

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You can search for a specific time range by including both a start and end date and time in your search. This allows you to narrow down your results to a precise period.

The start and end dates can be in different time zones, as seen in the example that searches for anything updated before September 1, 2015 at 12:00 p.m. (UTC).

You can also include times in your search range, such as searching for anything created between August 1, 2014 at 11:59 p.m. (UTC) and August 4, 2014 at midnight (UTC).

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Sorting Results

You can sort your search results by field, in ascending or descending order, using the order_by:field and sort:asc or sort:desc keyword phrases.

Sorting is available on several fields, including created, commented, priority, status, and ticket_type.

The order_by and sort keywords are equivalent to using the API parameters sort_by and sort_order.

To sort your results, simply add the order_by:field and sort:asc or sort:desc keywords to your search query.

Here are the available fields for sorting:

  • created
  • commented
  • priority
  • status
  • ticket_type

Query Syntax and Usage

Credit: youtube.com, How to Format a Search Query in the Zendesk API Endpoint

The query syntax for Zendesk advanced search is quite powerful, and it's essential to understand how it works to get the most out of your searches. The query string syntax uses the : character as the equality operator, which means you can specify a field and a value to search for, such as status:open.

You can also use other operators like > (greater than), < (less than), and - (negation) to refine your search. For example, status

Double quotes are used to search for exact phrases, such as "Greenbriar Corporation". This is useful when you need to search for a specific string of words.

The type property is used to specify the resource type you want to search for, such as type:user or type:ticket. This helps to narrow down your search results and avoid irrelevant data.

Here are some common search operators:

You can also use property keywords to narrow down your search results. Property keywords are the names of properties in a ticket, user, organization, or group. For example, you can use the assignee property keyword to search for tickets assigned to a specific user.

Credit: youtube.com, How to Search for a Ticket in Zendesk [2025 Guide]

Some properties have predefined values, such as the ticket status property, which has values like new, open, pending, hold, solved, and closed. You can search for these values using the status:property syntax.

Other properties accept user-defined search terms, such as the subject property, which can be searched for using the subject:term syntax.

Tickets and Updates

You can search for tickets with a specific ticket form and get results for all tickets where that ticket form is applied.

To view ticket information, the Tickets category returns a list of support requests that have your search term(s) in their subject line or comments. This category contains the most options for organizing your results.

The Ticket category's columns display relevant ticket information, including ID, subject, requested date, updated date, requester, and group. Each result is preceded by an icon indicating the ticket's current status.

You can exclude closed tickets from your results by clicking the Filter menu and clearing the Include closed tickets check box. Closed tickets are identified by an icon (), which you can hover over for more information.

Credit: youtube.com, Quickie app for Zendesk: includes Advanced Search!

To update multiple tickets, select the tickets you want to update, click Edit from the toolbar at the bottom of the list, and update the ticket information as needed. You can also delete, merge, or mark the selected tickets as spam.

Here's a breakdown of the ticket information columns:

  • ID: the ticket's numeric identifier.
  • Subject: the text from the ticket's subject line.
  • Requested: the date the ticket was submitted.
  • Updated: the last time the ticket was updated.
  • Requester: the name of the user who submitted the ticket.
  • Group: the group assigned to handle the ticket.

Recent and Additional Options

You can access your most recently viewed content records and searches from the search menu.

To access your recent searches, click the Search icon in the upper-right of the top toolbar, and your most recent searches and viewed content will appear in a menu.

You can filter your recent searches and viewed content by selecting a content record type, such as tickets, users, articles, organizations, or side conversations.

To quickly navigate to a record, click a Recently viewed content record, or to perform a search, click a Recently searched query.

The content record types you can filter by are: tickets, users, articles, organizations, and side conversations.

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