Zendesk Regex - How to use and example overview

Using Regex (regular expressions) can be very helpful in order to receive requests in a higher quality. If you need an order number from a client to give a great response you can ask for it. Mistakes made by users can be avoided if set as regular expression. 

When using Zendesk and especially Zendesk Guide you have the possibility to use contact forms (both for internal use and public/external use). A specific regex field (field type) allows you to specify a pattern that a customer's input must match in order to be accepted.

Example use cases for Zendesk regex

This can be useful in a number of situations, such as collecting: 

• Customer numbers
• Order Numbers
• Article Numbers
• VAT numbers
• IBAN
• license plates 

Create a new Zendesk regex field

To create a new Zendesk regex field you need to do the following: 

• navigate to the "fields" section in the Admin area under "Objects and rules" of Zendesk.
• "Add field" - here you can choose between a variety of field types like text, numbers, dropdown but also "regex" as field type.
• specify a display name and description
• specify this field to be editable by end users
• define your regular expression under "Regular expression to validate this field"

Example Zendesk regex expressions

Automatically extract Zendesk regex data from tickets

Because this is a common use case we developed also an Zendesk app to extract data based on regex directly from text (i.e. Email-Body) to store the extracted portion directly in a Zendesk custom field. Requesters who contain order numbers, IBAN, client-IDs and so on can directly be stored in custom fields to be used in macros etc. - no more need to copy & paste data! 

Feel free to search for the Knots Parser on the Zendesk marketplace and try for free!