Published August 16, 2026

Zendesk Views, Done Right

Agents work what is in front of them. Views decide what that is, which makes them the single most consequential piece of Zendesk configuration.

What a view actually is

A saved filter with an order. Conditions decide which tickets appear, the sort decides what gets worked first, and the columns decide what an agent can judge without opening anything.

Views can be personal or shared, and shared views can be restricted to a group or role. The shared ones are where your process lives, whether you designed it or not.

The five views most teams need

My open tickets, sorted by oldest update. The default working queue.
Unassigned in my group, sorted by created date. This is the view that stops tickets rotting in nobody land.
Pending, awaiting customer, so you can see what is genuinely blocked rather than counting it as backlog.
Breaching soon, filtered on SLA target within the next hour. The only view that should ever be red.
Recently solved, for quality checks and for spotting the reopened ones.

Five views that get used beat twenty that get scrolled past. If a view has not been opened in a month, delete it.

A view that surfaces duplicates

Zendesk cannot compare two tickets for you, but you can get close enough to spot the obvious pairs by eye.

Build a view with status less than solved, sorted by requester, showing created date and subject. Duplicates from the same person land next to each other, and a ten-second scan each morning catches the obvious ones.

Add a second view on the tag `closed_by_merge` and you have a running count of how many your team is already catching by hand. Compare that with what a detector finds and the gap is usually uncomfortable.

Both of these are manual sweeps that need somebody to run them. They catch same-requester pairs and miss everything else: different wording, different channel, two colleagues at one company.

Common view mistakes

Too many views. Agents pick the first one that looks right, so the tenth view might as well not exist.
Sorting by priority alone. Everything becomes high priority within a quarter, and then the sort means nothing.
Views that overlap. If a ticket appears in three views, three people think somebody else owns it.
No unassigned view. The most common cause of a ticket sitting untouched for three days.

Frequently asked questions

How many views should we have?+

Enough that every ticket appears in exactly one working queue. For most teams that is five to eight shared views.

Can a view show duplicate tickets?+

Only approximately. Sort by requester and duplicates from one person sit next to each other. Cross-channel and cross-requester duplicates stay invisible.

Stop scanning views for duplicates

A morning eyeball check catches the obvious pairs. Ticket Merger catches the rest, before an agent opens either ticket.

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