Health Check

A Self-Assessment plan for Zendesk Admins

10 Points to improve your Zendesk Setup

A Zendesk instance is never "set it and forget it." After a few years, any system that isn't actively maintained starts to decay.

It's a problem I see all the time. Countless small changes, temporary fixes, new features, and a revolving door of admins all leave their mark. That clean, efficient setup you once had is now likely a complex web of undocumented triggers and confusing, legacy fields.

This "system clutter" isn't just an annoyance. It has a real cost. It frustrates agents, makes your reports unreliable, and burns money on inefficient processes. You probably feel this, but you're not sure where to even begin fixing it.

As a consultant, the first thing I do with a new client is run a diagnostic "health check." I'm not just looking for what's broken; I'm looking for what's inefficient, outdated, or built on a shaky foundation.

I've adapted a10-point checklist for you to run on your own instance.

The 10-Point Zendesk Health Check

1 Trigger Chaos

If you see a long, disorganized list with non-descriptive names like "trigger_123" or “temp” and no categorization, you have a major liability. The real problem is that triggers run in order from top to bottom, and that order is extremely important. In a messy list, a "temp fix" triggered towards the end can undo an important action from a trigger at the top, sending the ticket to the wrong group. Triggers also "loop" and recheck the list after a change, which often causes unpredictable chain reactions. This is how one small change or wrong placed trigger can bring down an entire workflow.

Action: Deactivate any trigger that hasn't fired in 30 days. Enforce a strict naming convention (e.g., [Notify] - Assignee on Comment) and start using categories to group your triggers, like “Ticket Creation”, "Routing," "SLAs," and "Notifications."

2 Manual Tag Mess

Open ten solved tickets and look at the tag field. Is it a jumble of bug, Bug, and product-bug? This is the classic sign of manual, free-text tagging, and it means your reporting on "top issues" is completely useless.

Action: Turn off free-text tagging. Force all tags to be added only through a required custom field, and mark the important ones as "Required for Solving." This is the only way to get structured data you can actually use and get reliable reports"

3 Custom Field Clutter

How many ticket custom fields do you have in your Admin ?

Check 10 solved tickets - how many have these fields populated?

How many are actually used in a report you check weekly? I often a lot of legacy fields from old workflows. This isn't harmless. It clutters the agent interface, confuses new hires, and slows everything down.

Action: Audit your fields. If one isn't 100% required for routing or reporting, deactivate it. A simpler form means faster resolution.

4 View Overload

If your agents have to navigate more than 5-10 shared views, they don't know where to focus. The classic symptom is "cherry-picking" from one massive "Unassigned" queue. This isn't just a bad habit. It means high-priority tickets get buried, SLAs are breached, and agent workloads are completely uneven. Your views are meant to focus and guide your teams for an efficient work. With priorities. To meet the SLA.

Action: Consolidate them into role-based queues: a "Triage" view, an "Escalated" view, and "My unsolved tickets." Use Group, Assignee, Priority, and ticket field conditions to correctly present each agent with which tickets they should be working on.

5 SLA Blind Spot 

Are you only measuring "First Reply Time"? It's an important metric for responsiveness, but it's not enough. You can hit a 95% FRT target and still have terrible CSAT because the full resolution takes days. Your customers appreciate a fast first reply, but they really care about the final fix. If FRT is your only major target, you're not measuring the metrics that actually define the complete customer experience

Action: Start measuring multiple metrics. Implement advanced SLAs for "Full Resolution Time," "Agent Work Time," and "Time to Next Meaningful Update." This aligns your team's goals with your customers' real expectations.

6 Agent Experience Audit 

Ask a few agents to share their screen and watch their ticket handling process. A veteran agent and a new hire will show you very different problems.  Are they copy-pasting from a personal text file? Manually setting Priority or Category fields? Are they sending external emails to the finance team? Are they using their own 20 personal macros? Watching your agents working will show you where your system is broken. They've built "shadow workflows" because the official ones are too slow, confusing, or simply don't exist!

Action: If agents are setting fields manually, build one powerful shared macro that does it in a click. If they email other teams, build a proper Side Conversation workflow. These official workflows ensure agents follow company policy and use on-brand wording, boosting efficiency and creating consistent customer experience.

7 Self-Service Gap 

Does your company even have a Zendesk Guide (Help Center)? If you don't, you are missing the single biggest opportunity for ticket deflection. If you do, check the stats. What's your self-service score? If it's low, no one is using your Guide and it doesn't help your support efforts, most likely because the content is outdated and your agents are stuck in a costly, repetitive loop, answering "how to reset my password" 50 times a day.

Action: Your Help Center isn't a side project; it's your most efficient "agent" and the essential foundation for any future AI strategy. Make sure you have an updated Help Center. Agents should use the "Knowledge" app in the agent sidebar to easily link articles as part of their workflow. Use links to articles in your macros.

8 Data-Rich, Insight-Poor

Can you answer, "What were our top 3 product-related complaints last month?" or "How many tickets were created last month" in 60 seconds? If you can't, you're not data-driven. You're data-rich and insight-poor.

Action: The solution starts with proper tagging and usage of ticket custom fields. You can't report on what you don't track. Then, build one "Management Dashboard" in Explore that answers your most important business questions, and build your agent workflows backwards from that.

9 System Silos

Watch your agents work. Are they constantly switching browser tabs to look up customer details in your CRM or order history in Shopify? Manually copy-pasting info into a Jira ticket? Are they helping a customer, unaware their real history is hidden on a duplicate user profile?

This is a classic 'system silo' problem. Agents waste time manually checking external systems, working with incomplete customer information. These are gaps easily solvable with simple apps or integrations from Zendesk marketplace.

Action: Identify your team's "top 3 most used manual tasks." Add integration to critical systems (like your CRM, Jira, or e-commerce platform). Add applications to handle repetitive tasks like finding and merging duplicate users.

10 Scalability Test 

Finally, ask this: If your ticket volume doubled tomorrow, would your Zendesk system help your team manage, or would the system itself break? If you're honest, and the answer is "it would probably break", it's probably because your system relies too heavily on manual work and not on stable automated processes.

You can't scale by asking your team to work harder or continuously adding more support people. You scale with solid processes, smart automation, and effective self-service. The 9 points above are your roadmap to an effective, automated, data-driven system that will help you scale.

So, what now?

If you recognized your own system in many of these points, you've just completed the most important step: diagnosis and understanding.

These aren't just minor "admin" issues. They are fundamental, business-critical gaps that lead to agent burnout, frustrated customers, and significant inefficiency.

You now have a clear "to do" roadmap to take you from diagnosis to action.

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About the Author:

Moshe Anisman is a CX consultant and Zendesk expert who helps support teams build efficient, scalable, and data-driven operations. When he's not optimizing client workflows, he builds apps for the Zendesk Marketplace, including the Advanced User Merge app to automatically detect duplicates and easily merge them with one click.