Searching Records in your Help Desk

Searching Records in your Help Desk

The search option helps locating records like Tickets, Customers, Articles, Products and Tasks without having to go through the entire list, thus saving time in finding them. There are three kinds of search options available in Zoho Desk:
  1. Quick Search
  2. Advanced Search
  3. Search Records by Alphabets (for the Customers module)
Quick Search
Quick search enables you to search for specific record(s) from all of your modules or from a particular module by entering the search keywords. You can specify the modules in which the search should be carried out. You can also choose to search from a particular department or from all of your departments. Remember that this is global search and for English. 

To perform a search:
  1. Enter the search criteria in the search box. 
  2. To search in your current module, click This module from the search drop-down list. If you would like to search through all of the modules, click All modules.
  3. Similarly, to search in your current department, click This department. If you would like to search through all of the departments, click All departments. 
  4. Press Enter. 

The records matching the search criteria will be listed. Please note that the module refers to the Tickets, Customers (Contacts & Accounts), Tasks etc. Your current module will be listed in the upper-left corner, besides your logo. 

Once you are in the search results page, you can toggle between the modules from the left panel.


Advanced Search
Advanced search enables you to search records by specifying your own search criteria.

To search records using criteria:
  1. In the Module home page, click the  icon. 
  2. From the search drop-down list click Advanced Search. 
  3. In the Advanced Search page, specify the filter criteria and the keywords to search for. You can use the AND/OR combinations between the filter properties. 
  4. Click Search. 

You can create a custom view out of the search criteria to access them in future. To create a custom view from the advanced search parameters, click Save as Custom View in the search results page.

Search Records by Alphabets
You can search for contacts and accounts within the Customers module by clicking the alphabet links displayed on to your right. This would directly take you to the matching records that starts with the selected alphabet.
To search for Customers by alphabet:
  1. Click the [Module] Tab from the top bar.( For e.g. Dashboard, Tickets, etc.) 
  2. Select Customers from the Modules menu.
  3. In the Contacts Home page, click an Alphabet from the list. 
The page displays the list of matching contacts that start with the selected alphabet. You can switch to the Accounts module and follow the the above steps to search for accounts. Also, the alphabet search options searches records by First name. If you want to search records by Last Name, you need to change the Name Format under Setup. 

Sort and Order Search Results
While you perform a quick search, you can sort the search results according to your preference. You can sort the search results by:
  • Modified Time or 
  • Relevance
The Modified Time will list the recently modified records at the top. While sorting by relevance will fetch the records based on the number of times your keywords appear in a record. 
You can also choose to view the tickets that are received over a specific period of time. You can view tickets that are received in the: 
  • Last 7 Days
  • Last 15 Days
  • Last 30 Days
  • Last 3 Months 
  • All Days

Please note that the above sort and view options are available only for the quick search and not for the advanced search.