I'm a visual person, so I literally drew a workflow on a sheet of paper to help me see where the process needed to go and what issues would arise. You can visually see where you'll need to add Views, Triggers, Automations, and Macros and make notes along the way so you’ll remember where you need to add these features and what they need to look like when you start building your process.

Here is what our workflow looks like:

We deal with B2B distributors who prefer to email us POs. Your customers, however, might prefer an online order form or even a combination of the two. Both are possible! You just need to decide which is best for your business. Really, the only difference is whether or not you decide to make the order form visible to end-users or not. (More on that below!)

Since our customers email us their POs, ourticket formis agent-only and tied to our company’s orders email address through a trigger. If you’re creating an online order form you’ll need to make your form end-user visible by checking the “Form name for end-users” box.

Decide what info you'll need to capture and create new ticket fields when necessary. My form has the following fields (I’ve included the field type in the brackets to the right):

• PO#[Text]
• Sales Order#[Text]
• Ship Date[Date]
• Company/Address*[Text]
• Order Details**[Multi-Line Text]
• Total Cost[Decimal]
• Shipping Method[Drop-down]
• Freight billed to[Drop-down]

*Company vs. Address:I don’t think of “Company”in the usual sense here; I use the Organization field for that info. Our customers generally have multiple shipping locations and seeing the address isn't really as important to them as a quickly ensuring that process confirmation shows that the shipment is going to the correct location. I use the following format for entering info into the Company field: “ABC Company - Arlington”just as an easy way to reference the company and location. For one to one transactions where each customer only has one shipping address, however, you might think about creating a custom Organization field for the address that is displayed in the process confirmation.

* *啊rder Details:There are many different Field Types that could be used here from drop downs to regular expressions. And if you have Help Center enabled, the Conditional Fields App could even be utilized to add new fields for multiple line item orders. Again, it really just depends on what works for your organization.

More so than any other application in our Zendesk portal, I utilize user & organization data and fields in our Orders process. These features are what really make it possible to make your portal the central hub for your CRM data.

Our portal handles everything from external Customer Service to internal IT support, so the way I keep everything compartmentalized is by creating groups and views to accompany each team’s workflows. Similar to forms, the columns visible in each view are dependent upon the information pertinent to each Group.

Create an "Orders" groupand add all agents that will be involved in your orders process. For confidentiality, our portal is set up so that agents can only see views assigned to their group. You might want to check on your agent settings to make sure that your agents can only see what you want them to.

I heavily utilize tags to separate each view, and I rely on a combination of macros and triggers to add/remove those tags as the order progresses (with the exception of the “Escalation" and "Hold" tags, which are manually added to these tickets by the agent).

Below are the settings I have for each view. Please note that your settings might vary based on your own processes.

Here’s where the whole thing begins to take shape! You ’ll want to create at least one trigger to push an order directly through your process instead of having it bob around in your support queue. Here is how ours is set up.

Another cool aspect of processing your orders through Zendesk is that Explore can actually be set up to report monthly sales activity based on these orders by creating reports (dashboards if you will.…) that can add up numerical custom fields. Here are some fantastic articles on adapting Explore to fit your needs: