Searching Records in your Help Desk

Searching Records in your Help Desk

The Search option helps you locate records, including Tickets, Customers, Articles, Products, and Activities without having to go through the entire list, thus saving time in finding them. Four kinds of search options are available in Zoho Desk:
  1. Quick Search
  2. Faceted Search
  3. Advanced Search
  4. Search Records by Alphabets (Customers module only)
Quick Search
Quick Search enables you to search for specific record(s) from all of your modules or a particular module by entering the search keywords. You can specify the modules in which the search should be carried out.
To perform a search:
  1. Click the Search icon (  ) on the top pane.
  2. Enter the search keywords in the search box.
    Zoho Desk predicts what you're looking for and starts to show results for your search from the current module. 
  3. If you would like to search through all of the modules, click All inside the Predictions box.
  4. Click the Search icon (  ) and select Search in All Departments to search across all of your departments.
    If you still can't find the record in the Predictions box hit enter to perform a faceted search.



Faceted Search
Faceted search categorizes the search results based on common facets like status, channel, priority, etc., enabling you to quickly navigate to the exact record that you are looking for. Each time you click a facet value, the set of search results is reduced to only the items that have that value. Additional clicks continue to narrow down the search—the previous facet values are remembered and applied again.

To perform a faceted search:
  1. Click the Search icon (  ) on the top pane.
  2. Enter the search keywords in the search box.
  3. Hit Enter ignoring the Predictions box. 
    The records matching the search keywords will be listed.
  4. Click the facet values on the left panel to only show results in the given facets.
    The breadcrumb at the top of the page displays the facet values you've chosen.
  5. Keep selecting the facet values until the desired records are found.



Note:
  • You can also perform a faceted search from the All Departments view. In this case, the Department is added as a facet and displays their entities as facet values.

Advanced Search
Advanced search enables you to search records by specifying custom search criteria.
To search records using criteria:
  1. On the Module home page, click the Search icon (  ) on the top pane.
    When the icon is clicked, the search area will transition into a bar.
  2. Click the Search icon (  ) on the search bar.
  3. Click Advanced Search on the search drop-down list.
  4. On 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. 
  5. Click Search. 


You can create a custom view out of the search criteria to access them in future. To create a custom view of the advanced search parameters, click Save as Custom View on 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. It directly takes you to the matching records that starts with the selected alphabet.
To search by alphabet:
  1. Click the Customers module.
  2. On 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 above steps to search for accounts. Also, the alphabet search option will search records by their First name. If you want to search records by the Last Name, you need to change the Name Format under Setup.

Sort and View Search Results
While you perform a quick search, you can sort the search results according to your preference.
You can sort the results by:
  • Modified Time
  • Relevance



The Modified Time function 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.

By default, Zoho Desk displays 10 records per search results page. However, you can click the More Actions icon (  ) to choose the number of records to be displayed on a page. A maximum of 50 records can be viewed per page.

Note:
  • The option to sort the search results is not available for Advanced Search.

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