Automation#18: Automatically Fetch Values from Contacts to the Tickets Module

Hello Everyone,

Welcome to this week's edition, where you can seamlessly sync fields from the Contacts to the Tickets module. For efficient business operations, it's crucial to have details mapped across different modules.

Zylker Secure offers antivirus services with various pricing plans for its customers. Each plan purchased is stored in the Customer module. Every time a customer submitted a query, it was challenging to refer to the plan and process the requirements accordingly. Zylker Secure solved this by mapping pricing plan data from the customer record to the tickets module. This automatic sync streamlined their business operations. Let's see how to implement this automation in your Desk portal.

Prerequisites

1. Create a custom field in the Ticket and Contact layout.

    1.1 Go to Setup >> Customization >> Layouts and Fields.
    1.2 Choose the required Department and select the Ticket layout under it.
    1.3 Create a custom field in the Ticket layout. Click Save.

    1.4 In Layouts, choose Contacts from the drop-down list for the same department.

    1.5 Click on the Contact layout and create the same custom field type in the Contacts layout.

          Click Save.  

Note: The field type in the Contacts layout must match the field type in the Tickets layout. For example, if one layout has a single line field, the other must also have a single line field. Similarly, if one has a picklist field, the other must have a matching custom picklist field.

Create a Workflow Rule

1. Go to Setup, choose Workflows under Automation.

2. Under Workflows, click Rules >> Create Rule.

In the Basic Information section,

3. Select Tickets from the drop-down menu under Module.

4. Enter a Rule Name and Description for the rule.

5. If you want to activate the rule right away, select the Active checkbox. Else, create the rule and activate it later.

6. Click Next.

In the Execute on section, follow these steps:

7. Select the Create checkbox to execute this rule every time a new ticket is created.  

8. Click Next.

9. Leave the Criteria blank and click Next.

10. In the Actions section, click the + icon and select New next to Custom Functions.

11. Enter a Name and Description for the custom function.

12. Under Argument Mapping, give a desired Method Name. Map the arguments as below: 

12.1. In the Argument Name field, type ContactID, and from the Value drop-down list select Contact Id under Contact Sections.

12.2. In the Argument Name field, type TicketID, and from the Value drop-down list select Ticket Id under Ticket Sections.

13. In the script window, insert the Custom Function given below:

1. orgId = "6*********0"; // replace orgId
2. ticketAPIName = "cf_name"; // replace API name of the custom field in Tickets layout
3. contactAPIName = "cf_name"; // replace API name of the custom field in Contacts layout
4. getContact = zoho.desk.getRecordById(orgId,"contacts",ContactID);
5. customFields = getContact.getJSON("cf");
6. updateTicket = zoho.desk.update(orgId,"tickets",TicketID,{"cf":{ticketAPIName:customFields.getJSON(contactAPIName)}});
7. info updateTicket;

Note: In line 1, place your OrgId. To access your OrgId, go to Setup >> Developer Space >> API.

In line 2, replace the value with the API name of the custom field created in the Tickets layout.

In line 3, replace the value with the API name of the custom field created in the Contacts layout.

 

To access API name of the custom field, Go to Setup>>Customization>>Layouts and Fields >> Fields List. Select the module, and you can find the API name of the custom field created.

14. Click Save to save the custom function.

15. Click Save again to save the workflow.

Implementation

When a ticket is created, the custom field in the Tickets layout is updated automatically by fetching the value from the custom field in the Contacts layout.

 

See you next week with another custom function coming your way!

• Topic Participants

• Lydia | Zoho Desk

  

• niazb

• Shivani | Zoho Desk

  

• Abdelrahman

• Prince Garg

• Sticky Posts

• Register for Zoho Desk Beta Community

  With the start of the year, we have decided to take a small step in making the life of our customers a little easier. We now have easy access to all our upcoming features and a faster way to request for beta access. We open betas for some of our features

• Share your Zoho Desk story with us!

  Tell us how you use Zoho Desk for your business and inspire others with your story. Be it a simple workflow rule that helps you navigate complex processes or a macro that saves your team a lot of time; share it here and help the community learn and grow with shared knowledge. 

• Tip #1: Learn to pick the right channels

  Mail, live chat, telephony, social media, web forms—there are so many support channels out there. Trying to pick the right channels to offer your customers can get pretty confusing. Emails are most useful when the customer wants to put things on record. However, escalated or complicated issues should not be resolved over email because it's slow and impersonal.  When you need immediate responses, live chat is more suitable. It's also quick and convenient, so it's the go-to channel for small issues. 

• Welcome to Zoho Desk Community - Say hello here!

  Hello everyone! Though we have been here for a while, it’s time to formally establish the Zoho Desk Community; we’re really happy to have you all here! This can be the place where you take a moment to introduce yourself to the rest of the community. We’d love to hear all about you, what you do, what company or industry you work for, how you use Zoho Desk and anything else that you will like to share! Here’s a little about me. I am Chinmayee. I have been associated with Zoho since 2014. I joined here

• Webinar 1: Blueprint for Customer Service

  With the launch of a host of new features in Zoho Desk, we thought it’ll be great to have a few webinars to help our customers make the most of them. We’re starting off with our most talked about feature, Blueprint in Zoho Desk. You can register for the Blueprint webinar here: The webinar will be delivered by our in-house product experts. This is a good opportunity to ask questions to our experts and understand how Blueprint can help you automate your service processes. We look forward to seeing

• Recent Topics

• Manage Testing Process in Zoho Sprints

  Agile framework supports a robust quality assurance system that incorporates continuous testing throughout the development lifecycle of the product. The agile testing team focuses on planning the testing around the development, identifying defects early

• Announcing the Zohotshots of the ZDC Hackathon 2025

  Hey everyone, The wait is finally over! After weeks of building, experimenting, and pushing creative boundaries, we’re excited to announce the winners of the second edition of the ZDC Hackathon. This edition brought together an incredible community of

• ZOHO CRM Button Integration

  Hi Team, I’m currently working with Zoho CRM along with a custom application where I fetch deal details from the CRM and use them based on my requirements for each deal. Now, I want to enhance this setup. I plan to create a button on the Deal Detail page

• Major journey crash and not loading. Zoho Marketing Automation

  Hi all. Last night (19MAR, 2026) Marketing Automation for a specific journey completely crashed, and since the crash the specific journey has failed to load at all (blank journey canvas, no journey appears, no menu accessible) but other separate journey's

• Candidate Assessments, no workflows.

  I have an issue where I would like to trigger a workflow based on a candidate assessment being completed. Sometimes a returning candidate will complete a second assessment, on completion the status of the candidate will be updated to "Unqualified" if

• Mail Merge in Zoho Desk

  Hello Team, Do we have an option of mail merge within Zoho Desk like we have in Zoho CRM? We have a requirement to generate some pdf file in the form of mail merge doc from the ticket.

• Workdrive backup and default storage selection

  Hi community, I have been informed by Zoho that workdrive will be the default storage mechanism for crm and projects. These 2 Apps seem to have different design on how they interact with workdrive for storage. 1. Crm: seems to have files saves at the

• Zoho vault filling in a form it's not supposed to fill in

  Hey there, I have a problem with ZOHO Vault autofill. In a software package, we have these options: For some reason zoho vault always replaces what's in the top option and fills a 2fa password in there, and then saves that value.. Meaning whatever was

• Zoho Booking Integration with Desk

  Just wanting to share something in case it helps someone else who may run into a similar use case as we did. Issue: Currently, the Zoho Booking integration with desk will drop a comment into the ticket when a customer books a time, however it won't change

• Let us view and export the full price books data from CRM

  I quote out of CRM, some of my clients have specialised pricing for specific products - therefore we use Price Books to manage these special prices. I can only see the breakdown of the products listed in the price book and the specialised pricing for

• Syncing calendar with Google Calendar doesn't work when events are sent to auto repeat

  Hi... The ZOHO CRM -- GOOGLE CALENDAR sync is broken. If I create a single event on either side, sync works, but if I create an event with auto repeat on either side it doesn't work. Furthermore, events created before the sync don't show up in the calendar.

• Organization wide Account and Contacts Visibility/Sharing Capabilities?

  Has anyone figured out a way to make visibility or sharing of Accounts and Contacts to be available across the entire organization without having to have every individual user edit their Sharing permissions? For our sales folks they need to be able to

• Notification of Interaction Assignment

  If a user is assigned an interaction, they should be notified via email. These are almost useless because if I assign an interaction for someone to respond to, they dont know that I assigned it to them without me telling them or them logging in and discovering

• Countries List Global Set- Complete with Phone Country Code and Continent.

  Dear Zoho Team I saw your recent addition to the Global Sets regarding the Countries list and states. While working on it, why didn't you also add things like Continent and Phone Country Code? Also, some ISO codes from some Countries/regions are mis

• Custom Display Field for Lookup Dropdowns in Zoho CRM

  Could Zoho CRM support changing the display field in lookup dropdowns, like Zoho Creator does? This would make it much easier to select the right record by showing a more useful field instead of only the default one. It would improve speed, clarity, and

• Message as bot

  I would like to be able to send a Cliq message truly as a bot. the current implementation of this function, while it sends the message as a bot it sends that message inside a chat from the user how authenticated the flow cliq connection instead of directly

• Books <-> CRM synchronisation with custom Fields

  Hello, We are synchronising Books Customers with CRM Accounts. In CRM Accounts I set up last year a "segments" multiselect field shown below In Books, I set up a custom multi-select field with the same value as in the CRM And set up the synchronisation inside Books. Want to synchronise the Books Segments with the CRM Segments, but the later doesn't exist, and another non-existing is there ?! First, I don't understand where the field Segmentation is coming from. Second, I set CRM Segmentation to sync

• Trouble with using Apostrophe in Name of Customers and Vendors

  We have had an ongoing issue with how the system recognizes an apostrophe in the name of customers and vendors. The search will not return any results for a name that includes the mark; ie one of our vendors names is "L'Heritage" and when entering the

• Recording overpayment?

  So a customer just overpaid me and how do I record this? I can't enter an amount that is higher than the invoice amount. Eg. Invoice is $195 and he sent $200. He's a reccuring customer so is there a way to record so that he has a $5 advance for future invoice?

• Introducing the New Zoho Assist Quick Support Plugin

  We are thrilled to announce the new Zoho Assist Quick Support Plugin, the upgraded and enhanced version of the Zoho Assist Customer Plugin. This new plugin allows organizations and IT administrators to deploy it directly onto their customers’ devices,

• Automate your signing workflows with Zoho Sign + n8n

  Hello! We're excited to announce that Zoho Sign is now available as a community node on n8n, a popular open-source workflow automation platform used by tens of thousands of teams worldwide. n8n lets you connect apps, APIs, and services through a visual

• Ask the Experts 27: Onboarding and managing support reps

  Hello everyone, We are back with our Ask the Experts (ATE) series for 2026. This year, we bring experts to help you address customer support challenges using Zoho Desk. For our first ATE, we are getting into the human side of customer support. "Every

• Retainer invoice in Zoho Finance modlue

  Hello, Is there a way of creating retainer invoices in the Zoho Finance module? If not can I request this is considered for future updates please.

• Spotlight #27: Embed visual collaboration Spaces in your presentations using the Vani add-on

  Hello everyone! This month’s spotlight feature is the Vani add-on for Zoho Show. Every time you pause your presentation to open another tab or pull up supporting material, you lose a bit of momentum. At Zoho Show, we design features that keep everything

• CRM

  Is anyone else experiencing this issue? Our company is not moving out of using Gmail's web app. It just has more features and is a better email program than Zoho Mail. Gmail has an extension (Zoho CRM for Gmail) that we're using but we've found some serious

• Good news! Calendar in Zoho CRM gets a face lift

  Dear Customers, We are delighted to unveil the revamped calendar UI in Zoho CRM. With a complete visual overhaul aligned with CRM for Everyone, the calendar now offers a more intuitive and flexible scheduling experience. What’s new? Distinguish activities

• Global Search / Command Palette in Live App

  Zoho Creator applications can contain many forms, reports, pages, and dashboards. While navigation inside the app is smooth, users still need to move through multiple menus or screens to find specific records or open particular modules. Currently, in

• New 2026 Application Themes

  Love the new themes - shame you can't get a little more granular with the colours, ie 3 different colours so one for the dropdown menu background. Also, I did have our logo above the application name but it appears you can't change logo placement position

• Smarter appointment allocation with round-robin distribution

  Greetings from the Zoho Bookings team! We’re excited to introduce the Appointment Distribution feature, a new way to decide how appointments are assigned among users. By default, appointments are distributed evenly across all event types, but this enhancement

• A2P 10DLC Opt-in Rejection Issue with Zoho Creator Public Form

  Hi everyone, I’m working on an A2P 10DLC SMS campaign and running into repeated rejections due to opt-in issues. I’m using Zoho Creator for the registration flow. The form is public (no login required). Users enter their phone number and there is an unchecked

• Make Quick Edits to Images Before Attaching

  Hello everyone, We have enhanced how attachments are handled in tickets to help agents preview and share files more efficiently in Zoho Desk. Agents can preview image attachments before adding them to tickets and edit them using attachment annotator.

• 3/18 オンライン勉強会のお知らせ Zoho ワークアウト （無料）

  ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。コミュニティチームの中野です。 3月開催のZoho ワークアウトの開催が決定しましたのでご案内します。 今回はZoomにて、オンライン開催します。 ▶︎参加登録はこちら（無料） https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/BoNTN7zYR8OvOPGShqBY0A ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Zoho ワークアウトとは？ Zoho ユーザー同士で交流しながら、サービスに関する疑問や不明点の解消を目指すイベントです。

• Extend color coding to custom picklist fields

  Objectively, Projects has the best UI of any Zoho app — clean, intuitive, and never feels bloated. Big props to whoever owns the design. Feature request: color coding for custom picklist field values in field customization. You've already done it in two

• New in Office Integrator: In-sheet text translation

  Hi users, We're pleased to introduce translation capability in the spreadsheet editor in Zoho Office Integrator. This allows you to translate the text in your spreadsheet's cells into 70+ languages from within your web app. Office Integrator's spreadsheet

• Streamline email communication with Out of Office configuration

  Managing user communication effectively is the key to ensuring timely responses and consistent messaging. However, when users are unavailable, the absence of an Out of Office response can lead to delays and missed expectations. Managing these settings

• Changing settings for auto logoff

  I've noticed that when I haven't used Cliq for a while, I have to re-enter my password. That is really clumsy, especially if you have a complicated password. Because it won't be filled in automatically. Is there a way to change that behaviour? We are

• A few Issues when using "Pay Bill via Check"

  We have quite a bit of issues with how paying for Bills via Check works. Would love some feedback from the Zoho team in case we are doing something incorrectly. 1. When we go from a vendor and select "Pay Bill via Check" option, we see ALL the outstanding

• Prevent tracking users from specific countries

  Currently, I’m receiving many bot visits from the United States and Malaysia. I would like these visits not to be recorded in SalesIQ. I already enabled the option to exclude traffic from cloud service providers, but I’m still receiving bot visits. Ideally,

• My client requires me to have custom pdf file names to except payment for invoices, how can I customize this before emailing.

  Hello! I love the program so far but there are a few things that are standing in the way. I hope you guys can code them in so I can keep the program for years to come. My client requires I customize the pdf file names I send in for billing. Can you please

• Edit Project Number?

  Hi all: We just signed up for a trial of zoho one, which includes ZoHo Projects. We've noticed there was a 'dummy project' preloaded in projects to help familiarize yourself with the software. We've created a couple of our own projects now but noticed since the dummy project was preloaded, our projects start with number 2 then 3, sequentially. Since it seems we will be keeping zoho past the trial, If we delete the dummy project, how do we get our own projects renumbered, beginning with 1? We'd like

• Next Page