A practical guide to Zendesk task management in 2025

Let’s imagine a common scenario. Your support team needs to set up a new employee. The request kicks off as a Zendesk ticket, but the checklist for it is sitting in Notion. The step-by-step instructions? Buried in a Google Doc. And all the little questions and updates are happening over in Slack. Before you know it, you’re drowning in tabs and context-switching, which just wastes time and makes it easy for things to slip through the cracks.

Sound familiar?

While Zendesk is brilliant for managing customer conversations, things can get messy when you’re trying to handle internal, multi-step projects. The platform wasn’t really designed for complex task management, which often leaves teams patching together a system that’s, well, a bit clunky.

This guide will walk you through the different ways you can handle Zendesk task management. We’ll start with the built-in features, check out some popular third-party apps, and then introduce a more modern, AI-powered way to get rid of the manual work for good.

What is Zendesk task management?

At its core, Zendesk task management is simply about the tools and methods you use to track, assign, and complete work that’s more involved than a single customer reply. We’re talking about internal processes like escalating a bug report, onboarding a new hire, handling an IT change request, or any workflow that needs multiple steps and a bit of back-and-forth between team members.

The whole point is to keep these processes organized right inside your help desk. When tasks live inside Zendesk, you have a clear line of sight on who’s doing what, and nothing gets lost in a forgotten email thread or a separate project tool.

Zendesk does have a native ticket type called "Task" to help with this, but as workflows get more complicated, most teams find they need something with a little more horsepower.

Using native Zendesk features

The first stop for most teams is Zendesk’s own toolkit. It’s already there and it doesn’t cost extra, but you’ll likely bump into its limitations pretty quickly.

The ‘task’ ticket type

Zendesk lets you set a ticket’s type to "Task," which is a simple way to separate these internal to-dos from regular customer questions. You can assign the task to an agent and, crucially, give it a due date. This works just fine for straightforward, one-off jobs like, "Follow up with the finance team about invoice #123."

Checklists using custom fields and forms

For more structured processes, a common workaround is to build a makeshift checklist using custom fields. You can create a specific ticket form for something like "New Laptop Setup" and add a series of checkboxes for each step: "Order laptop," "Install software," "Configure accounts," and so on. An agent can then tick off each item as they go. If you browse community forums, you’ll see this recommended a lot for teams trying to avoid paying for another app.

The limitations of native tools

But this is where the out-of-the-box solution starts to feel a bit strained, echoing the frustrations you’ll often find on Reddit threads.

Reddit

• No sub-tasks: You can’t break a big task into smaller pieces and assign them to different people. That "New Laptop Setup" ticket can only be assigned to one person at a time, even if one person orders the hardware and another sets up the software.

• You can’t see the big picture: There’s no Kanban board or high-level project view to get a quick snapshot of where everything stands. You’re left trying to manage project-style work from a standard ticket queue, which is clunky for tracking progress.

• Knowledge is disconnected: The task is in Zendesk, but the "how-to" guide is probably in a Google Doc or a Confluence page. This means agents are constantly switching between tools, which burns time and increases the odds of missing a step.

• It’s all manual: From checking a box to updating the status, every single action has to be done by an agent. It’s tedious, time-consuming, and a perfect recipe for human error.

Extending Zendesk with third-party apps

Because Zendesk’s native features have these gaps, a whole ecosystem of apps has appeared on the Zendesk Marketplace to help out.

The marketplace solution: An overview of apps like SweetHawk

If you spend any time in Zendesk communities, you’ll see SweetHawk’s Tasks & Subtickets app mentioned again and again. It’s built to solve the exact problems we just talked about. It lets you add checklists and create sub-tickets (also called child tickets) right inside the Zendesk interface.

This is a huge improvement. It keeps the entire workflow inside Zendesk, so you aren’t trying to manage tasks in a separate tool like Notion or Asana. You can set up templates for recurring projects and make sure every step is covered.

A look at the Zendesk Marketplace, where users can find third-party apps for Zendesk task management.

Pricing for popular apps

Of course, this extra functionality comes at a price. Here’s a quick look at what one of the most popular options will run you.

While $6 per agent might not seem like a lot on its own, it’s one more subscription to manage, and those costs can add up, especially for larger teams.

The downside of adding more apps

Here’s the catch: while apps like SweetHawk give you a much nicer interface, they don’t actually fix the root problem with the workflow itself.

• It’s still a manual process: The app provides a clean checklist, but an agent still has to read each task, go do the work somewhere else, and then come back to check the box. The app helps organize the work, but it doesn’t do the work for you.

• Knowledge is still separate: The app has no idea what’s written in your Confluence pages, Google Docs, or old ticket history. Your agent is still the one who has to connect the instructions to the action.

• More complexity and cost: It’s another tool to pay for, set up, and keep updated. For teams already feeling a bit of tool fatigue, this can feel like a step in the wrong direction.

A modern approach to Zendesk task management: Automating workflows

The real objective shouldn’t just be to get better at tracking tasks, but to get rid of the manual work that comes with them. This is where task management is heading next.

Why task lists aren’t the answer

The bottleneck isn’t the lack of a good checklist; it’s the hours of hands-on work needed to complete everything on it. The perfect solution wouldn’t just give you a list. It would read the task, find the right information from your knowledge base, do the work, and let you know when it’s done.

Unifying knowledge for true automation with eesel AI

This is where eesel AI comes in. It’s an AI platform that connects directly to the tools you already use. Its big advantage is that it links up not just with your help desk, but with all your scattered knowledge sources, from Confluence and Notion to Google Docs and even your past ticket history.

This creates a single, intelligent hub that understands both the task it needs to do and the steps required to do it. You can get eesel AI’s AI Agent up and running in just a few minutes, and it fits right into your existing help desk setup without making you change how your team works.

An infographic showing how eesel AI unifies scattered knowledge for better Zendesk task management.

How eesel AI automates complex Zendesk task management

Let’s circle back to our "New Employee Onboarding" ticket. A traditional app gives you a checklist to follow. An eesel AI agent can take over the whole thing:

1. It automatically reads the new ticket when it comes in.

2. It finds your onboarding guide in Confluence to learn all the steps.

3. It uses custom actions to create user accounts in other systems by talking to their APIs.

4. It posts a welcome message in the correct Slack channel.

5. It updates the Zendesk ticket with its progress and closes it out when everything is finished.

This transforms a manual task that could take hours into a fully autonomous workflow. With features like custom actions, you can teach the AI to interact with any of your internal tools. With selective automation, you always have the final say, choosing exactly which tickets the AI should handle. And with the ability to simulate on past tickets, you can test everything out and get comfortable before you go live.

A look at eesel AI's simulation feature, which allows testing of Zendesk task management automation on past tickets.

Move beyond checklists to intelligent Zendesk task management automation

The way we think about Zendesk task management is changing. We started with clunky, limited native tools. Then we moved on to third-party apps that gave us a better interface but were still completely manual. Now, we’re arriving at true, AI-powered workflow automation.

The most efficient way to manage a task is to have an AI agent do it for you. This frees up a ton of time, cuts down on human error, and lets your team focus on the kind of work that actually requires their expertise.

The best task management system isn’t a better list, it’s a system where the tasks complete themselves.

Ready to stop checking boxes and start automating workflows? Try eesel AI for free and see how you can automate your most complex Zendesk tasks in minutes.