When defining who is required to action an approval template, rather than specifying a specific individual or a specific group, you are able to dynamically define to who the approval will be sent to based on the requester of the Zendesk ticket. 

The 3 steps to set this up are:

Step 1: Create a custom user or organisation text field in Zendesk. 

Step 2: Populate the text field with the email addresses of the approvers for each requester or organisation. 

Step 3: In the approval template, specify which user or organisation field will be used to define who the approval will be sent to. 

Step 1: Creating a custom user or organisation text field in Zendesk. 

To create a custom user text field click on the cog in the main left bar, go into 'user fields' and on the right click to create a 'Text' field like this: 

Then name your text field and click on create. 

Step 2: Populate the text field with the email addresses of the approvers.

To populate the email address for each user there are 3 methods...

a) Manually enter a managers email address for each user.

To manually enter in an email address for each user you will need to go into each user's profile and scroll down to the field that you just created. You'll then need to fill out the email address of their manager like this: 

b) Bulk import users in Zendesk where this field is defined in the csv. file.

For instructions on how to do a bulk import of user information, Zendesk has a knowledge base article on how this can be done here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203661996-Bulk-importing-users- 

c) Integrate Zendesk with a 3rd party single source of truth.

You may be able to integrate Zendesk with another platform where the relationship between users and their respective approvers is predefined and maintained. Systems, where something like this may be possible are Okta or Workday. 

While SweetHawk does not provide or support integrations with these platforms, the ability of the approvals app to reference a Zendesk user or organisation field does facilitate the potential for an integration between a 3rd party user management software and Zendesk. 

Step 3: Specify the user or organisation field in the approval template.  

Before being able to specify the manager field in an approval template you will need to ensure the functionality is switched on under the settings tab like this: 

Then when creating an approval template in the Approvals app you can specify that it be sent to the approver's email address listed in the user or organisation field by first selecting "Manager" under the 'Primary approver' section like this: 

Once selected a new section will appear on the right. In that section you will then be able to specify the user text field that you created earlier that will contain the approver's email address for each user like this:

Once you submit/save the approval template, then whenever this approval template is used, the app will check if an email address is stored in the "Line manager's email address" user text field and send it to that email address. 

If that field is empty for that user then the app will send it to the fallback approver, in this case, Bruce Wilson. 

Note that since each approval template allows you to specify a different user or organisation manager field, you are able to create different processes and chains of command depending on the approval template being used.  For each different process, it's a matter of repeating the 3 steps above to create the different flows required.