The Zendesk Agent Workspace enables agents to work seamlessly across Zendesk channels, all within a single ticket interface. Agents can use the appropriate channels to address issues, without being restricted to the channel in which the customer originally made contact.
When enabled by an administrator, agents can manage Support, Chat, and Talk conversations within the same Support ticket. They don’t have to switch between dashboards to view and track customers issues. They have a full, customer-centric view of their work, enabling them to provide faster, better, and more personalized service. If configured, agents can also receive and reply to social messages and Zendesk messages.
Watch this video for an overview of the Zendesk Agent Workspace:
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Sample ticket
The following is a sample ticket in the workspace.
Key elements of this ticket include:
- Ticket conversations can include Support, Chat, and Talk. Agents can also receive and reply to social messages.
- Agent status (online, away, or invisible) and chats served appear at the top of the page.
- Agents can open the Talk console at the top of the page to set Talk status and manage calls from the workspace.
- Customer context information, including interaction history, appears on the right side. Agents can use the context panel to toggle between customer context and Apps. If your account includes Guide, agents can also use the Knowledge panel to search, link, and quote your help center content in tickets.
- To be compatible with chats and provide a more-natural conversation flow, ticket comments are arranged from oldest to newest, with the newest comments at the bottom.
- The visitor path shows a list of websites the requester has viewed. The interaction history shows a list of Support events.
Sample workflow
Here’s the sample workflow shown in this ticket:
- While working with Support tickets in her queue, Agent Jackie receives a chat notification from her customer Maggie. Maggie wants to know the status of a refund.
- From within the ticket, Jackie replies to Maggie by chat to let her know her refund has been processed. Jackie promises to email Maggie the reference number.
- Instead of keeping Maggie waiting online, Jackie ends the chat and takes a few minutes to look up the reference number for the refund.
- When Jackie finds the reference number, she sends an email reply to Maggie. She includes the refund reference number and details about the refund status.
- If Maggie has questions about the refund, Jackie can use the Talk console in the workspace to call Maggie and explain details.
Benefits
Jackie likes the workspace because she doesn’t have to swap between her Support tickets, the Chat dashboard, and her office switchboard. She has a clean, unified record of her interactions with Maggie to solve her issue. Jackie can swap seamlessly between channels, picking the best one as appropriate. She uses chats for quick, timely, interactive conversations, relies on email for longer, follow-up communications, and uses phone calls for urgent, sensitive, or complex matters.
Additional features
Additional capabilities in the workspace include:
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
|
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Agents can see the customer’s chat status in their Support tickets. See Using ticket tabs to manage conversations. |
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Agents can serve or end a chat from the ticket. |
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Agents can set their chat and messaging status. |
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Agents can set their talk status. |
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Agents can switch to a call and start it directly from within a ticket conversation. |
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Agents can forward, pause, or end calls from the ticket. |
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Agents can use the Talk console to receive and place calls. |
Messaging support in the Zendesk Agent Workspace
Social messaging and Zendesk messaging is supported in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. When configured, agents can receive and reply to social messages and Zendesk messages in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. These messages appear as part of a unified conversation within the ticket. For more information, see Receiving and sending messages in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
Social messaging channels and Zendesk messaging channels for the Zendesk Agent Workspace are configured in Zendesk Admin Center. For more information, see About messaging channels in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
40 Comments
I don't see any option to translate the chat. Has the translation feature been removed?
Hi Jordan. Chat translate is not supported for this EAP.
Is there a plan to add this? I hope the current agent dashboard won't be discontinued without adding this feature to the new dashboard.
Hey Jordan,
Thanks for taking the time to share this with us! I was able to confirm with our PM's that this is something they're looking into adding in the future but no ETA to provide yet.
Let me know if you have any other questions :)
Hi Lisa Kelly,
This is a great new functionality. Any ETA when the Agent Workspace will be live for everyone?
Hi Armen, Unfortunately. I cannot comment on future product development in this space. Have you contacted your Zendesk account representative?
Just some feedback (after using it for 1 hour):
Overall I like it. I wish we could choose to have the 'public reply'/'internal note' box stick to the bottom of the ticket when we scroll through past conversation so that we can always type there and don't need to be at the most recent part of the conversation.
I also would like to have the option to move the reply/note box to the top (where it was). My colleague commented that she feels like she's having to look down a lot more (we have quite big screens so it sits low on the screen).
I like having the user tab on the right - seems very useful!
Thanks!
When activating and chatting this function, the Hangul input function does not work properly.
There is no problem when answering in public, but the Korean input function does not work properly only when chatting.
When can this problem be solved?
Hey 신승빈,
I'm going to bring this into a ticket so our Customer Advocacy team can troubleshoot this with you.
Thanks for taking the time to report this to us!
Hi all,
I would like to change the answer field to appear at the top, I have received many complaints from agents. They have to do a lot of scrolling when the ticket is very long.
Thanks,
Hi Abel,
If you'd like to create a feature request for this you can post in out Feedback on Support topic, we've got a guide for writing effective feedback posts up to help.
Hi!
I don't see the option to transfer the chat to another agent. Is that coming later, with translations?
Hi Masha,
When you were setting up the agent workspace, did you complete the migration of chat departments to support groups?
The chat transfer option is only available in the agent workspace if that step has been completed.
We've got directions for it in our Migrating to the Zendesk Agent Workspace guide.
Hi All,
From a quick glance, this requires the purchase of the Social Messaging add-on - as I need this capability primarily for Chat - does this mean I still need the chat licences as well as the Social Messaging add-on?
Dan.
Hi Daniel,
The plan requirement for agent workspaces is that you be on the Suite plan, which has chat as part of its included bundle. You do not need the Social Messaging add-on as well if you're not planning to connect any social media accounts to Zendesk (if that ever changed you could get the add-on and be able to use it with the agent workspaces).
This looks great, but one thing missing my agents mentioned was the ability to see the user information such as browser or device that you can see in chat. It is great to still see the visitor path but the device and browser info is usually very helpful for troubleshooting.
Just enabled the new Agent Workspace and everything looks great but the email sorting is not great for me or my colleagues.
Please tell me there is a way to move the Reply Box back to the top of the ticket and sort emails from Newest to Oldest rather than Oldest to Newest :(
We just enabled the new Agent Workspace and noticed that the clickthrough links on tickets created via the Channel Framework are no longer showing. Will we need to do something on our end to get the links to show again? Also, the tickets created through my Channel Framework integration are truncating the body of the text on the tickets. Is there some way I can change this behavior as well?
Hi,
I have a couple of questions about AW:
@Matt, could you provide some additional information on why changing this is affecting you and your colleague? There's no way to change the sorting currently but I'm happy to pass your feedback along to our PM's with some additional context.
@Tolulope I'm going to create a ticket on your behalf so our team can dig into this further for you.
@Andrei, hang tight as I'm reaching out to the appropriate team for your questions :)
Hi @Brett, thanks for your question!
There's two issues for our instance -
1. The size of the Composer is too small. When the workspace was active, we had to scroll the screen down after every line we typed a line of text.
2. It's not convenient or time friendly to have to scroll through a series of back and forth emails to get to the clients response at the bottom.
I understand and really enjoy the idea of the composer being at the bottom for Chat and social media messages. However, for email - newest to oldest is preferable with the composer on top. I need to be able to react to current information swiftly and keep our SLAs for full resolution time down.
I would be happy to answer any other questions.
Thanks!
Awesome! Thanks for sharing this Matt! I'll pass this feedback along to the appropriate team :)
Hello,
Similar to other posters above, is there any way - within the new Agent Workspace - to have the reply box at the top of the thread in a ticket (ie above the last interaction) like it used to be rather than at the bottom of the thread. Having to scroll all the way to the bottom / start of a thread and not be able to easily reference the last communication seems a bit counter-intuitive
Thanks!
@David, There's no way to move the reply box currently but I have passed this feedback along to the appropriate team. Thanks for taking the time to share this with us!
@Andrei,
Typically, solved tickets are reopened on a new response from the end-user.
Existing experience: New response from end-user is displayed in Notifier App
Currently looking into this but are all agents experiencing this on your account?
Any agent can respond to the ticket via Reply on <social messaging channel>. However, the PM's are looking into improving this experience.
Hope this helps!
Hi! I agree with Matt
When clicking on a ticket, the ticket opens at the first message (oldest) and you have to scroll all the way down to the most recent (and the reply box). The reply box not being sticky means there's a lot of scrolling back and forth to see previous messages and then type a response. (Matt's number 2 issue)
The reply also does not move the page down when you are typing. What I mean by this is that if you response is a bit longer than the current screen can show you, you end up typing off screen and you have to manually scroll to the new bottom of the screen to see what you are typing. It's very annoying. (Matt's number 1 issue)
Thanks!
Hi Brett - Community Manager,
Regarding Last updater issue - It happens for all agents; it always appears that the agent was the last updater.
I also have another question. When a client reply back to Pending and Hold tickets we don’t get any notification. I’m assuming that it happens because it saves the assignee but the problem is that the assignee will not be available at all times. Is this the case?
Hey Andrei,
Just to confirm, are you referring to an email notification that you'd like to receive when the client replies to a Pending or On-hold ticket? If so, you could set up a trigger that sends out the notification to the group.
Let me know if I'm misunderstanding your question.
Hi Brett Bowser,
No, I mean real-time notifications from Messaging tickets on the top bar menu.
Hi Andrei,
Thank you for writing in. I am going to answer your question in-line -
Ticket status changes from Solved to Open when end-user replies. Agent will see notifications when their assigned tickets receive new, end-user reply. There will be notifications when Solved Messaging Tickets get new replies and get reopened, only for tickets assigned to the agent.
Sounds like a bug. We can look into this.
Yes, the other agent will need to assign the conversation to themselves or get the triaging lead to assign the ticket to the second agent.
- Prakruti
We're seeing behavior where the default visibility (internal/public) isn't respected in the Agent workspace. Instead, it seems to match the visibility of the last comment. Is this expected behavior? I understand why this might be useful in a rapid fire chat; however, it's very different behavior than what is set in the defaults (Settings -> Tickets) and what our agents have grown accustomed to over the years.
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