The Zendesk Agent Workspace enables agents to manage Support, Chat, Talk, and messaging conversations within the same interface. Administrators can enable or disable this workspace for their Zendesk account.
This article contains the following sections:
- Preparing to enable or disable
- Enabling the agent workspace
- Coordinating call and chat traffic for agents
- Disabling the agent workspace
Related articles
Preparing to enable or disable
Before you can enable the agent workspace for the first time on an existing account, you'll need to migrate your Chat departments into groups. For details, see Migrating to the Zendesk Agent Workspace. For some new accounts created after July 28, 2020, the workspace may already be enabled by default and you don't need to migrate.
When you enable or disable the agent workspace, agents must refresh their browsers to see the change. Make sure your agents wrap up any chats, calls, or unsaved tickets when you enable or disable this feature. Otherwise, unsaved ticket replies, ongoing chats, and call recordings may be lost. When the workspace is enabled, Chat tickets cannot be updated using the Support mobile app.
If you prefer, you can test out the migration on a Sandbox account first. This gives you time to try out the agent workspace and train your agents before using the workspace in a production environment.
Enabling the agent workspace
To enable the agent workspace
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Settings > Agents. - In the Agent workspace section, select the Enable the Agent Workspace setting.
- Save your changes.
To prevent application conflicts and potential tracking issues, Zendesk does not recommend using the Support Chat app with the Zendesk Agent Workspace. When the agent workspace is enabled, the Support Chat app is automatically disabled on your account. If you subsequently disable the agent workspace and you want to use the Chat app, you have to manually re-enable it.
To get the full agent experience, after you enable the workspace, you can set up social messaging channels and Zendesk messaging channels for the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
Coordinating call and chat traffic for agents
When enabled, focus mode allows agents to be online on both Talk and Chat but only serves the agent one channel at a time. For example, if an agent is on a call, they will not be offered chats until the call and call wrap-up has ended. If an agent is responding to a chat or handling multiple chats (up to the maximum chat limit), then no calls are offered to the agent until all their chats have ended. This setting only applies for customers using Zendesk Talk and Chat, not Talk Partner Edition or social messaging.
To enable focus mode
- Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Settings > Agents.
- In the Focus Mode section, select Enable focus mode for live channels.
- Save your changes.
To disable focus mode
- Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Settings > Agents.
- In the Focus Mode section, deselect Enable focus mode for live channels.
- Save your changes.
Disabling the agent workspace
You can disable the agent workspace if desired and revert to a default Support interface without unified conversations. If your account has social messaging channels, you'll need to delete the social messaging channels in Admin Center and close out all your existing social messaging tickets before you disable the workspace.
To disable the agent workspace
- Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Settings > Agents.
- In the Agent workspace section, deselect the Enable the Agent Workspace setting.
- Save your changes.
When you disable the workspace, a message appears asking you to provide feedback. Your feedback will help Zendesk learn more about how you use this feature.
Disabling the agent workspace automatically disables focus mode.
- To restore support for social messaging channels in your account, set up the Social Messaging functionality in Support > Channel integrations. (Optional).
14 Comments
When disabling the Agent Workspace, I'm not able to create new Departments in the Chat product - it redirects me to create a new group instead (as if AW was still enabled).
Is this expected behavior?
I was expecting it to return to pre-agent workspace behavior and allow me to create new Departments.
Hi Jacob -
The product manager says that yes, this is expected behavior.
Why did the viewers list on chat get removed? That breaks the UI on the web and the mobile app. That is a huge feature for us
Hello Josh,
I would recommend posting in our product feedback forums regarding this topic so our developers can better understand your use case. This is the part of the community where our development team often replies to product changes such as these.
Best regards.
Does this also include the forums, meaning allowing us to manage forum posts/replies from within a single support agent interface instead of a separate system?
If not, why not?
And if not, please don't point me to the feedback forums, it's a black hole where feature requests go to disappear never to be seen again.
We disabled the workspace. It was too annoying to constantly scroll down to get the latest updates as well the chat disconnection popping up all the time even though there was no tab open for chat. Also had to constantly scroll down when writing a reply. This feature has not been tested out well enough to roll out for our needs.
Jay - it does not include Gather, unfortunately.
💩
Would the focus mode for live channels work for us if we are using the Aircall integration instead of the Talk Zendesk feature ?
Hi Catherine
Probably not, but I'm adding the Product Manager for this feature, Volkan Akdugan, so he can comment.
Hi Catherine
Not at the moment. Focus Mode is scoped to work with only with Zendesk live channels initially. We will consider adding Talk Partner Edition or any additional channels later based on the feedback.
Thanks,
Volkan
Hi Volkan Akdugan,
Thank you for your response. Keep me posted if this ever works !
Thank you,
Catherine
Hi there,
In the Agent Workspace, why is the customer's email address so challenging to access? I can only view it by clicking on the customer's name in the upper left corner and opening a new page(!), or by scrolling down into the ticket history. It's very time-consuming, when compared to the old view, https://share.getcloudapp.com/o0uekAoz
Additionally, I am unable to submit chat tickets as "Solved" and get this error message every time. Any recs? Our team wanted to launch the Agent Workspace, but because of these two issues, we've had to revert.
Hi there, bumping my post above. Thank you.
Please sign in to leave a comment.