This article describes how to migrate your account to use the Zendesk Agent Workspace, which enables agents to manage Support, Chat, Talk, and messaging conversations within the same interface.
This article includes the following sections:
Related articles
Before you migrate
The Agent Workspace provides a completely-new working environment for your agents with a great set of tools to manage interactive, cross-channel conversations. The benefits are significant, but there are some considerations.
Make sure you consider these items before you migrate:
- Enabling (or disabling) the workspace applies to your entire account. You cannot restrict the enablement to individual agents or agent groups. If you have an Enterprise account, you can test out the enablement in a Sandbox first before you activate it in your production account. See preparing to enable or disable.
- Chat departments and agent groups are merged. Admins manage agents through Support groups instead of departments on the Chat dashboard. Admins have a single location for managing collections of agents instead of switching between interfaces. See Managing groups of agents.
Important: This merge cannot be reversed. After migration, all activities associated with adding, updating, and deleting groups of agents in Support will impact Chat departments.
- To provide a more-natural flow, conversations are arranged with the most-recent comments at the end of the flow. This takes some adjustment for agents who work with email messages and are familiar with seeing the latest comment at the top of the ticket. See Sample ticket.
- Customer context has moved to a new location in the ticket interface. It has been expanded to include information from third-party applications. See Viewing customer context.
- Chats are served directly from the ticket interface, agents cannot serve chats from the Chat dashboard. Agents have one single location to manage all their conversations (chats, social messages, Zendesk messages). See Answering a message.
- Agents cannot see the contents of a chat or message before accepting it, but chat routing for messaging has been improved to help get chats and messages to the right agents at the right time. See Setting triggers, automations, and views for messaging and Business rules for Zendesk messaging.
- Multi-agent chats are not supported, but agents can transfer chats to other agents. See Sharing chats with other agents. The chat visitor path is only available during a live chat.
- The ticket tab interface in the workspace has changed to work better with interactive conversations. Ticket numbers aren’t included on chat and messaging ticket tabs, but conversation status, recent comments, and channel type are highlighted. See Using ticket tabs to manage conversations.
- The composer maintains separate text buffers for each conversation type (for example, internal notes vs public comments). This may be confusing for agents when they first start to use it, but it enables them to switch quickly between threads without losing content. See Switching channels in the composer.
- The workspace includes native ticket redaction which provides additional functionality that the Zendesk Ticket Redaction app doesn’t support. Zendesk recommends uninstalling the app and using native redaction, unless you need the app for bulk ticket redactions. Ticket redaction via API commands is fully supported.
Finally, it’s important to check out the current product limitations to see how they might impact your particular situation. For example, if your account serves a very high volume of chats or if you work with many Asian languages. See Limitations for the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
About the migration
Before migration:
- Chat agents are arranged in departments.
- Support agents are arranged in groups.
- Groups and departments are managed from Support and Chat respectively.
After migration:
- No more departments. Agents are organized in groups.
- Administrators manage groups (for Chat and Support) from Support settings.
Migration is required only once for your account. After that, you can enable and disable the agent workspace as desired, without restarting the migration. Going forward, you’ll manage all your agents from Support settings. The migration from Chat departments to Support groups can't be reversed.
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.
Starting the migration
To prepare your account for the Zendesk Agent Workspace, Zendesk Support provides a migration wizard to help you update your account.
Starting on July 28, 2020 the Zendesk Agent Workspace is enabled by default on some new Support Suite and Support accounts. You don't need to migrate your account unless you see a Get started button in Admin > Settings > Agents.
To start the migration:
- In Support, click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Settings > Agents.
If the agent workspace is available on your account, you’ll see a highlighted section.
- Click Get started.
A page appears with a description of what happens during the migration.
- Review the description, then click Next to proceed.
If you have groups and departments with the same names, a page appears with instructions on How to handle duplicate names. If there’s no duplication, this page does not appear.
To fix the duplication, you can:
- Automatically merge groups and departments with the same name into a single group. This is the default.
For example, if you have a Chat department named General and a Support group named General, all agents in the General Chat department are combined with all the agents in the General Support group, resulting in one large General group that included both types of agents.
- Keep the groups separate and append the word copy to similarly-named groups.
For example, if you have a Chat department named General and an Support group named General, the Support group is renamed General_copy to distinguish it from the existing Chat department. The Support agents remain in the renamed General_copy group and the Chat agents are moved to the General_copy group.
- Automatically merge groups and departments with the same name into a single group. This is the default.
- If necessary, select Automatically merge or Don’t merge, then click Migrate.
Depending on how many departments you have, it may take a few minutes or hours for the migration to complete.
- When the migration is complete, return to Admin (
) > Settings > Agents.
You should see a checkbox to enable the workspace. You may need to refresh your browser to see the change.
- Select Enable the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
- Save your changes.
A tutorial appears that shows you how to use the new workspace.
After the migration
Once migration is complete and the workspace is enabled, agents can start serving chats from the Zendesk Agent Workspace and administrators can manage agents in Support groups, instead of Chat departments. For more information on how to work with the Zendesk Agent Workspace, see Documentation Resources.
- All groups are listed in the Department tab on the Chat dashboard.
- Department settings on the Chat dashboard are changed. See example below. To edit group names, descriptions, and group memberships, you are automatically redirected to Admin (
) > Manage > People > Groups in Support.
7 Comments
Hi Team. The migration of groups was launched today ( which we weren't aware will happen) and currently we have serious issues with our chat availability. Upon trying to start chat on the widget we receive information "No agents available". I've checked group/departments, operating hours etc. and don't see any issues for the time being. I've sent an email to agentworkspace@zendesk.com as well.
+1, I have a ticket open with Zendesk support (Id #5226305). We've taken chat offline completely for now, as it's not working.
Both our chat bot (Ultimate AI) and Stitch Data (to export to DWH) are broken, and we're not even in the EAP anymore as we're not a Zendesk Suite user.
Edit: Zendesk support "rebooted" our chat instance which should fix the issues we were experiencing with routing and operating hours, but the fact remains we're now in some hybrid support-chat scheme without any benefits, but some massive downsides (+18 groups in Zendesk Support, no custom role ability anymore to change department members, etc).
Very unlucky, we´ve recently reworked our Groups in Support and without any notice, the Chat Groups are now in Support, we more like to not see them here, get a notification and device Chat Agents, we put manually in which existing groups
Hi Wobr,
Thank you for the comments! This article covers a specific migration from the existing Support agent interface to the new Zendesk Agent Interface. But, perhaps our Community team can take a look at your data migration recommendation. I'll forward your comment to our Community team.
We will not be able to enable the workspace for quite some time because it is an account level setting. While we're excited about the agent workspace, for us it has not insignificant training & engineering impacts (we have to update widget code to assign group vs dept).
Is there any possibility Zendesk will allow the agent workspace to be enabled on an agent/group/role level vs an account level?
Hi,
We are not able to pass user information to Zendesk agent workspace.
We are using webwidget and want to pass information we have on users to our agents, so that they can handle customers easily. We classify customers on our platform & would like to reflect the same on agent dashboard.
Can anyone help?
Currently, we are trying to authenticate visitors which we are yet to figure out how to do it correctly. Can anyone confirm that we are in right direction at least?
Thanks
Hi Arpit,
Thanks for reaching out!
I can see that you also contacted us on Friday and described your question in more detail during the chat that you had with one of the advocates. I'd like to confirm that your request is currently being looked at.
Our team will follow up with you with further information over the ticket that was created through this chat.
Please let us know if you have questions in the meantime!
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