Migrating to the Zendesk Agent Workspace

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:

• Before you migrate
• About the migration
• Starting the migration
• After the migration

Related articles

• About the Zendesk Agent Workspace. 
• Resources for migrating to the Zendesk Agent Workspace
• Migrating social messaging channels to the Zendesk Agent Workspace

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 you can enable the workspace, you have to migrate your account. During migration, your Chat departments are merged into Support groups. This enables you to manage collections of agents in one location, rather than switching between two separate locations. Mapping Chat departments to Support groups is necessary for Chat transfer to work properly in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

Note: The migration from Chat departments to Support groups can't be reversed.

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.

Important: Only migrate your account when Chat traffic is stopped and there are no ongoing chats. Otherwise, your active chat sessions may be lost.

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:

1. 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.

   

2. Click Get started.

   A page appears with a description of what happens during the migration.

   

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. Select Enable the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
7. 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.

After migration, open (or refresh) the Chat dashboard.

• 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.

  

Note: If you use custom Apps in your account, after migrating Chat departments to Support groups, your App developers should update all public APIs for Chat department Create, Update, and Delete to public APIs for Support group Create, Update, and Delete.