This article describes how to use tabs to help manage conversations in Zendesk agent interfaces. Some channel types shown in this article may not be available in your account, depending on which channels your administrator has configured.
As a busy agent using the Zendesk Agent Workspace, you may have to manage multiple conversations at the same time. You can use tabs at the top of the interface to help you move easily between many types of conversations (chats, phone, email, and messages). Tabs provide important information and help you see which conversations are still active and which conversations are waiting for your reply.
If your administrator has not enabled the Zendesk Agent Workspace, you can also use tabs to help manage your tickets in the Support agent interface.
To help you manage your conversations, the tabs provide you with useful information to keep you on-track with your customers.
Tabs can include:
- Icons to show the conversation type. For example, email, chat, phone, or message application.
- Requester name
- First line of the last successful reply between the agent assigned to the ticket and the requester (for chat and messaging).
- Ticket ID number (except for chats, messaging, and phone calls).
Here are a few examples:
| Tab | Description | Channel |
|---|---|---|
 |
New message (red dot) | Any channel type, except phone |
 |
Conversation is active (green dot) | Any channel type, except email |
 |
Conversation is inactive or the agent is away (yellow icon) | Any channel type, except email |
 |
Conversation (or call) has ended (no color) | Any channel type |
 |
User is typing | Any channel type, except phone, email |
 |
Unsaved changes in the ticket (blue dot) | Any channel type |
Other benefits of tabs include:
- Because phone conversations and live chats typically require the most immediate responses, tabs for these types of conversations automatically move to the left side of the interface, so they don’t get overlooked when you’re working on multiple conversations.
- Channels that have “live” conversations, such as chats, phone calls, or messages, show when a conversation is active, inactive, or ended. A conversation is inactive if no messages have been sent or received after a certain period of time. For example, ten minutes for social messages.
- To see conversation details, hold your mouse pointer over a tab.
9 Comments
Are these changes only available in the combined Agent workspace? We just have Support, but the "new message" dot would be super useful in Support (and in views) to note a new message/post that the agent has not seen yet.
My team is concerned - and a bit frustated b/c the ticket number is no longer part of the tab. For our non chat, non talk agents, this new format makes it more difficult to work their tickets.
+1 we were using the ticket number present in the tab...
When will translation be a part of the new agent workspace?
Hi all!
@...
The unread message count indicator in tabs will be on Agent Workspace only.
Sandata Technologies, LLC and Frédéric
The ticket ID could still be found in the tab tooltips through hovering over the tabs with your mouse. The primary text on tabs is now requestor instead of ticket subject, so that agents could refer to specific conversations from the customer name rather than the ticket ID.
Reached out to y'all both privately to find out more about how this impacts agents' operational efficiency on your end.
@...
There's an early access program for that which starts on 8/28, you could reach out to your customer success executive to get you signed up for it!
Cheers,
JJ
JJ Miclat our team would like to switch over to the new Admin view, but the team loves the subject line for each tab. Is it not possible anymore to have the subject line rather than the requestor?
Thanks,
Kyle Gibbosn
Hey guys, we recently just switched to Agent Workspace but found it quite confusing which tickets are open in which tabs, and find that Ticket Subject (even just the first part of it) is much more useful than the requester name (especially when the user has several tabs open, each from the same requester!).
Is there any chance of either changing this back to Subject, or at least making it configurable to be Subject OR requester name?
Hey Pat,
It's currently not possible to change the primary text on tabs. This was an intentional design change since the Agent Workspace is heavily based on having live conversations within the Support interface, so displaying the requester's (or visitor's) name in the tabs will be more useful to agents than having multiple tabs showing “Conversation with XYZ”.
As an alternative, agents can still view the ticket subject by hovering over the tab itself as well.
Eric G. Gao | Technical Support Architect | Zendesk
Thanks for responding Eric. Because we are a B2B organisation, we receive support tickets from the same people multiple times per week (sometimes per day!). In these situations, it's not helpful to show the name of the requestor in the ticket tab. I feel like this design was only built for B2C organisations where you rarely contact the same customer multiple times. It'd be great if this was at least configurable to switch between either the requester name or the first part of the Subject.
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