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can use the appropriate channels to address issues, without being restricted to the channel in which the customer originally made contact.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 activated by an administrator, agents can manage Support, Messaging, 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.
Watch this video for an overview of the Zendesk Agent Workspace:
This article contains the following topics:
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 and web messages.
- Messaging and chat notifications appear at the top of the page.
- Agents can open the Talk console at the top of the page and manage calls from the workspace.
- With omnichannel routing, you can automatically direct agent workload across multiple channels to ensure that the highest-priority tickets are assigned to the agents who are most available to work on them.
- Agents can set their status from a single, unified menu.
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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 a help center, agents can use the Knowledge panel to search, link, and quote your help center content in tickets.
If your account has side conversations activated, agents can use the context panel to create and manage side conversations on a ticket.
If your account has custom objects activated, agents can use the context panel to preview custom object records related to the ticket.
- To be compatible with messaging and chats and provide a more natural conversation order, ticket comments are arranged from oldest to newest, with the newest comments at the bottom. For customers with plans that support custom layouts, you can change the order.
- 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 |
---|---|
|
Agents can see the customer’s chat and messaging 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 status for multiple channels from a single, unified status menu. |
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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 and web messaging are supported in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. When configured, agents can receive and reply to social and web 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.
Messaging channels for the Zendesk Agent Workspace are configured in Zendesk Admin Center. For more information, see Getting started with web and mobile messaging and Getting started with social messaging.
Agent copilot support in the Zendesk Agent Workspace
For customers with the Advanced AI add-on, agent copilot is supported in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. When activated by an admin, agents can use the powerful auto assist feature to help them solve tickets quickly. Agent copilot also includes other features, such as
- Ticket summaries
- Suggested first replies
- Suggested macros, and more
For more information, see About agent copilot.
136 comments
AntonMi
Florian The only way to route such messaging tickets now is to assign those to different brands. But you must have multi-brand enabled.
UPDATE
this issue have been fixed, now you can use the channel name in triggers
0
Eric Witman
Has anyone experienced the email option not showing up on tickets since the update? I can't get a screen snip because the drop down minimizes. It's not all tickets, just some. Call, chat and internal note are available.
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Florian
Eric Witman, I did not see that, but I found tickets in an agents open tickets view which has received an update by requester, but the new message is not visible. The agent has to close and re-open the ticket to see the requesters newest message.
0
Michael Shay Hall
We recently switched to Workspace. We've been using the "Interactions" section to read a customer's previous emails instead of searching for their email address to find these. But we've realized that not all tickets from a customer's email are listed under "interactions". There were tickets from a couple years ago that could be found from searching the email address, but they didn't show up in "interactions." Does "interactions" only show tickets from a certain recent time period? Is there some other filtering happening? Is this a bug?
0
Michael Shay Hall
Lisa: Does that mean I should ask my question in the feedback section?
0
Lisa Kelly
Hi Dries and Florian,
The feature was added to make text readable when copied from applications that use "dark mode." If you don't want to retain the color and other formatting, you can use a keyboard shortcut to paste unformatted, black text. For example, Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows, Option+Shift+Command+V on Mac. Or, you can change the background color after pasting. See Changing text color. Also, you can deactivate color text by turning it off in Admin Center.
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Dane
As it turns out, there's no option available to turn off such notification. This is also being used so that any invisible agents will be notified that they should be online during that period.
0
Dan Savage
Thanks Dane, so in our use case we have about 20 Agents trained for live chat but we only schedule a handful at a time. Using Agent Workspace I assumed those not scheduled would need to set themselves as the invisible until they are scheduled. Is there an alternative or do we just need to accept that any Agents who have access to the Chat product will have to see this alert?
1
Deb Kaseman
We've recently switched to the new agent workspace and it's actually slowing down our productivity. It seems that when a ticket is reopened, the customer's reply shows up in the last interaction, but not in the body of the ticket itself. We have to refresh the ticket to see what the customer's full reply was.
Does anyone have a fix for this? We've submitted an IT ticket about it, but so far, have had no replies as to how to resolve this (without having to go back to the old workspace).
0
Florian
Deb Kaseman, I think that's the same issue as Eric Witman mentioned on may 12th.
We have the same issue and have opened a ticket at ZD support team. But we do not have an answer yet.
0
Natalia Cano
How do I differentiate the triggers from chat and social media?
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Marko Lukač
As someone who also does B2B support, I also agree that the new ordering of messages in tickets in the new agent workspace (oldest on top) is slowing down our productivity. Most of the other features are actually nice, but this one is a problem, and might make us look for a different ticketing system.
1
Cécile Pottier
Hi there,
I have been using the new version for a few days now, and I am really lost with this new thread.
Not only because of the reversal of the order, but especially it is so painful to found the last messages of my clients, especially when they are sending more that one at a time.
The very last one is OK to find, but the previous ones are lost in the thread.
It means more scrolls, more concentration, more fatigue.
I really miss the old thread version. Why this reversal ?
I also sorely miss a separation of the messages.
Is it possible to have an option to be able to chose the way the thread works?
I am happy with the other functionnalities of this new release, but I really think the old thread was much more efficient.
Thanks
1
Maik Künnemann
There is a request, but still no feedback from the product manager Amisha Sharma .
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4408860670106-Customize-Agent-Workspace
0
Amie Brennan
hey Kieron Dunne,
There's no setting to change the order of the ticket comments, unfortunately.
Might be best for you to vote for this existing feature request here. However it's currently not on the roadmap by the looks on it.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4409222725530-Change-the-order-of-the-comments-as-an-agent-when-viewing-a-ticket
Best,
Amie
0
Peter Rittau
Hi,
How to remove icons if i use only E-Mail as communication channel?
0
WhitePages - whitepages
Supervisors used to be able to 1) see chats agents are having with customers without the agent knowing they're being monitored as a way to maintain accountability and rate performance and 2) jump into a chat and respond to a user if an agent needed help from a supervisor.
Are these features still available with agent workspace?
0
Lisa Kelly
Hi Vlado,
1
Jonas Libbrecht
The agent workspace is horrible to use in context of emails at the moment. When forwarding a email, the previous conversation is added and in Zendesk we see the bottom of the email.
In these situations we've noticed that orders are being processed twice by accident because the agent workspace is a huge mess.
The complete interface was in the V1 interface build around emails, so everything went fine.
Zendesk promotes the agent workspace to be "flexible" but in short, it is not and completely adjusted to the philosophy of a chat window.
Why does zendesk not detect that a ticket was created by a email (it even says this in the overview!!) and shows the text as a normal email (from top to bottom).
And when opening a ticket, which was created via chat, you get a bottom to top approach ??
Or just make the agent workspace flexible and let us decide how the text is ordered! Even better!
By enforcing the agent workspace in this state, zendesk will go under real fast...
1
Cathy Grim
<angry eyes>
Just hit the snag that I can't use custom ticket status' until I enable Agent Workspace.
This is a LOT of effort for very little reward.
1
Lisa Kelly
Hi Derek,
![](/hc/user_images/lb3tYtGEG2JQGf3yLXJ5yA.png)
Are you talking about Chat shortcuts? In the Agent Workspace, when you type a / in the composer, you should see both macro keyboard shortcuts and chat shortcuts. See Applying macros with a keyboard shortcut. However, you need to make sure it's enabled for your profile. See Activating and deactivating macros keyboard shortcuts.
1
Sebastian Silva
I like to point out the lack of "space" when you are adding inline images, previously this wasn’t an issue thanks to the formatting, but it seems that it’s no longer working.
This experience is way worse if you are editing a long text where you need to use images.![](/hc/user_images/JrMJympuqAty79gi1mhSUw.png)
1
Khoa Le
While the advantages of agent workspaces are apparent for accounts that provide support using multiple channels, this is a severe step back for those of us who only use email. The layout of agent workspaces does not mimic the workflow/layout of email.
It's obvious that agent workspaces is catered towards accounts using multiple channels for support; and so this feels like a con to upgrade/add additional channels to make the most of the "feature."
Agent workspaces can obviously exist without it being a mandatory layout (it has since its introduction), and so it makes no sense to push this onto those of us who do not need/prefer it.
1
Welcome Break Holdings Ltd.
Hi there,
Is it possible to OPT out of the mandatory upgrade?
Zen never really has been an ITSM tool, but a post sales Q&A platform... ideally we'll be moving to a more suitable tool and I'm not keen in faffing around trying to get various items to work as we need until then.
1
Lisa Kelly
Hello h_sz_ke
We're sorry you don't like the new interface. Zedesk is aware of the conversation thread issues. It's a common request from customers.
For your Talk issue, this may help:
![](/hc/user_images/01H98PC1BM574112YF9M4NQP5H.png)
If you aren't using Talk for tickets (or any other purpose), you can deactivate Talk in your account. Then, you will not see Calls as an option in the Channels menu for tickets.
To deactivate Talk
1
h_sz_ke
Another work-slowing change: In the new workspace interface, after I have written the text in the "Internal note," if I switch to "E-mail," the entered text disappears.
The issue of placing the text box at the bottom is no longer relevant; we will develop our own Google Chrome plugin to finally achieve the old, well-established functionality along with the reordering of comments – it seems we cannot expect assistance with this here. :(
Can we expect changes from Zendesk, or do we really need to make the interface usable again with a custom-developed Google Chrome plugin? If it's a Beta version, why was it released?
1
Justin Federico
Hi Lisa,
That EAP requires you to already have Agent Workspace enabled. Does the sandbox apply here? I would not enable this in prod unless this works as expected.
1
Judd Higgins
+1 the comments about email only use. The fact that it's not configurable is upsetting. https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408821259930/comments/4572991646746
Also, switching to an Internal Note is now 2 clicks instead of one click on a tab previously. Please let me know if this is configurable as this is essentially increasing my agents' friction.
If you were going to make a complete 180 degree change like this, you should have at least adding some configurability to the layout for those people who use email. This new layout makes trying to read threads so much more difficult.
Why would I scroll to the bottom of a thread to reply when the top of the page has the latest reply from the customer?
1
Ross Malyon
madness isnt it. the good news is zoho desk are paying out peoples zendesk contracts and moving people over for free.
1
Gareth Wood
Is there anyway to move the response editor to the top of the screen?
This new editor location is doing terrible things to my posture and neck.
1