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can use the appropriate channels to address issues, without being restricted to the channel in which the customer originally made contact.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:
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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 |
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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
Lisa Kelly
h_sz_ke
The text does not "disappear." It remains as part of the internal note. See Saving drafts across channels for more information. Zendesk does not recommend using internal notes as drafts. It was not designed for that purpose. Instead, we recommend the following: Writing drafts of public replies in tickets.
If you have any further questions or thoughts about the Agent Workspace, contact Zendesk Customer Support, so they can work with you to address your issues.
-2
Justin Federico
The text doesn't "disappear" but the issue is that you are preventing the agent from changing from "public" to "internal" on the fly. They would need to copy/paste the note or rewrite it.
The reverse order of the ticket comments is a dealbreaker for us. We would never use the Agent Workspace because of this change. This should be configurable. Another button does not resolve the issue.
You're changing the way that things have worked for years and what people are used to and calling it "better". The experience is not better and this is evident from the comments on this thread. If you fail to listen to your customers be prepared to lose them.
4
Lisa Kelly
Hi Justin,
We are listening. You can now reverse the order of ticket comments if you have an Enterprise plan. See Configuring the conversation flow and composer location in tickets
-1
Ross Malyon
Hey Lisa,
No one is going to pay 6 times more to be on the enterprise plan to get back a feature that was in the software since day one.
For the money you are better off buying multiple years of a Freshdesk subscription. Why would we go for 5-6k a year to 30+ to build the ability to read comments the right way again?
Yes i sound unreasonable but just think about it for a minute and you can clearly see you guys mucked up big time. I have users refusing to use zendesk right now.
6
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
Lisa Kelly
Hi Justin,
You should be able to enable AW in your sandbox and try it out. You also need to sign up for the Layout builder EAP, if you haven't done so already. Custom layouts give you all sorts of flexibility to configure components in the ticket interface, including changing the conversation flow.
0
IT dienst
Hi Lisa,
Are you kidding me?
We are already waiting MONTHS for this feature and then you say: "yes we listened to the community?!"
This is absolutely outrageous. The previous ticket order was the standard for YEARS!
This is absolutely fubar
2
h_sz_ke
I agree with last answer. It's especially infuriating that we lose features we use every day, and then the problem is supposedly solved by switching to the Enterprise Plan to again sort the tickets in descending order.
2
Rudolph
h_sz_ke - Zendesk hiding more and more features behind a paywall is an upsetting trend I've also noticed. They did the same thing with Messenger and MAU's. We recently switched over from Enterprise Legacy to Enterprise Suite, and you'd think "Suite" would come with everything (as advertised by Zendesk for years), but it doesn't include the cost of MAUs. Nefariously, MAUs are required for Messaging and so much new tech being built is hidden behind Messaging.
As a customer of Zendesk for over a decade, it feels like Zendesk's new ownership are just grabbing money wherever they can... and burning long-time customers in the process.
3
JJ Miclat
Hey folks!
We're looking to open up Layout Builder to additional plans in 2024.
Extending a warm invite for everyone on this thread to join us on Tuesday, November 14th at 11 AM CDT for our live PM Roundtable on Layout Builder for Agent Workspace community event, where you'll get to live chat with Paul Von, myself, and other PMs looking after customization at Zendesk.
We'll be going over the 2024 roadmap and long-term vision of Layout Builder, in addition to our customization strategy around Agent Workspace.
We'll then open it up to the floor for discussion on any questions regarding Layout Builder, feedback on the current state of the product, feedback on our roadmap, feature requests regarding Agent Workspace customization that you would like to see us bake in, sharing best practices around creating custom layouts, and so much more.
We'd love to see y'all there!
Cheers,
JJ
0
Elizabeth Cochran
HELP. How can we permanently disable the apps panel from being visible. It takes up space that we need and we do not and will not be using the apps panel at our organization. Thank you! Elizabeth @ UNM Foundation
0
Aleksandrs Galiullins
I'm afraid that it could not be removed or disabled, since it's a system designed functionality. However, I'd recommend for you to post a feature request to our Product Feedback forum here. Our Product Team reviews this forum regularly and it has inspired many of the enhancements we've made to Zendesk over the years.
0
Sean Morrissey
We have an issue with the new agent workspace interface. We have an employee who is colorblind and the blue shadowing on the internal comments prevents them from seeing the comment clearly. Can an accessibility option be added to remove the background color. In speaking with my employee if the hue was a bit darker they could see it better.
0
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