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can use the appropriate channels to address issues, without being restricted to the channel in which the customer originally made contact.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, 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. If configured, agents can also receive and reply to social messages and web messages.
Watch this video for an overview of the Zendesk Agent Workspace:
This article contains the following topics:
- Sample ticket
- Sample workflow
- Benefits
- Additional features
- Messaging support in the Zendesk Agent Workspace
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.
- Agent status (online, away, or invisible) and chats served appear at the top of the page.
- Agents can open the Talk console at the top of the page to set Talk status and manage calls from the workspace.
- 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 Guide, agents can also use the Knowledge panel to search, link, and quote your help center content in tickets.
- To be compatible with chats and provide a more-natural conversation flow, ticket comments are arranged from oldest to newest, with the newest comments at the bottom.
- 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 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 chat and messaging status. |
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Agents can set their talk status. |
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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 About messaging channels in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
50 Comments
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.
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?
Hi Folks,
If you have comments about the Zendesk Agent Workspace, we recommend posting them in the Community. See Giving product feedback at Zendesk.
Lisa: Does that mean I should ask my question in the feedback section?
Hi Michael. Is it possible the tickets were archived? Archived tickets are not included in the interaction history. Contact Zendesk Customer Support for questions specific to your account.
They are archived, yes. >:(
Thanks!
My mother taught me to start with compliments before you request changes ;-). So this new view looks promising, but my team found a real annoying behavior:
When the agent is composing an answer to the customer (starting in internal, switching to external now takes an extra click) and switches to external while typing or after finishing the message, the text is gone! Also happens with attachments. You have to type it again and have to attach a file again. I cannot think of a situation where this is a feature, so It must be bug.
Hopefully you can either solve this soon, or reply to me why this is useful behavior. Otherwise we will switch back to the old situation and wait until you have fixed it.
Hi Dries
Your information is not lost. In the Agent Workspace, the information you enter as an Internal note is stored separately from the information you enter as an External public comment. See Saving drafts across channels for details. This allows you to create separate drafts for both at the same time.
Hi Lisa,
Thanks for your quick reply. So, it is a feature for some, but still annoying for us. Our agents start a lot of there messages internal and when it's finished they switch to external to send it to the customer. They have to use cut and paste to use it in this new way. Could you please make a toggle of something in the composer window that you can choose which behavior you get?
I am curious how many organizations really like this new behavior. Is made available after a feature request or is it designed by Zendesk as a future way to compose messages?
Hi Dries,
Here's the best way to Give product feedback at Zendesk.
After the update to Agent workspace we experience that copy paste als paste's the background color of a website. This very annoying. Could you please turn that of? It's also the case while copying from internal message to external; you get the yellow background on a white external message. This can't be your way to make it agents easier!
I am absolutely with Dries Oomen.
We have experienced the same. That's very annoying.
Please remove this inconveniant background color copy function.
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.
The enabled link in the article to https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408834058010#topic_xjc_3d3_b3b no longer works.
Does that mean Zendesk is planning to make it permanently enabled (and no option to switch back)?
Hi Ryan,
It's just a broken link. It's fixed now. Thanks for letting us know!
Is there any way to disable this pop-up from showing every time? We schedule our Agents for Live Chat so nobody needs to see this...
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.
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?
I'd recommend creating a Community post separately for that with your use case to help get more visibility and votes on the idea. Then, others can share their use cases to further drive demand for that feature.
Feedback: People have mentioned this already but @Zendesk, have you honestly used it to handle tickets? Having to resize the boxes to see all the text and msgs and if you have to send a long reply etc is really badly designed. It's a poor user layout. And please put the most recent back at the top again. I'm more than happy to embrace change but when it improves a flow or process.
This is the trouble sometimes, people in businesses making too many unnecessary tweaks. I hope this will improve in future. I'm already very close to switching to another provider after such poor service from you on an ongoing ticket.
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