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can use the appropriate channels to address issues, without being restricted to the channel in which the customer originally made contact.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 also use the Knowledge panel to search, link, and quote your help center content in tickets.
If your account has side conversations activated, agents can also use the context panel to create and manage side conversations on a ticket.
If your account has custom objects activated, agents can also 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 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 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.
137 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.
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).
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.
How do I differentiate the triggers from chat and social media?
I didn't see anyone talking about the missing ticket subject from the top browser-like ticket navigator thingy?
Perhaps it makes sense to B2C, IDK, but not for B2B
Is it configurable?
We enabled this today and within 10 min we turned it off as The Comment order in a ticket being reversed is REDICULOUS!!! and then not offering a setting to control that.
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.
What happened to the ability to write up replies in "internal" and then switch to public and still have what you wrote show up?
Is there any way to revert back to the old way as the "new" way is a really bad user experience...needless scrolling to see the latest message?
Hi Peg,
You cannot revert back, but you can compose an internal message, then cut and paste it into a Public reply. See Saving drafts across channels for more information on how this feature works in the Agent Workspace. You can request product enhancements and vote for your favorite product features on our Community site.
Thanks for the reply, Lisa, but now instead of one step to go public, it is five. That isn't innovative and is more time-consuming. How often does Zendesk actually listen to the users and make changes? The Agent Workspace is definitely not created to make things quicker for the users... it really slowed us down.
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
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