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can use the appropriate channels to address issues, without being restricted to the channel in which the customer originally made contact.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.
- 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 |
|---|---|
|
|
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. |
 |
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.
128 Comments
Am the odd one out to say that I really hate the way zendesk is driving communication away from email to chat?
You can't even raise a support ticket with zendesk through email anymore!
Is this the way of Agent workspace as well? We've recently been informed we are being upgrade and it concerns me.
Chat might be great for assisting with simple issues like the reset of passwords but it assumes the customer is there at their computer working on some web-based application (like Zendesk) needing a quick fix.
All our customer support issues are driven through email because they are long and complex and not in anyway suited to a chat message. The system we are supporting is not in the cloud or web-based so they are never logged on to our website where a chatbot might appear. If our customers were answered by a chatbot, they would find it very irritating as they are paying us for our service.
The user is not necessarily online and the resolution will run over several days or even weeks.
The current direction of Zendesk might be great for some businesses but I'm really not liking for us.
Hi Adrian,
In your Zendesk account, you can still use email as your primary method to manage tickets in the Agent Workspace. Chats and messages are also supported in the ticket interface, but not required.
Lisa Kelly - Are you aware of any feature enhancements that would allow ordering of comments to remain the same to pre-agent workspace settings? We still want to see new ticket comment on top!
Ana Jones - The below feature would likely be concerning for my team, and bothersome for my team in upgrading to Agent workspace.
Hi Jimmy,
Thanks for asking! This is a common customer request, but I am not aware of any plans to change the ordering of comments in the Agent Workspace.
I like the new interface, I have one question/recommendation. Can the line height be adjusted to make for better visibility/reading for responses? Currently, each text line is very close making the user experience/readability difficult.
Hi Andrew. I'm glad you like the new interface! We don't have a UI setting to configure the default text presentation in ticket comments. But, here is some advice from our Making Zendesk products accessible article: "To help improve visibility, many users prefer to configure their own style sheets. Zendesk does not specifically block user style sheets or use inline style sheets (with the exception of some reporting features)."
Me and my colleagues and our sister companies hate the new workspace. Especially when you respond to a new and existing ticket, we cannot see the compose message box when typing . We can no longer use our tablet and phone to answer urgent tickers. Desktop Site option won't help. I am going back and forth with your support. What a journey. Let your Devs use their phones and tablet to test the interface, so you will know what I am saying. Please fix!
Our team launched the latest Zendesk "upgrade" last Friday morning that moved the reply box to the bottom of the screen - this was a horrible design choice and completely unintuitive. You don't start a document at the bottom of the screen - you start at the top. The reverse sorting is another horrible idea up there with when Zendesk removed the ability to sort by subject. I have to go the the Subject line to edit the entry, then to the bottom of the screen to type and then I often have to scroll up if it's a long entry in the ticket itself and then back to the bottom again (I'm aware of the "Jump to Latest" button but it's right next to the bottom text box anyway - so back down again). Who tests this stuff??
Is there an option to choose top/bottom for the message box and an option for the oldest/newest sorting?
I'd agree with Cristian Clements and add, clients have to view from the top down as well. It would be nice to have an option to change the sort in both views.
I also agree with Christian Clements, the "new" formatting of the replies and ticket layout in general did not need to be redesigned and has been received poorly by our team.
Agreed... at this point its so bad I am not sure we will ever transition to the new layout and if forced so we will most likely look for a new Software that listens to their clients needs and frustrations... As you can see almost everyone is upset that this change was made and there is no way to set customer defaults for comment preferences.
Hi Christian, Stan, and Brian,
There are no options to change the location of the reply box at this time, but it is a common customer request. You can request product enhancements and vote for your favorite product features on our Community site.
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
Hi!
Just upgraded to Agent Workspace and got some things that i dont like, that i would love to see got changed.
1. Customers e-mail adress is only visible in the customer profile, would love to also have it beneth the subject as before.
2. When i transfer the ticket to another group i have to search for the group, press the group and then again press assign to the group. This means two clicks instead of just one.
Hi Tobias,
Thank you for the comments! I would encourage you to make a post in the feedback forum as posts with high upvotes ultimately are seen by our product dev teams for potential future work.
This change to a messaging format for email users is just dumb. You now have agents with the opposite view as the end user.
Is there an Admin setting to reverse the new Agent Workspace Ticket comments/updates from the current oldest to latest? i.e. change ticket updates order to be from new to old?
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
Hi,
How to remove icons if i use only E-Mail as communication channel?
Hi Peter,
Only users with Chat access will see these icons and the Conversations button. You (or your admin) can deactivate your Chat access in Admin Center. See below. But, we don't recommend that because it means you can't perform any Chat or Messaging functions.
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?
Hello! We want to activate AW but we have some concerns:
1) How long does take the activation? I know that it's gonna require a while but I would hear from some other users. Are we speaking about minutes? Hours? We cannot shut down the service for a long time.
2) Is there the possibility of loose some data during the migration? With Data I mean tickets, conversations, settings, and configurations (like the ticket form we use)
3) If we don't find it useful or we want to go back to our previous workspace, is still possible? If yes, are we gonna lose some data (as above)?
Thank you!
Hi Federica,
Is there an option to reassign some still-active chat conversations? Currently, I can only take some chat tickets after the chat is ended and the chat status is changed to Solved.
Also, please assist me with the Location of visitors. It seems like there is only an option to see the Time zone. In the old interface (before Workspace) I could see the location, I could blocking some visitors, reassign chat inquiries among agents, etc.
Hi Vlado,
Hi guys. I can't use workspace for live chat and every incoming chat automatically changes into missed chat. I already set online the status and still can't receive the chat. In my ticket also just available only email and internal note options. Can anyone help me to find my mistake?
Hi Dea,
For issues with your account, contact Zendesk Customer Support so they can help you.
The video referred to seems to be missing in the initial post.
Hi Nora,
Are you referring to the video at the top of this article? It takes a minute to load.
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...
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