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can use the appropriate channels to address issues, without being restricted to the channel in which the customer originally made contact.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. 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
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 enabled, agents can also use the context panel to create and manage side conversations on a 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 About messaging channels in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
114 Comments
Hello Jonas Libbrecht, there is another open request to that topic. I hope Zendesk will finally improve that. We switched back to the old workspace, since we communicate mainly by mail. Thanks for your comment!
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4408868318746-New-agent-workspace-Long-emails-signatures
Zendesk is holding a Community event for Agent Workspace. Click the link below for details:
Community event: How to deliver conversational experiences with the Agent Workspace
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408821259930/comments/5415004199066
Are there any plans to release this to be by brand in one account.
I.e. We have three brands in our account, but only one can't switch to agent workspace. The other two are therefore forced to remain on legacy and missing out on other opportunities.
We don't see it happening in the near future. We are recommending all accounts to switch to Agent Workspace for all the major improvements are available on that interface. But a good suggestion nonetheless.
Is there really any benefit here if we only use web and email for support?
There seems to be simply a lot more noise in this case - for us at least.
Hi Cathy,
Going forward, new features Zendesk adds to the agent interface will only be available in the Agent Workspace, including the context panel, panel resizing, native ticket redaction, color support, and more. See What new features are available after upgrading?.
Hi Lisa Kelly,
That may be so, but if the workspace clutters up daily operations for messaging, thats not a reason to upgrade. We are also an organization that specialize in web and email support, and are likely in the same boat as Cathy, and have not migrated as a result.
<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.
Anyone found a workaround for this in Agent Workspace? When working with multiple brands "incorrect" receiver information on ticket causes unnecessary confusion for agents. For some reason also with multibrand the Zendesk account name is shown as receiver of the ticket. It is surely common, that main brand is the same or similar to company name, so account name looks like one of the brands, and when you receive emails to other brands, with quick look, it looks like brand was incorrectly set on ticket. Is there a way to change that somehow so, that actually receiving brand name, or correctly receiving address name, would be shown as receiver correctly on the ticket view?
Changed account name to "Account name shown here?" to test it, to be sure, that it really is account name shown, not the email address name nor correct brand name:
It would nice to see brand or email address name as receiver:
Is there a way to achieve this or reasonable workaround? All I could think is to change the account name to something so general and unrelated, that does not mix with the brands at all now.
All of the shortcuts we'd previously added don't appear to be available... do we need to recreate them all as Macros? Was handy to simply start typing and have suggested shortcuts pre-populate- has this disappeared?
Hi Derek,
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.
We have been notified that our account is going to migrated over to the Agent Workspace in August.
Looking at the screenshots on this article against our Sandbox - then our Agent Workspace looks out of date.
The Ticket fields do not have the dark grey background and the Macro button is still aligned to the left.
Whereas other commenters have posted screenshot and theirs is different.
Hi Darren,
Your Sandbox account is up-to-date. The Macro button moved when we rolled out the ability to resize the ticket properties panel. Also, you may find this article useful for comparisons.
Hello Zendesker,
Is anyone who uses this able to tell me if the agent workspace allows Agents to create articles or be suggested articles from another brand?
We have our "live" brand where end-users enter support tickets and our Agents work them, and then we have a separate brand that is our "internal knowledge base" for system support.
We wanted to keep these separated so our Agents have a designated spot separate from our "self-help" center available on our "live" brand.
Hi Hannah,
The Zendesk Agent Workspace doesn't change how Zendesk Support and Zendesk Guide work together. See Using Zendesk Support and Zendesk Guide together. If you have a specific question about Guide setup, you can post your question there, or contact Zendesk Customer Support.
When you are in Guide Admin, you can choose the brand with the pulldown in the upper left corner. Once you are on the correct brand, then add your article.
Hi Everyone, thank you for your quick responses. I understand how to change the brand in Guide. My question is specifically about Agent workspace and how it will suggest specific articles when agents are working on a ticket. Will it show articles from a different brand than what the current ticket is assigned?
Example: A ticket is assigned to "ABC Soup" brand and there is an article that goes over the resolution process in brand "Chicken Noodle". Would Agent Workspace offer the suggested article from the brand "Chicken Noodle" even though an Agent is working on a ticket assigned to brand "ABC Soup"?
If you are pertaining to the Knowledge section in the context panel, you have the ability to designate a default filter to it so that it will only show tickets on a specific brand. You can also remove ticket brand filter to show all related articles on all your brands.
Can you forward emails in Zendesk to an outside email inbox?
Hi Kenya Roberts you definitely can forward emails in Zendesk to an outside email inbox :) There are a few ways to do this which you can find here: How do I forward tickets to an external user?
I hope this helps! :)
We tried the Agent Workspace. We support via Email, not Chat. My team hated it and complained A LOT. I have since switched us back. These are some of the complaints:
We appreciate that you took the time to let us know about your experience and feedback. Rest assured that this will reach our Product Managers. Your feedback helps us grow – thanks so much for sharing it with us.
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.
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