Optimizing the Zendesk Agent Workspace

Zendesk’s Agent Workspace is a powerful way to manage your customer requests, providing them with the best service possible no matter how they reach out to you. Follow these best practices to make the most of the Zendesk Agent Workspace. Optimizing the workspace can reduce costs, drive revenue, save time, and increase value. You must have the Agent Workspace activated to use these features. The features mentioned are available for all plan types, unless otherwise noted.

This article includes these sections:

• Optimize for multi-channel support
• Optimize the ticket interface for your agents
• Extend your data set to optimize ticket content
• Train your agents to optimize their performance

Optimize for multi-channel support

With the Agent Workspace you can easily switch between communications channels, all within the same ticket interface. You don’t have to maintain separate tickets or use separate dashboards for each ticket type.

Best practices

• Configure all the channels your agents need to handle tickets, including email, messaging, and voice.
  • For email, see Adding support email addresses.
  • For messaging, see About messaging
  • For social messaging, see Getting started with social messaging.
  • For phone support, see Enabling Talk and configuring general settings.
• Configure omnichannel routing to make sure the right tickets get to the right agents as quickly as possible. Omnichannel routing with unified agent status allows you to automatically direct tickets to agents based on their availability, capacity, and ticket priority. See About omnichannel routing.
• Set up Zendesk bots to deflect common questions across your service channels and increase agent productivity. See About Zendesk bots.
• Activate all available AI offerings to enhance every part of your service experience, from smarter conversations and bots, to productivity tools for agents, to new insights and instant actions for admins. See Zendesk AI overview. (Professional plans and above)

Optimize the ticket interface for your agents

The Agent Workspace enables you to customize the ticket interface so your agents have the best experience possible to manage tickets.

Best practices

• Create custom ticket statuses for your account. Custom ticket statuses can help manage your ticket workflows, as well as indicate a more meaningful ticket status to your business and end users. See Activating custom tickets statuses.
• Create contextual workspaces to automatically tailor tickets to show the right information to the right group of agents. Help them cut through the confusion by providing them with a curated set of options to get the job done, including recommended ticket forms, apps, macros, and knowledge searches. See Setting up contextual workspaces. (Enterprise plans)
• Define custom layouts to handle different ticket types. Only show agents the interface and tools they need to take on the task at hand. No developer resources are required. See Creating custom layouts. (Enterprise plans)
• Configure the intelligence panel to provide your agents with access to AI features directly from the ticket interface. Agents can use AI to automatically detect a ticket’s intent, language, and sentiment. They can also use AI to summarize tickets and enhance ticket comments. See About intelligence in the context panel and Using AI to summarize tickets. (Professional and Enterprise add-on)
• Configure the essentials card. The essentials card appears in the context panel in the Agent Workspace and displays information about the ticket requester. You can change the card by adding, removing, and reordering standard and custom user fields so that agents can access the most relevant information. See Configuring the essentials card. (Enterprise plans)
• Change the ticket conversation flow to match how agents do their work. Give them an intuitive, comfortable interface that matches how they like to talk to customers. See Configuring the conversation flow and composer location. (Enterprise plans)

Extend your data set to optimize ticket content

If you work with external systems, Zendesk custom objects allow you to seamlessly integrate your custom data into tickets, triggers, and Explore analytics.

Best practices

• Use custom objects to give your agents access to all the data they need to solve tickets, all without leaving the Zendesk interface. See Understanding custom objects. (All Suite plans and Support Enterprise)

Train your agents to optimize their performance

Make sure your team knows how using the Agent Workspace will impact their day-to-day tasks. Also tell them about changes they can make to personalize the interface and boost productivity.

Best practices

• Share some basic information about the interface. See About the Zendesk Agent Workspace. If you’re migrating from the standard agent interface, show them this Quick reference to highlight what’s new in the Agent Workspace.
• For agents who manage sensitive material give them permission to redact ticket content and keep customer information safe. See Redacting ticket content.
• Mention that they can:
  • Use the context panel to quickly access user information and open a list of public or private apps.
  • Add app shortcuts to personalize access to their favorite apps.
  • Search, link, and quote content from your help center to include in tickets. (Growth plans and above)
  • If available, use AI features for working in tickets, including intelligent triage, suggested macros, ticket summaries, comment expansion, and show similar tickets. (Suite Professional plans and above)
  • Resize the context panel, the ticket properties panel, and the composer window.
  • Change text color to highlight important ticket comments.
  • Use built-in translation features to communicate with end users and other agents using different languages.