At Zendesk, we value the feedback of our customers and consider it an important part of our process. That's why we offer early access for some features in development so that you can try out the feature in advance and give us feedback or report issues. We may also provide other feedback opportunities during the development process
In addition to participating in betas and early access programs (EAPs), you might want to join our Experience Research Panel to learn about UX research opportunities where you can help shape our products.
We are offering opportunities for you to give input in the following areas:
- Zendesk Support
- Zendesk Explore
- Zendesk messaging
- Zendesk Guide
- Zendesk Workforce Management
- Trust and safety
- Zendesk AI
- Developers
Important considerations
Participation in betas and EAPs is completely optional, and availability may be limited. Please be aware that pre-release features and functionality:
- May not always function as expected or meet your particular needs.
- Are not subject to any Zendesk Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that may be applicable to your Service Plan.
- Are not considered “BAA Covered Services” or “HIPAA-Enabled Add-Ons” under your Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with Zendesk if you are entitled to and have signed one.
- May be discontinued or significantly modified at Zendesk’s discretion.
When a beta or EAP closes, Zendesk will often make the feature or functionality generally available to all eligible Zendesk customers. The feature or functionality may be included in an existing Service Plan, or it may require the purchase of an Add-On. Upon general availability, beta or EAP participants may be required to upgrade Service Plans or purchase an Add-On in order to continue accessing the feature or functionality.
Zendesk Support
The following current and upcoming betas are available for Support:
App Builder
The App Builder EAP is a new and powerful feature leveraging generative AI to empower admins to create custom apps without the need for developer resources, making it faster and more cost-effective than ever to tailor your Zendesk experience to your unique business needs.
Features of the App Builder include:
- Conversational UI: Lets you to describe your desired app using natural language.
- Example prompts: A small collection of prompts to help you get started.
- Iterative app development: Continuously refine and build applications using LLM, allowing you to adjust the app according to your specific requirements.
- Version control: Save different versions of the created app, enabling easy navigation between various iterations.
- Real-time visual preview: Preview the app visually in real-time as you build.
- Data integration: Create apps that utilize data from Zendesk, your company's internal system, and third-party platforms such as Shopify, Jira, and others.
- Code accessibility: View the generated code for the app, which can be reviewed by more technically skilled admins or developers.
- Testing environment: Test the app within your Zendesk Lotus environment prior to installation to ensure proper functionality.
- Publishing and deployment: Publish and deploy the app to install it within your Zendesk account, including an app permission flow.
- Error resolution: Utilize LLM for error fixing if you encounter any unexpected issues.
- Feedback submission: Use the feedback form to report bugs, request features, or share general comments.
Although the EAP is currently limited to a small group of users, we are actively working to make it available to a larger audience in the coming months. If you would like to try out App Builder when it becomes more widely accessible, we encourage you to join the waitlist. Please be aware that access to App Builder currently requires the Advanced AI SKU.
Sandbox configuration management
The Sandbox Configuration Management EAP provides early access to features that streamline the management of configuration settings across your Zendesk environments. The EAP will consist of multiple phases, beginning with inspection, which gives admins a near-complete overview of an environment's configurations.
Future phases of the EAP will include saving a snapshot of your configuration settings, comparing environment configurations, and deploying configurations from sandboxes to production.
This EAP is open for sign ups, but the functionality isn't available yet.
Learn more about the Sandbox Configuration Management EAP.
Custom objects in Explore
The Custom objects in Guide and Explore EAP provides early access to multiple enhancements to custom objects. First, lookup fields pointing to custom objects can be included in your help center request forms. Second, you can configure end user permissions to view and interact with each custom object's records. Finally, you can also leverage expanded reporting on lookup relationship fields in Explore. Together, these features allow you to integrate custom objects into your end-user's experience and collect more complete data about how lookup relationship fields and custom objects are being used.
Learn more about the Custom objects in Guide and Explore EAP
Microsoft Exchange Connector
The Microsoft Exchange Connector allows you to integrate your non-Zendesk email servers based on Microsoft Exchange directly into your Zendesk Support instance. This is ideal for Microsoft customers looking to connect their online Microsoft 365 or Exchange servers and leverage their Exchange/Outlook workflows.
Learn more about the Microsoft Exchange Connector EAP
Brand spaces
Brand spaces gives admins the ability to assign agents to brands, and then restrict agent access to tickets only within their assigned brands. You'll use an updated version of the Brands page in Admin Center, along with the Team members page to configure this. While agents are restricted to tickets within their brand spaces, admins maintain access to settings and tickets across your Zendesk instances.
Learn more about the brand spaces EAP
Ability to merge organizations
Admins can merge one organization into another. When organizations are merged, all users, open tickets, and domains are merged into one organization - the receiving organization. The merging organization is deleted after the merge completes. All changes related to an organization merge are recorded in the audit log. Additionally, tickets that are part of the merge show the change in their ticket events log.
Learn more about merging organizations
New email spam filter for Support
Zendesk uses a combination of our own internal spam prevention rules and an outside vendor. We are now exploring a new open-source tool for spam prevention that will give us new options for fighting spam. We are building our own instance of a tool called Rspamd. Rspamd uses a number of factors to determine the legitimacy of email, but most importantly, because this is our own separate instance, we can tweak the results ourselves.
Sign up for the spam filter EAP
Zendesk Explore
The following current and upcoming betas are available for Explore:
New report builder
This open beta introduces the new report builder, a newly redesigned reporting experience that makes data exploration and report creation more efficient and intuitive for beginners and advanced report builders alike.
Learn more about the new report builder open beta
Zendesk messaging
The following current and upcoming betas are available for messaging:
Engagements reporting API
The omnichannel engagements reporting API has been launched as an Early Access Program (EAP) for eligible customers to access the engagements dataset.
Engagements represent individual legs of agent interactions in the overall ticket lifecycle.
Learn more about the engagements reporting API
Zendesk Guide
The following current and upcoming betas are available for Guide:
- Service catalog EAP
- Article multiplacement EAP
- New article editor with generative AI article summaries EAP
- Generative search for help center
- New request list experience
Service catalog EAP
The service catalog is a ticket channel built for employee service that lets employees easily find and request employee services and assets from internal departments via the help center.
When an employee requests a service or asset from the service catalog, a ticket is automatically created and linked to that item. Internal support specialists can manage and resolve requests through their unified workspace, and employees can manage their requests through the request management interface in the help center.
Learn more about the service catalog EAP
Article multiplacement EAP
Article multiplacement lets you create one article and place it in up to ten different sections across all brands in your help center. Article placements share the same title and body but have a unique article ID and placement configuration that tells your help center where the placement article should appear.
As a result, when you update the content of an article, the content of related placements are also updated and published. This powerful feature makes it possible to create content once and share it between multiple sections and brands.
New article editor with generative AI article summaries EAP
The new article editor includes improvements designed to streamline your content creation process and boost audience engagement. Specifically, with the new editor, you will have access to improvements such as:
- New editing tools: New image editing tools (including text-wrapping around images), a new table editor, and drag and drop functionality for content elements.
- Source code improvements: Cleaner code when using content blocks. You can now view the article source code above and below the content block, regardless of where your cursor is positioned in the article.
- Article components: You can now insert components including HTML blocks, horizontal lines, and AI-powered article summaries into your articles.
Learn more about the new article editor with generative AI article summaries EAP
Generative search for help center
Generative search for help center includes the following capabilities:
- Provides AI-generated answers to help center searches
- Allows end users to provide feedback on the quality of the generated answer
To use these capabilities, your account must meet the following requirements:
- Have a connected Zendesk knowledge base
Learn more about the generative search for help center EAP
New request list experience
The help center, by default, offers the option for end users to submit requests. End users who submit requests can also manage their support requests in the customer portal.
The new request list experience (Beta) improves the way in which end users can manage large numbers of requests in the customer portal. When you enable the new request list experience in your theme, end users can use the new combinable filtering options to refine the requests they want to manage as well as new column configuration options to show/hide columns.
Learn more about the new request list experience open beta.
Trust and safety
The following early access program is available for trust and safety.
Advanced Encryption
Advanced Encryption empowers enterprises with management and control over encryption keys, ensuring that Service Data stored in Zendesk Services can’t be read in plain text by an external party and is only decrypted just in time to enable our services. This feature also helps our customers comply with data protection and privacy obligations and strengthens their security posture.
This feature is commonly referred to as Bring Your Own Key / Hold Your Own Key / Customer Managed Key Encryption.
Advanced Encryption capabilities will be released incrementally, beginning with an Early Access Program (EAP) in early 2023. The first release will encrypt a subset of user fields and will only be available for sandbox use, with a production release coming later. Additional features and fields to be encrypted will be added throughout the coming year.
Learn more about the Advanced Encryption EAP
Zendesk Workforce Management
The following EAPs are available for Zendesk Workforce Management (WFM). This section was formerly Tymeshift.
- Define a rotation period for automatic shifts
- Track agent time with Google Chrome extension
- Combined workstreams and workstreams prioritization
- Forecast vs Actual report
Define a rotation period for automatic shifts
This EAP lets admins define rotation periods for automatic shifts. By defining rotation periods, agents' shift start times are automatically rotated based on the time period you defined, which frees managers from having to decide a specific order in which to rotate shifts.Learn more about the automatic shifts rotation period EAP.
Track agent time with Google Chrome extension
WFM admins can track how agents spend time outside of Zendesk by using the Zendesk time tracker Google Chrome extension and configuring extension tracking. Extension tracking allows general tasks to be mapped to specified URLs. When agents can install the Zendesk time tracker extension from the Google Chrome web store, their activity is tracked when they visit any of the specified URLs.
Learn more about the extension tracking EAP.
Combined workstreams and workstreams prioritization
Admins can combine workstreams, as well as prioritize workstreams so that you can ensure that you’re covering the right work at the right time.
Learn more about the combined workstreams and workstreams prioritization EAPs.
Forecast vs Actual report
The Forecast vs Actual EAP unveils a dynamic new reporting feature, offering users the ability to directly compare forecasted data with actual performance metrics within their operations. This reporting page is tailored to enhance decision-making and operational analysis by providing insights into Inbound Volume, Staffing, Average Handle Time, and Service Levels.
Learn more About the forecast vs actual report (EAP).
Zendesk AI
The following EAPs are available for Zendesk AI:
Entity detection
The entity detection feature allows you to define and detect unique information in tickets and messaging conversations. You can then use that information to populate associated custom ticket fields and power automated workflows and reports.
Learn more about the entity detection EAP
Similar tickets
The similar ticket feature uses generative AI to show agents a list of tickets that are similar to the one they're working on. By seeing how similar issues were addressed, agents are able to solve tickets more efficiently.
Learn more about the similar tickets EAP
Custom intents
The custom intents EAP allows you to instantly create custom intents. It is added immediately to your intent list and available right away to start predicting the intent of incoming tickets. Leveraging custom intents will help you optimize and extract valuable insights about your customer service operations.
Learn more about the custom intents EAP
Generative AI
The following EAPs include generative AI features:
Developers
The following early access program is available for workforce management (WFM).
WFM reports API
The WFM reports API is a powerful new tool for you to harness your data more effectively. This endpoint allows you to extract data from both default and custom reports by specifying the ID of the desired report template.
The WFM reports API is currently in an Early Access Program (EAP). You can sign up for the EAP here.
59 comments
Nova Dawn
Adding new functionality to the Zendesk Agent Workspace!
Knowledge in the Agent Workspace
Agents can use content from your knowledge base, and community, to answer questions across tickets, chats, and social channels. This makes it a powerfully productive tool for agents to get information and answers that are relevant to the conversation they're engaging in - without having to leave the conversation or manage multiple browser tabs.
Sign up for the Knowledge in the Agent Workspace EAP here.
0
Nova Dawn
WhatsApp for Sell
New in! WhatsApp for Sell EAP
WhatsApp is the most popular mobile messenger app worldwide, used by more than 1.5 billion people in over 180 countries. WhatsApp for Sell allows businesses and users of the WhatsApp messaging app to interact via Sunshine Conversation’s functionality within Sell.
Sign up for the WhatsApp for Sell EAP here.
0
Jennifer Rowe
New EAP for Sell:
Custom objects in Sell
There are three native objects in Sell: Leads, Contacts, and Deals. However, it may be difficult to represent all of your business context using just those three objects. With Custom Objects, you can adjust Sell's data to your exact needs by defining new object types that are specific to your business, and link them to your Leads, Contacts, Deals.
Sign up for the custom objects in Sell EAP
0
Erin O'Callaghan
New closed beta for Explore:
New Dashboard Builder
This closed beta introduces the new Dashboard Builder, a redesigned and streamlined experience for creating dashboards within Explore. The new Dashboard Builder makes it easier and more intuitive to create dashboards that give you the insights you need to optimize your service channels.
Learn more about the new Dashboard Builder closed beta
0
Lisa Kelly
New EAP for Support:
Resizing the Context Panel in Support
This EAP enables functionality that allows agents to manually resize the width of the Context Panel in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. Resizing enables agents to get an expanded view of the Apps, Knowledge, and Customer Context sections in the panel.
Sign up for the Context Panel Resizing EAP
0
Jacquelyn Brewer
New EAP for Support and Messaging:
New routing for tickets and messages by priority and agent availability
Zendesk has a variety of ways to route tickets, but the new Routing EAP provides a way to route tickets and messaging conversations based on both ticket priority and the availability of agents. The result is that the most important work items are routed to the agents most available to resolve them quickly.
Sign up for the routing early access program
0
Elizabeth Williams
NEW EAP for Guide:
Help center search crawler
The help center search crawler provides a way for search results to display links to relevant external content (such as webpages or blog posts) alongside help center results (such as articles, posts, and comments) when it is relevant to the query.
Until now, this functionality was made possible through the external content API, which required coding to implement. With the help center search crawler, you can now set up a crawler in a few clicks to achieve the same results with no coding.
Sign up for the help center search crawler early access program.
0
Erin O'Callaghan
New EAP for Support:
Macro content suggestions
Macros are a valuable tool that save agents time and help provide end users with consistent support. But knowing which macros to create is not always straightforward. The new macro content suggestions EAP makes it easier to determine which macros will be most useful for your agents and end users.
Sign up for the macro content suggestions early access program
0
Jacquelyn Brewer
New EAP for Admin Center:
A unified way to set agent status across Support, Messaging, and Talk
Rather than needing to manually maintain separate statuses for Support, Messaging, and Talk, the Agent Statuses EAP provides a way for agents to set a single status that defines their availability across these products. In addition to the standard statuses, admins can also define additional custom statuses for their agents to use.
Sign up for the Agent Statuses early access program
0
Jacquelyn Brewer
New EAP for Support:
Access log API
The Access log API provides access to a 90 day record of what agents have accessed in your account. We call these the “read” events and the Access log API is your record of read events for your account. Creation, update, and deletion events for settings and configurations are captured separately in the Audit log.
Sign up for the Access log API early access program
0
Jennifer Rowe
Not an EAP or beta this time, but here's an opportunity to provide feedback to the Product team for the "Bring your own server" feature in the discovery phase. The team would love your feedback.
Bring your own server
Currently, Zendesk customers are required to use Zendesk's email servers and domains when using the email channel (note: ignoring the Gmail connector). The Bring Your Own Server feature will expand upon this and allow Zendesk's customers to connect their external mail servers to their Zendesk instance, thus making the integration with Support more seamless. In particular, we anticipate this will help with pain points around email forwarding, encryption in transit, and more.
Please note: We're currently in the discovery phase of this project and this does not mean that there will be a beta or EAP, but your input in the form below will help direct the prioritization of the features included with this project. We'd appreciate your input.
Provide your feedback/input for this feature here
0
Jennifer Rowe
Corrected link! We apologize for mistakenly sending a restricted link yesterday. It's been corrected below. Thank you!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Not an EAP or beta this time, but here's an opportunity to provide feedback to the Product team for the "Bring your own server" feature in the discovery phase. The team would love your feedback.
Bring your own server
Currently, Zendesk customers are required to use Zendesk's email servers and domains when using the email channel (note: ignoring the Gmail connector). The Bring Your Own Server feature will expand upon this and allow Zendesk's customers to connect their external mail servers to their Zendesk instance, thus making the integration with Support more seamless. In particular, we anticipate this will help with pain points around email forwarding, encryption in transit, and more.
Please note: We're currently in the discovery phase of this project and this does not mean that there will be a beta or EAP, but your input in the form below will help direct the prioritization of the features included with this project. We'd appreciate your input.
Provide your feedback/input for this feature
0
Erin O'Callaghan
New EAP for Support:
Automated triage
Automated triage uses artificial intelligence to enrich your tickets with intent and language predictions without the help of agents or admins. You can then use this information for setting up views for teams, automating with triggers or automations, and enhancing Explore reports.
Learn more about the automated triage early access program
0
Elizabeth Williams
New open beta for Guide:
New request list experience
The new request list experience (Beta) improves the way in which end users can manage large numbers of requests in the customer portal. When you enable the new request list experience in your theme, end users can use the new combinable filtering options to refine the requests they want to manage as well as new column configuration options to show/hide columns.
Learn more about the new request list experience open beta.
0
Charles Nadeau
New EAP for developers:
Messaging in the Unity SDK
In 2020, we launched our first native Unity SDK to give our gaming customers a quick and easy way to bring the power of Zendesk seamlessly into their games. Since then, Zendesk announced Messaging to help customers deliver rich conversational experiences connected across web, mobile, or social apps. The new version of the Unity SDK includes messaging capabilities.
Learn more about the Unity SDK early access program
0
Rob Stack
New beta for Support and messaging:
Omnichannel routing for email and messaging tickets
The omnichannel routing beta enables you to direct tickets from email, messaging, web form, and API to team members based on their availability, capacity, and ticket priority. Using omnichannel routing means that the highest priority tickets are assigned to the agents who are most available to work on them.
Learn more about omnichannel routing
1
Erin O'Callaghan
Zendesk update: Please see our correction in the next comment below regarding this EAP.
New EAP for Explore:
Messaging dataset
The Messaging tickets dataset in Explore contains metrics and attributes that relate to all messaging channels, including web, mobile, and social messaging channels. This information includes number of tickets, resolution times, satisfaction, and more.
1
Jennifer Rowe
Correction:
The Messaging dataset EAP that we posted earlier today is currently restricted and not taking new signups. We'll let you know if that changes.
Sorry for the confusion!
0
Kristie Sweeney
New upcoming EAP for trust and safety:
Advanced Encryption
Advanced Encryption empowers enterprises with management and control over encryption keys, ensuring that Service Data stored in Zendesk Services can’t be read in plain text by an external party and is only decrypted just in time to enable our services. This feature also helps our customers comply with data protection and privacy obligations and strengthens their security posture.
Advanced Encryption capabilities will be released incrementally, beginning with an Early Access Program (EAP) in early 2023. The first release will encrypt a subset of user fields and will only be available for sandbox use, with a production release coming later. Additional features and fields to be encrypted will be added throughout the coming year.
Learn more about the Advanced Encryption early access program
0
Erin O'Callaghan
New EAP for Support:
Macro suggestions
Macros are a valuable tool that save agents time and help provide end users with consistent support. But knowing which maros to create is not always straightforward. The new macro suggestions EAP makes it easier to determine which macros will be most useful for your agents and end users.
Sign up for the macro suggestions early access program
0
Lisa Kelly
New upcoming EAP for custom layouts - Layout builder
Custom layouts for tickets - Layout builder
With custom layouts, admins can use an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface, called layout builder, to create and apply custom layouts to tickets. No Developer resources are required.
With layout builder, you can feature the apps that your agents use the most by moving them out of the context panel and into the main ticket interface. You can also rearrange, resize, and stack components (such as ticket conversations and ticket properties) to improve agent workflow and reduce the time agents need to manage tickets.
If you are an admin using Zendesk Agent Workspace on an Enterprise or Enterprise Plus plan, you can sign up for the upcoming EAP. Visit the EAP Community site for layout builder to add your name to the waiting list. We’ll notify you when the EAP is ready.
Register your interest here
0
Jacquelyn Brewer
New EAP for developers:
Agent Activity APIs
The Agent Availability EAP is available for all accounts. The APIs provide a way to view real-time agent availability information across Zendesk channels and update an agent's status when needed. These APIs also enable better integrations and open up a variety of use cases, such as the development of custom monitoring, reporting, and routing flows based on real-time agent availability data.
Learn more about the Agent Availability early access program
0
Erin O'Callaghan
New closed beta for Explore:
New report builder
This closed beta introduces the new report builder, a newly redesigned reporting experience that makes data exploration and report creation more efficient and intuitive for beginners and advanced report builders alike.
Learn more about the new report builder closed beta
0
Lisa Kelly
New EAP for custom layouts - Layout builder
Custom layouts for tickets - Layout builder
With custom layouts, admins can use an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface, called layout builder, to create and apply custom layouts to tickets. No Developer resources are required.
With layout builder, you can feature the apps that your agents use the most by moving them out of the context panel and into the main ticket interface. You can also rearrange, resize, and stack components (such as ticket conversations and ticket properties) to improve agent workflow and reduce the time agents need to manage tickets.
If you are an admin using Zendesk Agent Workspace on an Enterprise or Enterprise Plus plan, you can sign up for the early access program.
Sign-up for the early access program here
0
Erin O'Callaghan
New EAP for generative AI:
Summarization and text enhancing
Zendesk offers several AI-powered features that help agents be more productive while still providing a high level of customer service. These features, which harness generative AI powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, include:
Sign up for the Summarization and text enhancing EAP
0
Colleen Hall
New beta for conversational commerce:
Conversational commerce
With conversational commerce, you can turn everyday support conversations into revenue generating opportunities. Agents will be equipped with product recommendations, promotion sharing, and payment handling, all within the conversation.
Sign up for the conversational commerce beta
0
Lisa Kelly
New beta for Agent Home
Agent Home
Agent Home is the one-stop-shop for agents to manage all work, including tickets, messaging conversations, and conversations you’re CC’d on or following. Agent Home works in real time, showing you tickets assigned to you and their latest updates. The page includes read and unread indicators help keep you on top of the conversation and productivity tools help you keep your workspace well-organized and tidy
If you are an admin with the Zendesk Agent Workspace activated in your account, you can sign up for the open beta program. Agent Home is ideal for customers who have Omnichannel Routing (OCR) but it works for all Agent Workspace accounts. We don’t recommend this beta if you’re using Talk or Chat.
Sign up for the Agent Home open beta program.
0
Jacquelyn Brewer
New beta for bulk importing data
Data importer
Zendesk is progressively replacing the current bulk data importing functionality with the data importer. This new, more intuitive tool will provide a consistent experience across types of imports, logging of import activity, and supports imports of files up to 1 GB in size. The Data importer page in Admin Center currently supports the import of new organization data.
In future releases, we'll add support for using imports to update existing organizations as well as importing custom object and user data, too.
Learn more about the new data importer
0
Erin O'Callaghan
New beta for Explore
Data exporter
This open beta introduces the Explore data exporter, which lets Enterprise customers export data from Explore datasets without any filters. This means you can easily combine data from Explore with other data sources.
Learn more about the Explore data exporter open beta
0
Aimee Spanier
New Agent Workspace beta for messaging and live chat
Auto-accept for messaging and live chat
Auto-accept functionality automatically assigns messaging and live chat conversations and end-user queries to specified agents in the Agent Workspace. With this feature, agent capacity utilization will always be at maximum.
Sign up for the EAP here
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