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 Guide
- Zendesk Messaging
- Zendesk Workforce Management
- Zendesk AI
- Trust and safety
- 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:
Custom objects in Guide and 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
Authenticated SMTP Connector
The Authenticated SMTP Connector in Zendesk will allow an account to create a secure inbound and outbound email connection with your email domain or service. This ensures TLS encryption, allows for authoritative sending and delivery tracking from your domain, more easily satisfies information handling, redaction, and compliance requirements or policies, and provides actionable visibility into unauthenticated email ticket creation and update events. This feature is platform-agnostic and relies on well-established protocols that already exist within most email services.
Learn more about the Authenticated SMTP Connector 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
Deploying automations from premium sandboxes
Zendesk is working to enhance premium sandbox functionality by supporting the deployment of new and updated automations directly to production rather than requiring admins to recreate them manually. This is already fully supported for triggers.
Learn more about the deploying automations to production EAP
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 Guide
The following current and upcoming betas are available for Guide:
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.
Zendesk Messaging
The following early access program is available for Zendesk Messaging.
Estimated wait time for messaging channels
With this EAP, you can now set expectations on wait time with your customers. An admin can set up Messaging Triggers to share the estimated wait time with customers once a messaging ticket is added to the queue. The wait time is estimated based on the messaging ticket's position in the queue. You can also set up triggers to send a message once the messaging ticket is assigned to an agent.
Learn more about the estimated wait time for messaging channels EAP
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
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.