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. It also supports saving snapshots of your configuration settings.
Future phases of the EAP will include comparing environment configuration snapshots and deploying configurations from one environment to another.
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:
- AI translations for articles
- Service catalog EAP
- Article multiplacement EAP
- New article editor with generative AI article summaries EAP
- Generative search for help center
- New request list experience
AI translations for articles EAP
AI translations for articles uses AI to help you quickly create article translations within your knowledge base, making it easier to provide support in multiple languages.
With this feature, you can generate translations for articles directly within the article editor. If your help center supports multiple languages, you can create an article in your default language, then use the AI translation feature to automatically translate the article into any language supported by your help center.
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
- Unassigned shifts
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.
Unassigned shifts
Unassigned shifts are created without being assigned specific agents, allowing managers to ensure optimal coverage without focusing on individual team members. Once created, unassigned shifts can be shared with a group of agents who can apply to take them.
Learn more about the creating and managing unassigned shifts 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.
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Sara Costa
New EAP for Zendesk WFM:
Unassigned shifts EAP
Unassigned shifts are created without being assigned specific agents, allowing managers to ensure optimal coverage without focusing on individual team members. Once created, unassigned shifts can be shared with a group of agents who can apply to take them.
Learn more about the creating and managing unassigned shifts EAP.
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