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 Talk
- Zendesk bots
- Tymeshift workforce management
- 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:
- Merging related tickets based on AI suggestions
- Brand spaces
- Ability to merge organizations
- Object triggers for custom objects
- Deploying automations from premium sandboxes
- New customer profile page with activity timeline
- New email spam filter for Support
- Bring your own server
- Conversational commerce
- Similar tickets
- Timed ticket deletion
- High-volume API dashboard
- Redaction suggestions
- Modernized conversational experience (MCE)
Merging related tickets based on AI suggestions
The merging suggestions feature uses AI to show tickets that might be potentially merged to the ticket agent is currently working on. These suggestions appear in the Intelligence section of the context panel within a ticket.
Learn more about the merging tickets based on AI suggestions 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
Object triggers for custom objects
Object triggers enable you to create and run triggers based on events with your custom object records. You can build condition statements based on custom field values and define actions that update field values on the same object. The custom object doesn't need to have any relationship to tickets at all.
Learn more about object triggers for custom objects EAP
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 customer profile page with activity timeline
Customer profile pages in Zendesk Support are getting a new look within the Zendesk Agent Workspace. The new page pulls together important data, actions, and context about the customer. Agents can focus on delivering support rather than collecting information from different places.
Learn more about the new customer profile page
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
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.
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
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
Similar tickets
The similar ticket feature enables agents to see a list of similar tickets in the Intelligence section of the context panel when they're working on a ticket. By seeing how similar issues were addressed, agents are able to solve tickets more efficiently.
Learn more about the similar tickets EAP
Timed ticket deletion
Zendesk is working to provide you with the right capabilities for deleting tickets once you no longer need them. This helps you comply with global privacy legislations such as GDPR and CPRA, in addition to helping you manage your data storage.
This beta feature allows admins to delete archived tickets after a selected number of days since the tickets have been closed and last updated. See Enabling timed ticket deletion for archived tickets (beta).
Sign up for the Timed ticket deletion beta program
Redaction suggestions
The redaction suggestions feature automatically highlights certain types of personally identifiable information (PII) within a ticket. Agents with permission can then click the highlighted PII and quickly redact it. This helps keep confidential information out of Zendesk.
Learn more about the redaction suggestions EAP
Modernized conversational experience (MCE)
The Zendesk Agent Workspace is modernizing the look and feel of the ticket conversation interface to help agents quickly absorb and parse information in a ticket. Tickets are much easier to scan and navigate so agents can quickly get the information they need.
Sign up for the MCE beta program
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
New dashboard builder
This 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 beta
Zendesk Guide
The following current and upcoming betas are available for Guide:
Customizable CSAT configuration
EAP participants can use the new Customer satisfaction page in Admin Center to configure the CSAT experience for ticketing channels (Web form, Email, API). You can use the new Admin center experience to:
- Edit the CSAT survey question to tailor it to your needs
- Select a rating scale range with either 1-2, 1-3, or 1-5 scale increments
- Edit the label text for each rating
- Select the rating type (numerical, emoji, or custom text)
As with the current experience, you can also configure optional open-ended or drop-down follow up questions for users who submit a negative rating. However with this EAP, you can also change the question text used for the open-ended question or remove the open-ended question if you don’t want it to be part of the survey.
Learn more about the customizable CSAT configuration 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 Talk
The following early access program is available for Talk.
Generative AI-powered call summarization for Zendesk Talk
Improve agent productivity by reducing the time that agents spend in call wrap up. With generative AI-powered call summarization, Talk agents can focus their attention 100% on the customer and the task at hand, building a personal connection with them without having to task-split. To learn more about this great new AI-powered feature and to sign up for the EAP, see Announcing generative AI-powered call summarization for Zendesk Talk (EAP).
Zendesk bots
The following current and upcoming betas are available for Zendesk bots:
Generative replies for bots
Create a conversation bot that automatically generates a response to customer queries based on help center content.
Learn more about generative replies here
Bot personas
Customize your bot's personality and tone of voice by automatically generating variations of select bot responses, such as welcome and fallback messages and generative replies.
Learn more about bot personas here
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
OpenID Connect
The OpenID Connect EAP allows you to set up single sign-on (SSO) using OpenID Connect. You'll be able to set it up as an SSO configuration, similar to SAML and JWT.
Learn more about the OpenID Connect EAP or sign up here
Tymeshift workforce management
The following EAPs are available for Tymeshift workforce management (WFM):
- Define a rotation period for automatic shifts
- Track agent time with Google Chrome extension
- Tymeshift WFM automations
- Combined workstreams and workstreams prioritization
Define a rotation period for automatic shifts
This EAP lets admins in Tymeshift 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
Tymeshift 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.
Tymeshift WFM automations
Similar to Zendesk automations, WFM automations perform an action when the conditions you define are met. Additionally, you can use WFM to send notifications to your team in Zendesk.
Learn more about the Tymeshift WFM automations 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.
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.