This article provides a roundup of the new features released in Zendesk over the last few months. It includes the following sections:
Zendesk Support Suite
- Zendesk provides two new add-ons you can purchase to provide additional security for your account: Enhanced Disaster Recovery and Advanced Compliance. These add-ons are a replacement for the combined Advanced Security add-on and can be purchased separately.
- Audit log for Support Enterprise customers includes a new Admin Center interface that allows you to download and email log entries in CSV format. Audit log now tracks successful user sign ins.
- Agent workspace includes a redesigned conversation header to enable you to quickly view that status of a conversation, filter conversations by type, and switch easily between ticket conversations and events.
- In addition to Support Suite, you can enable the Zendesk Agent Workspace on any multiple-product account that includes both Support and Chat.
- Agent workspace supports fully-integrated social messaging configured through Admin Center. Channels supported include WhatsApp, WeChat, and LINE. Twitter and Facebook are also supported.
- Agent Workspace includes a new ticket tabs interface to help agents move easily between many types of conversations (chats, phone, email, and social messages).
- Agent workspace includes support for enabling secure chat attachments. The name of the Attachments setting for private attachments in Admin > Settings > Tickets has changed from to Require authentication to download to Enable secure attachments.
Zendesk Support
- Side conversations search—Retrieve valuable ticket data easily by searching through side conversations.
- Follow-up tickets for side conversations—Maintain seamless collaboration by creating a follow-up ticket when a side conversation within a closed ticket receives a reply.
- Side conversations creation role permissions (Enterprise plan only)—If you have an Enterprise account and the Collaboration add-on, you can prevent agents with custom roles from starting and replying to side conversations.
- Delimiter removal for email—You can now remove delimiter (the ### Please type your reply above this line ### portion of email notifications), to create a better email experience for your customers.
- Social messaging add-on now available for Support Team—The Social Messaging add-on for Support enables businesses to effortlessly use popular messaging apps like WhatsApp, WeChat or Facebook Messenger. To make it easier for businesses to engage with their customers in this changing environment, we've expanded the availability of the Social Messaging add-on to Support Team as well.
- Premium Sandbox: New pricing, Availability to Suite Enterprise customers—New Premium Sandbox customers can leverage new reduced pricing on all three tiers of Premium Sandbox. Premium Sandbox is now also available as a paid add-on to Suite Enterprise plan customers.
- Premium Sandbox: Automated UI—A smoother experience for managing and interacting with your Premium Sandbox in the Admin Center.
- Standard Sandbox: Automated UI—A smoother experience for managing and interacting with your Standard Sandbox in the Admin Center.
- Admin Center Staff Profile—Manage all your teams product entitlements and roles in a unified view within Admin Center.
- Skills-based routing EAP fixes several known issues with skills-based routing.
Zendesk Guide
- Content blocks (Enterprise plan only) allow customers to create, manage and update content that lives in multiple places. Changes made to a content block are reflected in all articles that reference that block.
- Federated search—Federated search allows companies to extend their Help Center search to external (non-Guide) knowledge bases via API.
- User segments: selecting specific users—Configure more flexible user segments with the ability to select specific users (staff or end-users) to be added to a segment without the need to select them via an attribute or tag. Additionally, the setup wizard has been optimized to better manage the process of creating and editing user segments.
- Light agent permissions—Guide admins can now assign management permissions to light agents across all Guide plans.
Zendesk Gather
- User badges—Boost community engagement by rewarding users for hitting milestones or participating in specific ways.
Zendesk Chat
- Chat SDK v2—Now available: New versions of the Chat SDK v2 for both iOS and Android with a bunch of great updates including dark mode, support for quick responses and support for multiple app pushes.
Zendesk Sell
- Sales engagement automation—With new sales engagement automation tools, reps can schedule a series of personalized emails to easily engage and qualify leads. Built into Zendesk Sell, these tools fit into existing workflows and auto-update lead records, eliminating manual work and boosting productivity.
- Voicemail—Allow reps to fully customize their voicemail inbox and create personal greetings.
- Shared email templates—Keep your team on message and reduce time drafting emails with shared email templates.
- Conference calling—Loop in key stakeholders on sales calls or transfer customers smoothly to other departments for quick help
- Roles and actions permissions—Foster collaboration on your team without compromising data integrity or user privacy. Define custom roles within your team and assign specific permissions for viewing, creating, and managing user records.
Zendesk Explore
- Explore Enterprise—Explore Enterprise helps service leaders manage and scale the business in a rapidly changing world. Spot and react to challenges across the business with real-time analytics and boost team collaboration with advanced report sharing capabilities.
Zendesk Sunshine
- Shopify Integration with Sunshine Profiles and Events—Easily integrate Shopify events, like fulfillment activity, as well as your customer's Shopify profile details, into customer context. Along with our new Sunshine integration, agents can now also process refunds and cancellations directly from your Shopify app for Support or Chat.
- Relationship-based access controls for custom objects—Manage access controls based upon relationships to the custom object. This enhancement will allow you more granular control specific to an agent or customer's relationship to their custom objects. This could allow you to expose certain custom objects to your customer, or restrict them from agents based upon your criteria.
- More Zendesk events via Sunshine (Guide Events app)—Give your agents near real-time visibility into customer interactions from the Web Widget, like website visited, as well as mobile SDK events like Help Center articles viewed or searched for.
Zendesk Sunshine Conversations
- Multiparty conversations—Multiparty conversations by Sunshine Conversations allows for businesses to pull everyone into a single conversation. Whether it's connecting buyers and sellers on a marketplace, allowing for external teams to collaborate, or helping build customer engagement, multiparty conversations help boost customer satisfaction and drive agent productivity.
Apps & Partners
- IBM Watson Assistant—Watson Assistant is IBM's conversational AI platform. Watson Assistant uses market leading AI under the hood to understand what users are actually trying to accomplish. Combine the power of Zendesk with IBM Watson's AI powered virtual assistant.
- Assembled Workforce Management—A modern workforce management platform, integrated with Zendesk Support, that combines fully automated forecasts, intuitive scheduling, and performance analytics all in one place.