This article describes how to use tabs to help manage conversations in Zendesk agent interfaces. Some channel types shown in this article may not be available in your account, depending on which channels your administrator has configured.
As a busy agent using the Zendesk Agent Workspace, you may have to manage multiple conversations at the same time. You can use tabs at the top of the interface to help you move easily between many types of conversations (chats, phone, email, and messages). Tabs provide important information and help you see which conversations are still active and which conversations are waiting for your reply.
If your administrator has not enabled the Zendesk Agent Workspace, you can also use tabs to help manage your tickets in the Support agent interface.
To help you manage your conversations, the tabs provide you with useful information to keep you on-track with your customers.
Tabs can include:
- Icons to show the conversation type. For example, email, chat, phone, or message application.
- For messaging conversations and active chats:
- Requester name
- Last message and typing indicator
- For all other conversations and for ended chats:
- Ticket subject
- Ticket ID
- Indicators to show auto assist updates (Advanced AI only).
Last message is the first line of the last successful reply between the agent assigned to the ticket and the requester.
Here are a few examples:
Tab | Description | Channel |
---|---|---|
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New message (red dot) | Any channel type, except phone. |
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Conversation is active (green dot) | Any channel type, except email, API, help center, and channel framework. |
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Conversation is inactive or the agent is away (yellow icon) | Works for chats, but not messaging, email, API, help center, and channel framework. |
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Conversation (or call) has ended (no color) | Any channel type. For messaging conversations, the no-color icon indicates the call has ended or become inactivate. |
![]() |
User is typing | Any channel type, except phone, email, API, help center, and channel framework. |
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Unsaved changes in the ticket (blue dot) | Any channel type. |
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Includes a message or suggestion from auto assist | Email and messaging channels (Advanced AI only) |
Other benefits of tabs include:
- Because phone conversations and live chats typically require the most immediate responses, tabs for these types of conversations automatically move to the left side of the interface, so they don’t get overlooked when you’re working on multiple conversations.
- Channels that have “live” conversations, such as chats, phone calls, or messages, show when a conversation is active, inactive, or ended. A conversation is inactive if no messages have been sent or received after a certain period of time. For example, ten minutes for social messages.
- To see conversation details, hold your mouse pointer over a tab.
- If you’re using auto assist, the conversation details include auto assist
information.
26 comments
Kyle Gibbons
@... our team would like to switch over to the new Admin view, but the team loves the subject line for each tab. Is it not possible anymore to have the subject line rather than the requestor?
Thanks,
Kyle Gibbosn
9
Pat Harland-Lee
Hey guys, we recently just switched to Agent Workspace but found it quite confusing which tickets are open in which tabs, and find that Ticket Subject (even just the first part of it) is much more useful than the requester name (especially when the user has several tabs open, each from the same requester!).
Is there any chance of either changing this back to Subject, or at least making it configurable to be Subject OR requester name?
10
Eric Gao
Hey Pat,
It's currently not possible to change the primary text on tabs. This was an intentional design change since the Agent Workspace is heavily based on having live conversations within the Support interface, so displaying the requester's (or visitor's) name in the tabs will be more useful to agents than having multiple tabs showing “Conversation with XYZ”.
As an alternative, agents can still view the ticket subject by hovering over the tab itself as well.
Eric G. Gao | Technical Support Architect | Zendesk
-10
Pat Harland-Lee
Thanks for responding Eric. Because we are a B2B organisation, we receive support tickets from the same people multiple times per week (sometimes per day!). In these situations, it's not helpful to show the name of the requestor in the ticket tab. I feel like this design was only built for B2C organisations where you rarely contact the same customer multiple times. It'd be great if this was at least configurable to switch between either the requester name or the first part of the Subject.
17
Ethan Smith
I would like to add to the conversation here to say that Ticket Subject would be FAR more helpful to have in that tab rather than the name of the requester. Their name tells me nothing about the ticket. Having the name rather than the ticket title makes me have to memorize what ticket I have open with each customer at the present time. Was much easier to have the ticket subject in the tab
14
Nick S
+1 on Ethans comment - when having multiple tickets open the preview is best suited to show the Subject rather than the Requester Name. Especially when there may be instances when managing many different tickets from the same requester.
10
Victoria Brearton
Adding +1 to all the above comments. The subject of the ticket is signfacntly more useful to our agents than the customer name. We receive 100+ tickets a day - there's no way my agents can quickly look at a customer name and know that's the right ticket they need to navigate to. We would like the option to choose what information is displayed in the ticket tabs.
9
Phil Baker
Ditto, +1
I too prefer the subject in the ticket tab over the customer name.
6
Jonathan Ruh
+1 to all above comments. We desperately need the option to have the subject on the tab. Please fix or provide an option to change!
4
Lisa Kelly
Thanks to everyone for your comments! For better visibility to our Product team, would you mind creating a post in our Feedback - Ticketing System topic, using this template to format your feedback? Thanks!
-2
Ethan Smith
I'd like to voice that I'm not very thrilled with the way this was/has been handled. Decent amount of activity on this post for the last 12 months, and we're just now being asked to log this as feedback somewhere else. Seems like that is 12 months of lost time of having any chance of this change being prioritized.
I've logged this as a feature request and would appreciate if others would go vote for this idea so that it can get some more attention from the Zendesk product team.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4437348940058-Show-ticket-title-in-tab-not-requester-name
4
Lisa Kelly
Thank you, Ethan. The product team is already aware of this issue, but the more votes it gets in the Community post, the better.
0
Ethan Smith
Thanks Lisa Kelly for the reply. To clarify, as much as I would like this feature to be implemented, I do understand that roadmaps need to be developed and that features do need to be desired by a large number of customers (generally). I was mostly frustrated at the delayed communication here on this thread and the fact that no one on this thread was advised to open a feature request elsewhere for 12 months. Thanks for getting back to us on this thread now.
1
Olivier Tassinari
How can we disable the tabs entirely?
It would be much better for me to use Chrome's tabs for the same purpose (the tabs are better implemented by Chrome than by Zendesk).
1
Maurice Asuncion
do you know how I can customize my tabs to show the ticket subject instead of requester?![](/hc/user_images/84u-KkSFy6X6l1b1bf_eUg.png)
1
Beto
Hello Oliver and Maurice, I hope you are both well. Thank you for your questions!
Unfortunately, it is currently not possible to disable the ticket tabs, or edit how they work and the information they provide.
But this is a good suggestion to have. I can recommend that you create a feedback Post in our Community requesting this feature here. You can explain your use case and the more traction this post gets, the more chances there are for our Development team to consider implementing this in the future :)
I hope this was helpful!
0
Ethan Smith
Maurice Asuncion I've already got a post asking for this feature, so feel free to add your feedback there. there is already a lot of support for the idea on my post
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4437348940058-Show-ticket-title-in-tab-not-requester-name
1
Robert Winther
Clearly not 'more useful' to all, looking at how many have requested having at least the ability to chose if Subject Line instead.
8 months after Ethan formally made a post requesting the feature, and as usual from Zendesk, no signs of listening to their Customers.
1
Athar Hussain
Dear Support, multiple agents have the issue that the tabs are now in a collapsed menu, instead of having each tab open.![](/hc/user_images/Ne-B5ajW9wYunwL2kg7Ipg.png)
![](/hc/user_images/ZRIeQTn2WsmXrZ9ltf5nBg.png)
Is there any way to deactivate this feature?
This format is highly impractical.
Thanks for the feedback.
Cheers
Athar
0
Lisa Kelly
Hi Athar,
You should only see the More drop-down when you have many tickets open and all the tab space at the top of the ticket window is taken up. This is not the case in your situation. I recommend contacting Zendesk Customer Support so they can help you with this issue.
0
Ethan Smith
Athar Hussain
this happens to me from time to time. I just refresh the screen and the tickets generally sort themselves back out into the typical tabs so they aren't all collapsed into the "more" tab. does refreshing work for you when this happens?
0
Nate Perdomo
Is there a shortcut key combination that can switch between ticket tabs? I love the feature, but it's limiting to be stuck using the mouse to select the small tabs above the work area. Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and other browsers have a similar tab functionality, and most of them allow switching between tabs with the CTRL + TAB or CTLR(CMD) + NUMBER key combinations. Do we have this ability in Zendesk?
0
Lisa Kelly
Hi Nate,
![](/hc/user_images/SboKCJ51sEsE9TnBHjVJvw.png)
Yes. See below.
Note: For Mac, use the Option key instead of the Alt key. See Viewing keyboard shortcuts.
1
Abby
My team has experienced a lot of pain around the tabs moving back and forth depending on which includes the most recent message. We chat, and prior to Agent Workspace, my team really utilized muscle memory to navigate tabs. Now that these move position, they can no longer use that muscle memory. My team is reporting that they keep mixing up who to respond to, causing significant slow down. Is there any way to prevent tabs from moving positions?
1
Noly Maron Unson
Hi Abby,
Unfortunately, there is no option to prevent this behavior.
I've marked this conversation as product feedback for review, which means that your input will be aggregated as a part of our Voice of the Customer program that provides customer feedback to our product development teams.
Thank you.
0
Nate Hales
What do the red bubbles mean AFTER you have sent a message to the customer? I am seeing notifications on my messaging tabs, however I am the last person to send a message. I am not sure why these message bubbles would show?
0