Articles in the series
This guide introduces the core concepts and capabilities of the Zendesk Suite to help you get started.
The capabilities of the Suite
The Zendesk Suite includes the following:
| Ticketing system. Ticketing through Zendesk Support is the hub of your support experience. It provides ticket and user management, workflow, and other administrative aspects of the core of your customer service solution. The agent workspace is where all tickets and all interactions with customers from all communication channels are managed. |
| Help center. Using Guide, you can create a help center that contains your knowledge base articles and the support portal you provide to your customers. Zendesk also provides an authoring environment to create and manage your knowledge base articles. There are also features to enable team member collaboration in developing your knowledge base content. |
| Community forum. A community forum can be added to your help center using Zendesk Gather. It enables your customers to post topics (such as questions) and interact with other community members. |
| Messaging. Zendesk’s messaging capability enables customers to request support, converse with the customizable messaging bot, and connect with an agent if they need further assistance. Messaging conversations become tickets that agents can update after the conversation ends. You can add messaging to your website, help center, mobile apps, and social channels. You can choose to use Zendesk’s classic live chat functionality instead. See Messaging vs. live chat for information on the benefits of each feature. |
| Voice. Agents interact with customers through Zendesk’s telephony channel, Talk, in the agent workspace in Support. Zendesk also provides tools for monitoring all ongoing call activity, status for the agents currently working this channel, and reports to show you, for example, your customers’ average wait time and average call length. The voice channel also enables you to interact with your customers via SMS. |
| Reporting and analytics. Zendesk provides all the reporting and analytics tools you need to monitor and evaluate your tickets and agent status and performance with Explore. It contains reporting dashboards for the important activity in the Suite. You can also use query tools to build custom reports and dashboards. |
| Sunshine. This is Zendesk’s open and flexible CRM platform. You can use it to develop custom apps that connect to external customer data and to extend your messaging capabilities by adding additional messaging channels and AI services using Sunshine Conversations. |
In addition to these capabilities, Zendesk Suite contains additional features and functionality that automates and streamlines your customer service, offers your customers and agents rich conversational experiences, and helps to address the needs of increased organizational and business complexity and volume.
The workspace where agents handle support requests
For agents, the hub of the ticketing system is the Agent Workspace. This is the ticket interface where your agents manage all support requests for all of the communication channels you set up (email, messaging, voice, and so on).
The Agent Workspace is the interface you see whenever you open a ticket (from the list of tickets on the Views page, for example).
All the support conversations your agents have with customers are captured in a single interface. In the example above, you can see that this ticket began as a live chat, and then the agent followed up via an email message to the customer to provide additional information. That’s all captured in the conversation flow (the middle section of the ticket interface). The Agent Workspace allows all omnichannel communication to be captured in a single conversation thread.
On the left side of the ticket interface, you see the ticket data, such as who’s assigned to the ticket, its priority, type, any tags that have been added, and so on.
On the right side, you see more details about the person who requested support, their contact information, their interaction history (tickets), and the path they took within your help center before reaching out to request help.
The right side of the ticket interface also provides a context panel with access to the apps that you have the option of adding via the Zendesk Apps Marketplace.
At the top of the Agent Workspace, agents can access and monitor activity for the channels they’ve been assigned to (chat, voice, and messaging). They can also set their availability status (online, away, or invisible) to make themselves available (or not) to participate in incoming support requests via those channels.
To learn more about the admin tasks that are specific to the Agent Workspace, see Optimizing the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
Continue to Part 1: Accessing Zendesk Suite admin settings.