Getting started with Zendesk Suite - Introduction

Articles in the series

• Introduction: Getting started with Zendesk Suite
• Part 1: Accessing Zendesk Suite admin settings
• Part 2: Adding team members
• Part 3: Understanding how end user accounts are handled
• Part 4: Managing user access security and authentication
• Part 5: Adding support channels
• Part 6: Routing incoming support requests
• Part 7: Managing support requests during non-business hours
• Part 8: Guaranteeing customer support expectations with service level agreements
• Part 9: Reporting on support activity
• Part 10: Enabling customer satisfaction ratings
• Part 11: Using the Zendesk developer platform to extend your support solution
• Part 12: Rolling out your Zendesk Suite support solution

Zendesk Suite contains several Zendesk products and capabilities that are available in the following five plan options.

• Team
• Growth
• Professional
• Enterprise
• Enterprise Plus

While all five plans contain the core Zendesk products, the higher plans contain the additional features and capabilities needed to scale and manage the complexity of providing support in increasingly larger organizations and businesses.

For more information about the Suite plans, see About the Zendesk Suite plan types.

Zendesk Suite includes the following products:

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.

Zendesk bots

Zendesk's AI-powered bots can help your customers locate the answers they need without having to contact a human agent or wait for hours or days to receive a response during non-business hours.

Zendesk bots can be used in email notifications, where they can respond to customers with recommended help center articles derived from the content of the requester's email message or the information that has been entered into your contact form.

They are also part of messaging’s advanced bot-enabled functionality, where they can recommend relevant help center articles and guide customers through automated conversation bots designed in bot builder.

You can use bot builder to create a bot that interacts with customers and provides answers to common questions.

For more information, see Understanding everywhere you can use Zendesk bots and About the bot builder.

Agent Workspace

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.

Note: The use of the Agent Workspace in Zendesk Suite is optional. If you began using the trial version of Zendesk Suite, the Agent Workspace was enabled by default, and it's required to use web or mobile messaging. However, an admin with the proper role permissions can enable and disable the Agent Workspace. Several admin tasks affect how the Agent Workspace functions. For example, agents added to your live chat channel receive incoming chat requests based on the settings you selected for chat routing.

To learn more about the admin tasks that are specific to the Agent Workspace, see Optimizing the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

Additional features for increased organizational and business complexity and volume

In addition to these products, Zendesk Suite contains additional features and functionality that helps to address the needs of increased organizational and business complexity and volume. Here’s a quick summary of each.

Light agents	Light Agents are additional agent users that can collaborate on tickets. They have limited permissions but can stay informed about tickets and, when needed, provide subject matter expertise and advice by adding private comments to the ticket. See Understanding and setting light agent permissions.
Side conversations	Side Conversations enable you to bring in other people from internal and external teams to collaborate on tickets without interrupting the main conversation flow within the ticket. The difference between this and Light Agents is that these other people cannot see or interact with tickets; they have no agent permissions whatsoever. An agent working on a ticket can create a side conversation to communicate with and gather more information from, for example, a supplier or shipper to help them solve the ticket. Side conversations keep these informational conversations associated with a ticket so that it’s all in one place. See Using side conversations in tickets.
Multibrand	Multibrand allows you to create additional customer support experiences. A brand is a customer-facing identity represented by a collection of contact points for your customers. These contact points can include brand-specific email support addresses, a branded help center and embedded support in websites and mobile apps, and brand-specific contact telephone numbers and social media channels. By default, you have one brand in Zendesk. Adding more brands enables you to segment your customer experience in a way that makes sense for your business. For example, you might have two distinct brands whose customers do not overlap. Each different set of customers interacts with your Support team members via the brand-specific contact points. See Setting up multiple brands.
Multiple ticket forms and conditional ticket fields	In the Suite, you can create custom ticket forms (see Creating multiple ticket forms to support different request types) and use conditional ticket fields (fields that are displayed or hidden based on what a user selects in another field – see Creating conditional ticket fields in Zendesk Support).
Data center locality	Data Center Locality enables you to choose where your account data is hosted (US-only or EU-only). See About Data Center Location.
Advanced compliance	Advanced compliance helps you fulfill your HIPAA obligations. With advanced compliance, you can enter into a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with Zendesk. Additionally, Zendesk will provide appropriate security configuration options to help safeguard protected health information (PHI). See Advanced Compliance.
Enhanced disaster recovery	Enhanced Disaster Recovery enhances the protection of your Zendesk data and provides for faster recovery in the event of a disaster that interrupts your Zendesk service. Your Zendesk data is replicated in real-time and you’ll receive priority cloud resiliency. See Enhanced Disaster Recovery.
Premium sandbox	The Premium Sandbox extends the standard sandbox functionality that is included in your Zendesk account. A sandbox allows you to test changes you make to your Zendesk Suite configurations, experiment with integrations, and provide training for your agents. The Premium Sandbox allows you to include much more user, organization, and ticket data information. See About the Premium Sandbox.
High volume API	High Volume API provides more capabilities for developing custom solutions on the Zendesk developer platform, allowing you to increase your overall API rate limit to 2500 requests per minute (see Zendesk API rate limits) and to send up to 700 Zendesk events to AWS per minute (see Stream Zendesk events to AWS and Events schema for Amazon EventBridge).

To see which of these are available in your Zendesk Suite plan, review the articles that have been linked to above.

The Zendesk Suite also includes several capacity add-ons. For example, you can purchase extra "pay as you go" minutes for your Talk calls and texts. You can also add several of the features above (Premium Sandbox and High Volume API) as add-ons to plans that do not already include them. For more information, see About Zendesk Suite add-ons.

Continue to Part 1: Accessing Zendesk Suite admin settings.