What's new: August 2016 roundup

This article provides a roundup of the new features released in Zendesk over the last few months.

For a list of recent features in Zendesk Chat, see What's new in Chat: August 2016.

• Core support features
  • Satisfaction reasons
  • Guided mode
  • Admin changes to macros
  • PCI compliant field
• Self-service features
  • Help Center Copenhagen responsive theme
  • Help Center updated article editor
  • Help Center profiles
  • Help Center instant search
  • Help Center smart search
  • Web Widget restricted Help Center content
  • Web Widget contextual help
• Apps and integrations
  • Google Play integration
  • Office 365 Groups
  • JIRA integration update
  • Enhanced Pathfinder app

Core support features

• Satisfaction reasons (Professional and Enterprise) enable you to learn about the issues behind a bad satisfaction rating by asking any customer who gives a negative customer satisfaction survey response to select a reason for their dissatisfaction. See Working with satisfaction reasons.
• Guided mode (Enterprise) gives you greater control over the order in which agents address tickets to prevent the dreaded cherry-picking. Guided mode agents are required to work through tickets in a view using Play mode. In Play mode, agents are automatically guided through available tickets according to a view's sort order. See Setting up Guided mode.
• Admin changes to macros is a new macros management experience for all admins and agents. While this change consists mostly of an interface change, there are some important details that will impact all agents in Zendesk Support. Interface changes include the ability to search by macro title, the option to choose manual or alphabetical ordering, and pagination—instead of loading all your macros on one page, we'll load 50 macros per page. For information on macros see Organizing and managing your macros and Using macros to update tickets and chat sessions.
• PCI-compliant field automatically redacts credit card numbers to the last 4 digits, which, for example, can be used for identity verification by Support agents. This is a powerful tool for safely interacting with customers about their payment information in a PCI compliant manner. See Adding a PCI-compliant credit card field.

Self-service features

• Help Center Copenhagen responsive theme is a new theme for Help Center built on best practices and with support for mobile devices. The theme was built by our team in Copenhagen and is inspired by the highly functional and close attention to detail that’s part of Danish design. See About the default Copenhagen theme in Help Center.
• Help Center updated article editor is an improved experience for updating and publishing your articles and translations in Help Center. With the updated article editor you can now clearly see the status of drafts versus published articles, change the author, manage translation options, update multiple translations without saving each time, and quickly find the right section to publish your article. See Contributor guide to the Help Center knowledge base and Localizing Help Center.
• Help Center profiles (Professional and Enterprise) provide an overview of user information, activity, and recent contributions for members of your community. Help Center profiles also enable users to follow one another and get notifications of new articles, posts, and comments for anyone they are following. See Enabling profiles in your Help Center and Viewing user profiles from Help Center.
• Help Center instant search provides Help Center article suggestions as a user types in in the Search box. The user can select matched articles directly from the Search box without going to the search result page first. See Add instant search results to your Help Center.
• Help Center smart search is a search ranking algorithm for Help Center that returns more relevant results for Help Center article search. Smart Search uses machine learning technology to understand how customers interact with search results and reranks them based on those signals.
• Web Widget restricted Help Center content enables you to configure your Web Widget to embed content from a restricted Help Center (one that requires users to sign in for access) or restricted knowledge base content (a public Help Center with certain articles or sections restricted to signed-in users only). See Using restricted Help Center content with the Web Widget.
• Web Widget contextual help is a feature that uses the web page your visitor is currently on, along with your Help Center content, to suggest Help Center articles that may be relevant to their questions. Its goal is to reduce the effort of an end-user who might be trying to self-serve by suggesting contextually relevant articles. See About Contextual Help for the Web Widget.

Apps and integrations

• Google Play integration enables you to transform Google Play Store reviews into Zendesk Support tickets, allowing Google Play app developers or support agents to respond to reviews through the Zendesk Support platform. See Google Play integration.
• Office 365 groups enables you to engage with your team on the go with an Office 365 work or school account. Take part in the latest discussions, share photos and notes, and collaborate on files. With the Outlook Groups for Zendesk Support app, escalate tickets from Zendesk Support to Outlook Groups from your ticket sidebar. Tickets sent to a selected Outlook Group will create a new conversation within that group containing the ticket information as a Zendesk connector card. Team members in that group will be able to see pertinent information about the ticket and be able to help solve customer concerns more efficiently. See Even better than "Phone a Friend" on our blog and Outlook Groups in Apps Marketplace.
• JIRA integration update is all about bringing the great features from our JIRA Cloud integration to JIRA Server. We're merging the functionality so in the future we can add features and fixes to both versions faster and with less disruption to our users. See Migrating to JIRAv3 and Setting up Zendesk for JIRA integration.
• Enhanced Pathfinder app now includes web page visits and Help Center searches and articles viewed through the Web Widget. This is in addition to the Help Center and Community article views that were the hallmark features of the original version of the app. This enables agents and administrators to gain even more context about the customer journey leading up to tickets. See Installing and using the Pathfinder app.