What's New quarterly roundup: March 2022

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Check out what's new in the last quarter:

• Make it easy for your customers
• Set your teams up for success
• Keep your business in sync
• Sell smarter, not harder
• Coming soon

Make it easy for your customers

• Your customers can add multiple email addresses and phone numbers to their profiles and better manage their contact details. Customers can add up to 10 email addresses and phone numbers without contacting your customer support team. Customers can also delete email addresses and phone numbers, request verification emails, and assign primary emails and phone numbers. See Help Center guide for end users.
• Agents and end users can drag and drop files into messaging conversations, adding them as attachments. See Working with attachments.
• You can now configure digital lines without an outbound phone number. This gives you the ability to offer a digital call option to your customers without needing to have a phone number. See Adding an overflow number (for digital lines).
  

  

• Custom pages with customizable URLs can help you share more types of information with your users in your help center. Located in the theme editor of the help center, custom pages let you create and code pages from scratch that you can place anywhere in your help center.
  
  For example, you can use custom pages to create landing pages for specific audiences, browsable catalogs for products, or interactive flows that guide users to the right request form. See Creating custom pages in your help center.

Set your teams up for success

• You can resize the context panel in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. Changing the width of the context panel gives you a better view of customer context, sidebar apps, or Knowledge articles. See Resizing the context panel.
  

  

• End-user authentication is now supported in messaging. You can verify the identity of your end users through end-user authentication before starting a messaging conversation. This gives agents more context and continuity when they view an end user's conversation history. See Authenticating end users in messaging for the Web Widget and mobile SDK.  

  

• Content blocks enable you to create, manage, and reuse content across your help centers. You can add content, such as common troubleshooting steps, disclaimers, and rules and regulations into a content block, that you can then insert into multiple articles, across multiple help centers. 

  If you need to update information in your content block, you only have to do it once and it will automatically update in all the articles where your content block is placed. See Reusing content with content blocks.

• You can now create an article in Knowledge directly from the ticket. If you can't find a relevant article or post for the ticket that you're working on, you can create a new article and link it to the customer conversation. Including information that's missing from your knowledge base in a new article helps decrease the number of tickets on the subject. See Creating articles in Knowledge. 

  

• External content sources (such as blogs, websites, or wikis) can be included in the search in Knowledge. Search filters are also updated in Knowledge to help so agents find the right external content source among other search results. This feature is available on Enterprise plans where Federated Search is configured. See Setting up federated search and Configuring Knowledge in the context panel.
• You can now use the Unified Search endpoint to search for knowledge base articles, community posts, and external records, instead of using one endpoint to search articles and another to search community posts. See Unified Search in the API reference docs.
• Emergency calling is now available for certain countries when using Zendesk Talk, allowing outbound calls to be made to emergency services (such as, 911, 999, and 112). In the event of an emergency, agents can quickly get in contact with emergency services using the Talk call console. See Emergency calling in Talk. 
• The Zendesk Agent Workspace now includes assign links for ticket comments. You can use this assign link to manually assign a ticket to the agent who made the comment. See Manually assigning a ticket.
  

  

• In the Zendesk Agent Workspace, when you redact ticket content, a tag is now automatically added to tickets (redacted_content). You can search for this redacted_content tag to easily create a list of redacted tickets. See Redacting ticket content.
• In the Zendesk Agent Workspace, you can change the color of text in ticket comments. This feature is useful for drawing attention to important items in your comments. If your channel supports rich text formatting, the colors you add to comments in a ticket appear as colored text in your messaging applications and email replies. See Changing text color.

  

• Composers for the standard agent interface now support rich content and markdown within the same editor. You don’t have to choose between a rich content editor and a markdown editor for your agents. The rollout for this feature started on Jan 10, 2022 and should be complete by March 28, 2022. See Formatting options for agents.

  

• The new Zendesk composer experience is now available for AnyChannel integrations that use the Zendesk Channel Framework. The new experience enables agents to use a combination of rich content editing and markdown commands in ticket conversations. You don't have to choose between composers. See Formatting options for agents.

  

• The Next ticket button has a new look to prevent confusion with a control to collapse the context panel. This change is cosmetic; the button works the same as before. See Viewing tickets.

  

• The rollout for the final phase of Support settings in Admin Center has started. In this final phase, the settings pages will be fully migrated to Admin Center. They will no longer appear in Support. The rollout should be complete on March 3, 2022. See About Support settings in Admin Center. 

  

• The Add user and Add organization interfaces have been redesigned to make error messages more visible and easier to see. See Adding agents and admins.

  

• Updated User fields and Organization fields pages in Zendesk Support and Admin Center look and feel more like the modernized Ticket fields page. This change provides a consistent experience for custom field management across Zendesk. See Adding custom fields to users and Adding custom fields to organizations.

  

• Filter the audit log by activity type, including the new Exported type. In addition to filtering the log by date and the person responsible for the event, you can also filter by activity type. The list of activity types captured in the audit log includes: Created, Updated, Deleted, Exported, and Sign in. See Viewing the audit log for changes.

  

• The audit log now records three additional events: See Viewing the audit log for changes.
  • • • Changes to Team member authentication settings
      • Ticket form creation, deletion, and modification
      • Ticket field condition creation, deletion, and modification
• The Agent workspace navigation path in Admin Center has changed to Agent tools to clarify that settings in this part of Admin Center apply to both the Zendesk Agent Workspace and the standard agent interface. This is a label change only; no features or functions are impacted. See Using Zendesk Admin Center.

  

• Configuration settings for the context panel have moved to Admin Center. Previously, the settings were only available in Support > Admin. Use these settings to configure Knowledge in the context panel. See Configuring the context panel.
  

  

• Choose a circle- or square-shaped messaging launcher. You can now select the launcher shape for the messaging Web Widget. See Configuring the Web Widget.
  

  

• Agent Workspace migration rules for Support-only accounts have been relaxed to allow self-service migration for accounts with 100-500 agents. See Evaluating your account for migration.
• The Zendesk Suite trial task wizard now includes a new Learn more page with additional ways to explore Zendesk. The page includes links to demo videos, customer stories, training courses, and evaluation guides. See Introducing Zendesk Suite trial tasks.

  

• The Zendesk Suite trial wizard includes a new Apps and integrations section. During the trial, you can learn how to use Marketplace apps and integrations to extend Zendesk capabilities and work seamlessly with other business tools. See Introducing Zendesk Suite trial tasks.
  

  

• A new option to create a test ticket has been added to the Zendesk Suite trial wizard. You can try out your new Support email address by sending a test ticket and viewing the results. See Introducing Zendesk Suite trial tasks.

  

• Zendesk Messaging is now included as a setup task for new Zendesk Suite trial accounts. The Zendesk Suite trial wizard gives customers guidance on how to set up messaging on their account. See Messaging and live chat. 

  

• Messaging is now the default experience for all new Suite trial accounts. Customers who start a Suite trial will instantly gain access to messaging in the Web Widget, including bot-enabled conversations and an improved onboarding experience. See Enabling a Web Widget to offer messaging on your website or help center. 
• You now have two new ways to speak with a Zendesk representative before making a purchase. Customers with trial accounts can click the Get help button, located in the banner at the top of their account.
  

  

  Customers who are directly buying Zendesk can use the Messaging button on the payment page. See Buying Zendesk Suite.

  

• Customers with eligible sales-assisted accounts now have an improved buying experience for adding agent seats. Account owners and billing admins can instantly buy additional agent seats seamlessly in-product when they add users that require a paid seat. See Adding agents on-the-fly.
  

  

• Some customers will have the option to answer a few questions about their business needs before buying Zendesk Suite. After taking a short quiz, Zendesk will suggest the plan that works best. Zendesk is testing this purchasing option for a few select accounts, but we hope to expand it to all Suite purchases in the near future. See Discovering which Zendesk plan to buy.
  

Keep your business in sync

• The new Zendesk integration for Microsoft Teams brings your communication and support solutions together to enable employees to work wherever they’re most productive. You can create, update, and view support tickets directly within Microsoft Teams. You can also set up ticket notifications and provide self-service with Answer Bot inside the app. See Announcing the new Microsoft Teams integration and learn more on the Zendesk app for Microsoft Teams page. 
• The updated Zoom integration helps you deliver personalized support. You can schedule meetings, access full customer details, and manage tickets directly within the Zoom Meetings interface. Get the Zendesk for Zoom app. 
• A new prebuilt Agent Concurrency dashboard and dataset help you understand how many chats your agents are engaged in at the same time. The dashboard shows chat concurrency by hour and day, as well as a list of agents with the most concurrent chats. The dataset lets you build your own custom reports on chat concurrency. See Analyzing your Chat activity and Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Chat.

  

• A new prebuilt Search dashboard and dataset help you understand how your customers interact with your help center, including what they’re searching for and how successfully they find answers. It helps you identify hot topics that interest customers most, and also helps you detect gaps in your knowledge base that need to be addressed. See Analyzing help center search results with Explore and Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Guide.
• A new prebuilt Flow Builder dashboard and dataset help you monitor Answer Bot's performance. The dashboard can help you identify how many users received a message from the bot, how many users actively engaged with the bot, and how many users’ conversations were transferred from the bot to an agent. See Analyzing your Flow Builder activity and Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Answer Bot.
  
• The Reports settings page is now in Admin Center. In Admin Center, click the Account icon () in the sidebar, then select Tools > Reports. Use this page to export data from your account to a JSON, CSV, or XML file. Previously, this page wasn't a part of the Support settings move to Admin Center. See About Support setting in Admin Center.

Sell smarter, not harder

• Sales reps and managers can use the subscriptions feature to better forecast their sales pipeline with now more insight into the monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of contacts. Using MRR smart list fields, and the subscription widget on a contact's page, sales reps can define and track the history of a contact's MRR, see their current MRR, and the subscription's start and end dates, making it easier to know when to work on renewals and expansions, and log upcoming subscriptions with a description. See Activating and deactivating subscriptions in Sell. 
• Integrate new Sell apps like Textline, MobileForce CPQ, and Geckoboard to enhance Sell’s functionality, improve productivity, shorten sales cycles, and gain better insights. Explore the Sell marketplace. 
• Add an unsubscribe link to sequence emails to increase email deliverability and lower the spam score of your emails. This allows recipients to opt out of emails, ending their sequence and notifying Sell that they're an unsubscribed recipient. See Setting up email and task sequences in Sell and Best practices for preventing your Sell email messages from being flagged as spam.
• A last activity date logs meaningful activity with a lead or contact, for example whenever someone logs a note, call, text, visit, task, or sends an email relating to a lead, contact, or deal. It does not update for someone simply editing or tagging a lead, contact, or deal. See Sell standard calculated fields.

Coming soon

• You can use Flow Builder to quickly and automatically help customers on popular social media channels like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and more. See Flow Builder support for social messaging (Early Access Program). 
• You can resize the ticket properties panel in the Zendesk Agent Workspace to give you a better view of ticket fields. Changing the width of this panel is particularly useful if you’re working on tickets with a lot of fields. 
  
• Side conversations are moving to the context panel in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. You'll be able to view customer context, search for help center articles, work with side conversations, and manage applications, all from a single, resizable panel in the ticket interface.
• Streamline your sales process. Increase sales rep productivity by automating simple workflows with Sales triggers. This removes admin work and keeps your team focused on closing deals.