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Announcing the new Microsoft Teams integration

David Gillespie
  • Edited
Zendesk Product Manager

Announced on

New integration available

Removal of existing integration

February 22, 2022

February 22, 2022

August 1st, 2022

(Previously planned for September 1, 2022)

We’re excited to announce the release of the new Zendesk integration for Microsoft Teams! This integration brings your communication and support solutions together to enable employees to work wherever they’re most productive.

The new Zendesk-Microsoft Teams integration will allow you to:

  • Escalate and resolve issues faster by updating and responding to tickets within Teams
  • Make it faster for your employees to get help, by creating and managing tickets directly from Teams 
  • Improve ticket visibility by using the ticket tab in Teams to see and receive notifications on any ticket activity
  • Deflect incoming tickets by using Answer Bot, only escalating to an agent for complex issues

This announcement answers the following questions:

  • What’s changing, and why?
  • What do I need to do?
  • What’s happening to the existing integration?

What’s changing, and why?

We launched Zendesk’s existing Teams integration in 2016 and have received lots of feedback from customers about features and capabilities they’d like to see in the product. 

Over the past year, we’ve been working with our development partner, Softserve, to build a new product that caters for the top requested use cases and most demanded features. The first release of the integration includes the following features: 

  • Create, view and update Zendesk tickets directly from within Microsoft Teams 
  • Add internal notes or public replies to tickets from within Microsoft Teams 
  • Get real-time notifications on tickets based on status, priority, type, or updates within any Teams channel or DM
  • Deploy Answer Bot in Microsoft Teams to answer commonly asked questions
  • See all open and closed personal tickets in a single listview within Microsoft Teams
  • Import Zendesk ticket views as tabs into a single Microsoft Teams workspace 

After the first release, we’ll be continuing development, with plans to release features like:

  • Side Conversations with Microsoft Teams
  • Use Custom ticket forms when creating and updating tickets in Microsoft Teams
  • Send notifications for SLAs to Teams channels or DM

Go to our ProductBoard for more details of our roadmap and to add or upvote features that you’d like to see in the integration. We’re also collecting and incorporating feedback on the product, which can be submitted here.

We’re planning to run a series of interviews with customers who have installed and used the integration to help us iterate and improve the product. If you would be interested in participating in some customer research, please fill out the following form.

What do I need to do?

To install the new integration go to the app listing in Microsoft Appsource and download the app on your Teams tenant.

Learn more about how to install from our installation guide or how to use the product from our user guide.

What’s happening to the existing integration?

We’ll be deprecating the existing Teams integration ahead of schedule on August 1, 2022 (previously communicated as September 1, 2022.)

If you’re using the existing Teams integration, you’ll need to move to the new integration by August 1st, 2022. After August 1st, the legacy integration will no longer function.

 

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17 Comments

  • Tobias Hermanns

    Hi David,

    we are very much looking into Teams solutions with Zendesk for Internal and External Support.

    We also have still bottlenecks.

    If you have the time, I would like to do a meeting with you to present our workflow, limitations and idea brainstorming.

    Thanks.

    Kind Regards,

    Tobias

    0
  • Ed Ball

    Do you have to work out of teams or is this also available within zendesk itself?  Can I have a view that shows tickets created within teams?  Is it possible that the user can create a ticket without being sent a link in teams and having it show up in Zendesk?  

    We have some outsource agents that do not have access to teams, but that we would like to be able to help with certain tickets. Is that possible? I do not recall a mention of it that I have seen.

    2
  • John Meyer

    Oh man I've been waiting for more Teams integrations for years!

    The good:

    1. If you have the Answer Bot enabled users can ask a question, get suggestions, and then be pointed to opening a ticket if not answered by articles. The Answer Bot triage is going to be a new, approved method of opening a ticket for us. Really great.
    2. Very happy to have a shortcut that prompts the user to open a ticket.

    The meh...:

    1. Just about everything else was in the previous integration and I was confused why that one existed. Anecdotally, no agent on my team wants to use Zendesk from within Teams.
    2. Though end users can technically open new tickets with this, they have no idea what Zendesk is, so seeking out and installing a bot called Zendesk, or entering a command in a bot-installed Team (ticket) to open a ticket is not going to happen. They are still going to message us directly and not seek out the Zendesk bot, even if we train them on it. It also looks like I would have to install the bot to each chat from each user to use the features.
    3. Requiring 5 words and a question mark for answer bot is rarely going to work. People don't use punctuation half the time, we get screenshots of errors with no words, or we are given statements (The thing does not work.). I wish there was a more direct way to have the answer bot respond.

    The bad:

    1. The answer bot is extremely buggy. It has never returned an article in my testing. It rarely responds to questions in the first place (yes they have 5 words and a question mark) I also receive random errors when just having normal conversation. I have disabled it to stop the frequent error messages.
    2. I suspect Ed's comments are the beginning of a pattern of replies pointing out that the single most important aspect of a Teams integration is missing. Agents want to work in Zendesk and communicate with users that are using Teams just like we already do with other channels. Specifically, opening Teams to tell users that direct message us to go open a ticket is the problem we want to resolve. I really just want users to be able to open a ticket via a Teams chat and have an agent be able to reply in Zendesk. If the upcoming Side Conversations addition will resolve this then I am going to be absolutely THRILLED.

    Very excited to see development going into Teams integrations. I know this is day 1 so I'll take the issues with a grain of salt. I would love to answer questions about how we could further utilize the integration.

    1
  • David Gillespie
    • Edited
    Zendesk Product Manager

    Hi Tobias - thanks for flagging. Just saw you've signed up for our customer research so we'll be in contact with you shortly.

    Hi Ed Ball - yes, agents can work from wherever they choose, in either Teams or Zendesk. The demo video was showing the capabilities on the Teams side of the integration. Any ticket that is created in Teams is sent to Zendesk and can be managed and updated like any other ticket in Zendesk.

    The integration allows agents to receive notifications and updates tickets from Teams directly, but they can still continue working from Zendesk if they don't have access or love working from the Zendesk agent workspace!

    Thanks for flagging this - we'll produce another video that shows the full experience from within teams and also Zendesk to help clarify this!

    Hi John Meyer - First off, huge thanks for documenting all of this feedback! Here's my response to each of your feedback items:

    Good 1 & 2 - Thanks and great to hear this will help with your triage of tickets!

    Meh 1: There are a lot of customers using the existing feature set so we have built it into the new product. 

    Meh 2: The app needed to be called Zendesk for Teams as we were constrained with naming conventions on the Teams marketplace. Appreciate that some users may not be familiar with Zendesk but we've built an onboarding experience into the product which should help with users becoming familiar with what the integration does and how they can use it for support. 

    Meh 3 & Bad 1: Thanks for the feedback and I'll work with the Answer Bot team to see what we can do to improve the accuracy of responses and what we can do with the 5 words and a question mark requirement.  

    Bad 2: See my response to Ed above. Agents can continue to work from Zendesk, and by using our integration, your users can continue to work from Teams. After a ticket is created, our integration sends any agent responses direct to the user in Teams, and users can update the ticket and have their responses sent back to Zendesk. 

    Cheers,

    David

    0
  • Josh

    Off topic, an integration for rich previews with Facebook Workplace (workplace.com) would be amazing. 

    0
  • David Gillespie
    Zendesk Product Manager

    Hi Josh,

    Thanks for reaching out. There isn't an integration into Workplace at the moment but I've captured your feedback against our integration backlog.

    Thanks,

    David

    0
  • Simon Blouner

    Hey there,

    Is it gonna be possible to connect multiple Zendesk instances with one Microsoft Teams setup?

    0
  • Stef Viveen

    Hi Zendesk,

    Very much looking forward to having the feature available that allows our Zendesk agents to start a side conversation with an (internal) contact via MS Teams, directly from their customer ticket.

    Any update on when this feature might be available?

    1
  • Sean Bourke
    Zendesk Product Manager

    Hey Simon Blouner,

    At the moment the Zendesk Teams App can only connect to one Zendesk account.

    0
  • Sean Bourke
    Zendesk Product Manager

    Hi Stef Viveen,

    We are currently working on integrating Side Conversations with Microsoft Teams. Go to our ProductBoard for more details, submit ideas or to subscribe to updates on our roadmap.

    1
  • Kelsey Davis
    • Edited

    Hi, I am trying to work out clearly if this will work for us, I am wanting our light agents to be able to respond from teams, but full agents be full time working from Zendesk. Light agents will typically be responding to questions asked by Full Agents on a ticket when tagged, so in response and not as interested in having the Light Agents (teams users) creating tickets (although there could be opportunity for that too).

    It could work for us to use Side Conversations for Teams as well, but there are reasons it shouldn't be a Side Conversation and should be part of the general ticket comments

    0
  • David Gillespie
    Zendesk Product Manager

    Hi Kelsey Davis,

    Yes, you can do this using the integration too. Light agents are able to submit internal notes and responses on tickets from within Teams.

    How would the agents be tagged to the ticket? Using @mentions or another mechanism?

    Thanks,

    David

    0
  • Kelsey Davis

    Thanks David Gillespie

    Yes we currently would tag them using @ or add them to the CC field so they are alerted via email in outlook currently. We haven't yet moved over to CCs and followers but intend to do so.

    0
  • Yaniv Dayan

    Hi David Gillespie, Testing the integration, I found that Light Agent can change the ticket's status (Solve, Pending, Open...) from Teams integration, as well as change the assignee and other customize fields. It looks like a series bug, as Light Agent can't do this from the Zendesk UI. Can you please check it?

    0
  • Dane
    Zendesk Engineering
    Hi Yaniv,
     
    It seems that this behavior happens when the Light Agent in question is the requester of the same ticket. This was also verified on the Support Ticket that you have submitted. 

    Have a great day!
    0
  • Katy Fox

    Hi!

    I can see from an earlier post that my query has already been raised but I wondered if there are any updates on the answer bot within Teams, specifically the requirement to type 5+ words with a question mark in order for recommendations to be returned?

    We need our users to be able to type one key word, with no punctation, for knowledge article recommendations to be returned. This currently works in the Chat Bot within our Zendesk instance so don't understand why it would be different within Teams. This creates a confusing user experience.

    We're unable to roll this out to end users as we don't believe it's currently fit for purpose, which we're really disappointed about. This would have been a great feature to roll out, provide instant support to users and potentially decrease ticket volumes for agents. 

    Would be great to see this updated! 

    Many thanks
    Katy

    0
  • David Gillespie
    Zendesk Product Manager

    Hi Katy Fox,

    Thank you for the feedback on the Answer Bot feature.

    We have deliberately designed Answer Bot to work with 5+ words with a question mark so it on responds to questions posted in the channel, not every single message that's posted by users. Feedback from other customers is that they only wanted deliberate questions responded to, but I'll capture your feedback as an enhancement we could build into the product if we made this configurable.

    As an alternative, you could have use the message extension to search for articles (see article here), this doesn't require 5 words and can be used in all channels within Teams too.

    Would this cover your use case?

    Thanks, David

    0

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