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139 Comments

  • Dan Sørensen

    Hi Lisa,

    we bought into zendesk because it provided a good UX/UI for support, not for chat or social messages. I find it absolutely ridiculous that our experience 7 years ago was BETTER than the one we now have. 

    If the current UI less optimal for chat/social media - fine provide a different layout for them - but don't force the rest of us over to one where us that use mail is an afterthought.

    We are on the enterprise plan, but i don't feel enterprise - i feel ignored. 

    What is it exactly your stock reply should accomplish? Feature requests have been known to be left ignored for a decade (like simple split/merge features that every single basic free-to-use forum have).

    What can support do for me? Can they ensure we are not forced to an experience that simply does not fit those of us that have mail as our mail channel?

    28
  • Adrian Bell

    The new mode doesn't suit any customer that works tickets in email only mode.

    How hard it would have been for Zendesk to add to two new configuration settings:

    1. Toggle Switch (Email Only | Email, Chat, Social

    2 Thread Sort order: Oldest to Newest | Newest to Oldest.

    Mind-boggling. 

    23
  • Dan Sørensen

    Since you are now forcing ppl ove to this - you obviously have ensure possibility for having latest reply on top - like we have been used to for 7 years.. RIGHT!?

    22
  • Richy Hadlow

    I find it baffling that you would introduce a whole new UI, but break the main existing functionality. We use Zendesk for Customer Support via email. Having the latest messages on Top is a fundamental part of the that process which we have been using for years. We are not interested in Chat nor social messaging.

    Surely someone along the design, development and test process noticed this fundamental change and questioned whether your customers would actually like this?

    Can we delay this switchover until a resolution can be found, or if that's not going to happen, not do it at all?

    16
  • Dan Sørensen

    In a big surprise to nobody this is the reply i got

     

    I'm sorry to inform you that unfortunately your request to roll back to the legacy UI has been denied. This means that your account will remain set to using the Agent Workspace interface. We want you to take advantage of our latest innovations and join our customers who have already made the switch.

    To help you in the transition, we have created a resources page with more information. See Resources for upgrading to the Zendesk Agent Workspace (https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408843572762).

    15
  • Amund Haldorsen

    I agree with Dan - we should be able to continue using the existing interface and not be forced into something that will make it more complicated. So please postpone the "late August" deadline until you can provide an option to the Agent Workspace!

    13
  • Jest Paint - Santi

    From what I read here, it sounds like you have just gone ahead, consulted not one of your customers and made a change based on your own team decision makers who clearly don't use the product to communicate over e-mail with Zendesk.

    No sane mind would choose to see the most recent comment at the end of a conversation over e-mail. It increases time scrolling, it makes it confusing, and it ads time to retrain people right before we start with Labor Day Sale, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas... terrible time for this update, and not a well researched update. Why force something onto customers that are begging you not to? Are you not just scared you will loose them all? Aren´t our customers your focus and the reason for your company existing?
    I have left every single company that did this to us, and Zendesk I guess is the next one to go.

    SWITCH what you did wrong, acknowledge the error, postpone the changes and FIX IT, so it works in a intuitive way for EMAIL which is your main user base.

    13
  • Noel Matthias

    Echoing the responses of many: Why on earth would such a radical and ridiculous change be forced on accounts that EMAIL is the primary method of communication?  Not chat.  Not social messenger.  Email.  And who on earth thought that changing the response feed direction with no option to change it as a preference was adding anything but time, training, and wasted energy?  I too will be seeking other options for our enterprise, which by the way, has used Zendesk happily for over 10 years.  This is not a value added "feature", and to again echo the responses of many, having the current response at the top of the thread is imperative to functionality and work flow.  

    13
  • Adrian Bell

    The way Zendesk has managed this comes across as arrogant. There seems to be a strategy to give the impression Zendesk cares. But the use of canned responses/macros following the same sequence for all concerned demonstrates what is effectively a charade.

    1. "Hi XXXX,
     Thank you for your feedback regarding the Agent Workspace migration. I've escalated your request to roll back to the legacy Interface for approval. I'll let you know as soon as we've evaluated your request.

    2. "Hi  XXXX​,
    I'm sorry to inform you that unfortunately your request to delay the agent workspace migration has been denied. This means that your account will continue to migrate to the Agent Workspace interface. We want you to take advantage of our latest innovations and join our customers who have already made the switch."

    It's goes back to what customers must weigh up when selecting a Cloud Vendor for their essential systems. Note all Cloud Vendors are like this. Our accounting runs on a product called Xero. There are always changes in pipeline largely brought on by Government statutory changes. The warnings from Xero come way in advance and are always crystal clear. I couldn't be happier with Xero and have been with them for more than 10 years as well.

    I'd be really interested to know of any Support Desk software that focuses on Email response, supports more than 12 views, has a customer portal, allows export of ticket data, supports a conversion of all historical data from Zendesk, has a stable product/focus and communicates with it's customers. I don't care about bots, ticket ratings, social messages, chats or Knowledge Bases. We work with Corporate Customers and use MS Teams in conjunction with our Helpdesk.

    Customers could have been warned way in advance of this significant change. They had already decided the customer would have little or no input. The timing is bad for us. Bitterly disappointed.

    12
  • Monica Sandler

    I agree with Dan and Amund. The folks I support are OUTSIDE of my company. I do not need to "chat" with them. As it is, MIMECAST - the spam blocker of choice in the legal sphere - typically blocks our emails from ZenDesk and we have to call our users and remind them repeatedly to check their spam folders for our responses and mark us as a safe sender. I would see that as a more critical item to address than literally turning our worlds upside down. Partner with MIMECAST, provide whatever certificates are required so response is seamless and not delayed.

    12
  • Jesper Faurby

    I agree with the others here. The reason why we switched from Intercom to Zendesk 7 years ago was to avoid Intercom's small chat/message field at the bottom of all our email correspondence with our customers.

    @Zendesk product team; Please reconsider if this is the right way to go.

    10
  • Monica Sandler

    I would love to know what population they used to test this new interface. Who expressed the love for upside-down thread response?  Why on earth would they not give users a OPTION on the direction of response feed? Even MS gives you options on how you want to read your email and for those of us on Mac, we get to CHOOSE if we want to upgrade to the new OLK for Mac. We are not being forced into it.  I'm going to get my team involved. We may be looking for a new tool.

    10
  • Adrian Bell

    Like many other Zendesk customer our support is B2B and all via email channel. Chats and social messages are of no interest - so it is disappointing to hear that the Workspace interface will be optimised for a scenario that is not relevant to us and we are going to have this change forced on us at a time of Zendesk's choosing.

    We started using Zendesk over 10 years when email was the only channel and it worked really well for our use case.

    Are there any options to postpone the transition? We've got a lot of going on presently and don't need unnecessary, non-value-adding disruption for our team.

    10
  • Dan Sørensen

    Unless support can ensure we are NOT moved to workspace i dont see what that would help - but i have made a ticket to see if i can request to NOT be forced to an inferior UI

    9
  • Josh Cauchi

    Would someone from Zendesk be able to confirm whether or not this intended change to reverse the flow of conversation is forcibly going ahead or is at the very least being put behind configuration setting? Our company works entirely via email and this change if it goes through is going to render Zendesk useless to us...

    8
  • Dan Sørensen

    dont bother, we got rejected outright they just want you to make a ticket so its not visible in here

    This is the reply we got when creating a ticket regarding this:

    I'm sorry to inform you that unfortunately your request to roll back to the legacy UI has been denied. This means that your account will remain set to using the Agent Workspace interface. We want you to take advantage of our latest innovations and join our customers who have already made the switch.

    To help you in the transition, we have created a resources page with more information. See Resources for upgrading to the Zendesk Agent Workspace (https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408843572762).

    We sincerely appreciate the feedback on how the Composer and Conversation Log placement is not ideal for your individual workflow, and that feedback has come back to us in Product for review and discovery. 

    As for the auto-activation of this account, we did carefully review the request in combination with the use-case, however it did not qualify for a delayed activation. I do want to clarify that Zendesk is committed to this UI rollout, so we can ensure that all of our customer base can continue to receive the latest enhancements.  

    If you have other questions regarding issues or concerns, please feel free to reach back out. 

    8
  • Jonathan Aniano
    Zendesk SVP, Product

    Hello Zendesk Customers,

    My name is Jon Aniano, and I run Product Management at Zendesk for the Suite. When it comes to the process being discussed here and our decision making around Agent Workspace, the buck stops with me.

    I've read through all of your comments and I wanted to personally chime in here and respond:

    Firstly - Thank you for all of the feedback, it is genuinely a gift. It has been great to see the community engage on this thread. Please keep the feedback coming, we're listening, I'm listening.

    Secondly - From the feedback, it is clear there are some use cases and preferences that we're not handling well (and not giving you enough control over) in Agent Workspace. Please know that we are working on these, but also I want to hear more about these directly from you. So, we're going to hold one or more listening session webinars (stay tuned, we'll announce them here) where you can join me and engage directly with me and my PM team. We'll have some back and forth dialogue about the topics here, we'll take questions, and we'll talk through this together.

    Thirdly - We're making some immediate changes to this process in response to this feedback. We will absolutely honor any requests to roll back to the old agent UI for this batch of activations. If you feel your team will be unduly affected by the move to AW, we'll let you continue to use the old UI until a future date, likely in 2023 (timing TBD, we're working this all out right now). If you've already requested a roll back and you've been denied (as I've seen in the comments here), we'll re-engage with you and we will process the request again.

    Finally - The product and engineering teams at Zendesk will spend some time over the coming weeks to determine how we can reprioritize some of our work for the remainder of the year to respond to the feedback in these comments and the feedback we hear in the listening sessions.

    Agent Workspace is the primary Zendesk user experience. It is used by tens of thousands of Zendesk customers, and many of these customers have seen great results in migrating. Its our job to make sure ALL of our customers can reap the benefits of Agent Workspace, and you have my commitment that we'll make this happen together.

    Thank You,

    Jon 

    7
  • Amund Haldorsen

    I'm also in contact with the Customer Support Center. But why do you mean this would help us Lisa Kelly? They just confirm that there is no way back... We actually started using Zendesk because the existing workflow works very well. If it's not convenient anymore, I guess we will start to investigate if we can find another system to be used instead. So, please - give it a new discussion inside your Dev / Product team before you do this - I am pretty sure you will get a lot of complaints when this change is forced on all customers.

    6
  • Jest Paint - Santi

    Hello Jonathan Aniano I had already requested to stay on the old UI and was denied, I hope they reverse that decision soon before they switched and completely mess me up in the middle of my high season.
    You wanted feedback:
    1 - Provide an open testing sandbox so we can all play with it and understand how will it work.
    2 - Confirm what will happen to all of us that use Zendesk Support on our phones through your app, will it still work? Will it change?
    3 - Allow those of us who use mostly support as e-mail communication with our customers to work the same way we have done it since day zero, latest email at the top.
    4 - Having to click on the right side panels to get to the contextual info I want requires more time. Can we please be able to pin are most popular apps so we don't have to fetch for them every time? I personally just use the "Choose your address" app and the "Shopify App". I don't want to now have to click on a tab, then click on the app to see the same info I know can see just as soon as I open a ticket.
    5 - Since I can´t actually see and test the new UI without actually switching to it myself, and since you have not provided a sandbox version to test it, or a very long and clear video showing each feature, I am not sure if this is truth, but I heard from other users that now on the new UI private responses and public responses are not visible on the same view. That you have to toggle back and forward. This is a huge set back, it requires more time for me to see my agent´s notes and then respond accordingly to the public.
    6 - You want to make Zendesk better? Work on what was broken and needed fixing:
    a - When a regular e-mail user responds instead of using a new email by editing their original email with highlighted text or so, something many people do when responding to questions within an email, we can't see that information unless we click on "see original e-mail" tab. This should just show up on the ticket without an extra step.
    b - Solve the issue of many people being unable to see the attachments we sent because they are posted many times as a link at the bottom that they miss.
    c - Allow for apps to be seen and accessible on your Zendesk Support App for those of us that constantly use our phone while working on the road.
    d - When an old solved or pending ticket is updated by the requester, move it automatically to the top of our open tickets list, so we don't miss it.
    7 - Other companies that have looked into making changes like this have taken MUCH better approaches. Examples:
    a - One sent their customers new different looking UI screenshots and asked them how easy or not it was to get a specific task done. This allowed them to get real customer data back from real users, not just internet or industry trends. Your customers are the actual users, not internet trends. (Ex: Attentive)
    b - Other companies send me completely working test mode version of their new UI and asked me to provide feedback. I was able to test every single aspect of it and respond based on that.
    c - Other companies had full live meetings with top product managers and developers BEFORE they even started to think of launching a new UI to get feedback from their direct users (Ex: Shopify).

    8 - I would say that in this case it was clear that either no feedback at all was asked from real users about the changes you guys had thought about, or you only sampled a very small non representative set of people.

    9 - Roll out dates are HUGE. Most companies DO NOT do roll outs right before big days for online sales like Labor Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas  (or 4th of July or Memorial day).

    10 - Tell us exactly what will happen to our EXISTING integrations. I am integrated with: Facebook Pages, Tidio, Shopify, Ebay, Walmart, Amazon, 

    11 - Bring back the Admin Center to the same window, instead of having to click out of our Support Suite into a different page.

    12 - Bring the ability to open a support ticket for help with Zendesk Support Suite directly into the Support Suite, so we can access help faster, rathe than going t a different page, using a new login, scrolling through pages that try to avoid us reaching you and push us to read through articles we know by heart by now. Most major companies I work with have an Intercom chat right on the bottom right side and I can access a support agent in minutes, without a thousand clicks and new logins.

    13 - Bring back the ability to connect with Instagram, your tutorials say it is possible but my Admin Center under Messaging and social does not show Instagram as an option (or messages at all), just Twitter, Facebook Pages and Text.

    14 - As you probably know many  Zendesk users are company owners, if not most, I can guarantee that most of us before we make any changes that will affect our customers the first thing we think is: lets ask our customers what do they think. Lets send a SURVEY with our ideas and see if we are right, and give them a chance to express theirs BEFORE we make a change.

    I will be more than happy to chat with you or your team about all of this. 

    Lastly, I appreciate that finally Zendesk took real action and decided to stop and think, it is a bit late and you created unnecessary stress on a group of people that face a lot of stress on a daily business running their business and depends on your doing your job right so we can do ours right. I hope moving forward we can avoid situations like this.

    6
  • Jesse Papocchia

    Have to agree with many here. We're only using email so the new format seems to work in the opposite of what's always been the standard. It makes sense for chat/sms but not for email.

    I'm dismayed that markdown support was killed with no indication it would not be supported. I see now that links can be used in another way and now I'll have to spend time updating macros to support this.

    5
  • Dan Sørensen

    Are you still intending to forcefully move everyone to workspace? I can see this entry has been updated lately. We were put back on the "legacy" and i sincerly hope we stay there. Your insistence on forcing an irrelevant UI towards customers that use Zendesk for b2b mail based support is quite frankly worrying.

    I cant use "we are listening" for anything, unless you act on it. If you force us to workflow without addressing the need for oldest first and composer on top and the other major concerns we are going to actively start looking for a replacement, its that simple

    5
  • Onur Olmez

    Just rolled my account into the new Agent Workspace experience.

    @Jonathan Aniano, How can I provide formal feedback on the product? You mentioned there will be listening session(s). How can I join these?

    So far, the new Agent Workspace is not as bad as people are making it to be, and I'm actually seeing performance improvements in general responsiveness with the interface being able to keep up with the "quick" ticket updates I make, however I did notice a few annoyances compared with the "legacy" UX:

    • Although commits to tickets are saved in real time, when updating tickets (e.g., marking as solved) the ticket views don't update in real time to indicate this, and I need to either refresh the view or refresh the entire page. 
    • When composing a comment on a ticket, then switching it to be an internal reply the entire comment gets wiped. After playing around with it a little more, it appears that internal and public replies get their own "cached" versions when you toggle between both when editing. It would be nice if some kind of visual feedback was provided to make users more aware of this context.
    • As others are indicating, having the ability to toggle the way newest comments are displayed (top down or bottom up) would be nice, but not a showstopper.

     

    4
  • Jesper Faurby

    Does anyone know some Zendesk alternatives that are better suited for email support?

    4
  • David B. (L2)

    I agree.  When they changed the reporting system it was made unnecessarily complicated.  Now we are getting a change to workflow without any Beta testing to see how it works or show my employees how it works.

    This will be a disaster trying to retrain my staff on something that even I can't see how it works

     

     

    4
  • Jonathan Aniano
    Zendesk SVP, Product

    Hello everyone,

    Quick note to all of you who have commented since my post. If you've submitted a ticket requesting to opt out of this set of activations and/or if you've posted here, I've had our team add you to the list of exclusions. You will not be auto-activated.

    If you're reading this later on, and you have been auto-activated, and you'd like to revert, if you submit a ticket, we will approve the roll-back.

     

    4
  • Peter

    Yes, it would be great if it was possible for somehow to toggle between new an old version, for our usage we do not need any fancy chats or calls, only email-version. So please switch it back.

    4
  • Kevin Maughan

    Kolten Kittleson - for those of us who were unable to attend the 'PM Roundtable on Agent Workspace', is there a link to the recording available?

    3
  • Winnow Helpdesk

    Your support is unresponsive. Can we get opted out of Agent Workspace please? Already opened a ticket. 

    Thanks.

    3
  • Scott Patterson

    No response from Zendesk Product Managers on this one which is a bit frustrating when the user feedback seems to be negative and with the same issues being mentioned but not addressed.

     

    After using the interface for a bit here is a list of specific issues we have seen so far - https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/5460204876698-Agent-Workspace-Various-Issues

    3
  • Dan Sørensen

    @david - i hope your scrollwheels is lubed and ready if your main channel is mail

    3

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