Zendesk has introduced a new program to help customers upgrade to the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
The Zendesk Agent Workspace maximizes productivity for your teams by bringing you all the tools, context, and capabilities they need to deliver exceptional customer experiences, all from a single, unified interface. This includes:
- Delivering the conversational service your customers want
- Working smarter with powerful tools and built-in intelligence
- Boosting agent well-being for a better customer experience
This article includes the following topics:
- What's happening?
- Why is Zendesk making this change?
- What do I need to do?
- We're listening
- What new features are available after upgrading?
What's happening?
If your account admin received the email, your Zendesk account has been selected to be automatically upgraded to the Agent Workspace. We are helping customers automatically upgrade because Agent Workspace is the interface of choice for Zendesk going forward. It includes all the latest features and enhancements Zendesk has made to support agent productivity across channels.
Why is Zendesk making this change?
Zendesk built this new interface to help your agents provide fast and personalized support for customers and ensure they have all the tools and context they need to manage customer requests efficiently.
We want you to take advantage of our latest innovations and join our customers who have already made the switch. On average, accounts on Agent Workspace experience 17% faster replies to customers and 20% faster resolutions to customer requests by moving to our unified Agent Workspace.
What do I need to do?
Zendesk will automatically activate the Agent Workspace on your account during the timeframe Zendesk provided in the email we sent you. For the first phase of the rollout, selected Support-only accounts will be upgraded. No accounts with Support and Chat are impacted in this phase.
However, instead of waiting for an automatic upgrade, we strongly encourage you to start the upgrade now. This gives you and your agents time to prepare for the change.
Zendesk recommends that you:
- Upgrade now on your own terms. It's best to upgrade at the time of day when your account activity is the lowest.
- From now until the automatic upgrade date, you will be able to temporarily deactivate the Agent Workspace.
We recommend turning it on and off to get yourself and your agents acquainted with the key differences in the interface. This gives you time to generate any necessary training materials for your team. - If you are wary of upgrading your production account, you can always create a free Zendesk trial account to try out the workspace. All trials have the Agent Workspace activated.
To help you in the transition, we have created a resources page with more information. See Resources for upgrading to the Zendesk Agent Workspace. Also, for a brief summary of the main interface changes, see our Quick Reference.
We're listening
We appreciate all the comments you have made about automatically upgrading to the Agent Workspace. Your feedback is important to us and we have taken this into account. For details, see this statement from Jonathan Aniano, Sr. VP of Product.
What new features are available after upgrading?
In addition to a unified conversation interface based on the latest technology, the following is a list of new features Zendesk introduced that are available only in the Agent Workspace. Going forward, as you enhance and modernize your customer support offerings, these are valuable tools.
- Native ticket redaction
You can natively redact, or remove, sensitive information found in ticket comments and attachments so that your account stays secure and compliant. You don’t need to install a separate app. See Redacting ticket content. - Context panel
When you’re working on a ticket, it’s often useful to have contextual information that falls outside the basic ticket content. For example, you might want to know more about the customer who requested the ticket. In addition, you may need to open Zendesk apps that can help you solve the ticket or search for articles in your help center that are relevant to the ticket. See Using the context panel. - Knowledge in the context panel
Directly from the ticket interface, you can quickly search for content in your help center that might help your customers solve issues, view suggestions for content based on ticket content, or add feedback to flag existing articles. See Searching, linking, and quoting content in tickets and Flagging articles in Knowledge. - Context panel resizing
You can change the width of the context panel to give you a better view of customer context, sidebar apps, or Knowledge articles. See Resizing the context panel. - Ticket properties panel resizing
You can change the width of the ticket properties panel to give you a better view of ticket fields. This feature is particularly useful if you’re working on tickets with a lot of fields. See Resizing the ticket properties panel. - Channel switching in the composer
You can easily switch between communications channels, all within the same ticket interface. You don’t have to maintain separate tickets or use separate dashboards for each ticket type. See Switching channels in the composer. - Composer resizing
You can resize the ticket composer window as needed to meet your requirements. For example, you can use a smaller window for chats and messages, but you might want to use a larger window for long email messages. See Resizing the composer window. - Color text in the composer
You can use formatting options to change the text color and the text background color in ticket comments. This feature is useful for drawing attention to important items in your comments. See Changing text color. - Fixed composer (doesn’t disappear when scrolling)
You can also use the scroll bar on the right side of the ticket to scroll up or down through previous responses without losing sight of the reply you're composing. Separated scrolling is useful if you're working on a long ticket with a lot of details. See Scrolling through a conversation. - Contextual tabs
Agents may have to manage multiple tickets at the same time. You can use tabs at the top of the interface to help you move easily between many types of conversations (email. chats, phone, and messages). Tabs provide important information and help you see which tickets are the most critical to address. See Using ticket tabs to manage conversations. - Zendesk messaging
Messaging lets you have rich conversations with your customers that are persistent, with full context and history. When you enable messaging, you can connect it to your website or help center, mobile apps, and social channels, making it easy for your customers to self- serve or connect with your agents. See About messaging. - Flow builder
You can use Flow Builder to create answers for your conversation bots, giving your customers the opportunity to self-serve their support issues before connecting with agents. See About flow builder. - Easier process to add social messaging channels
You can send and receive social messages in the Zendesk Agent Workspace as part of the main conversation flow. Messages sent from these channels become tickets in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. See About messaging channels. - Omnichannel routing and unified agent statuses
The omnichannel routing beta enables you to direct tickets from email, messaging, web form, and API to team members based on their availability, capacity, and the ticket priority. Using omnichannel routing means that the highest priority tickets are assigned to the agents who are most available to work on them. See About omnichannel routing and Configuring agent statuses - Custom ticket statuses
Zendesk supports a set of system ticket statuses which are used to help you manage your ticket workflows. Custom ticket statuses enable you to create additional, more-specific ticket statuses. Custom ticket statuses can help manage your ticket workflows, as well as indicate a more meaningful ticket status to your business and end users. See Activating custom ticket statuses. - Draft mode
Agents can compose public replies as drafts first, before updating a ticket. This enables agents to make sure everything is correct before replying to a customer. See Writing drafts of public replies in tickets. - Custom ticket layouts (EAP)
Admins can create custom ticket layouts to support different ticket workflows for agents. Custom layouts allow you to specify which components are included in a ticket and control the location of where the components appear. Components include ticket conversations, ticket properties (fields), customer context, third party apps, and more. See About custom layouts. - Using AI to summarize and enhance ticket comments (EAP)
Zendesk offers several AI-powered features that help agents be more productive while still providing a high level of customer service. See Using AI to summarize and enhance ticket comments.
Features that harness generative AI powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT include:- Summarizing ticket comments to help agents get up to speed and quickly respond to customers.
- Enhancing agent comments by adding additional content, making the content more friendly, or making the content more formal.
106 Comments
Normally, our Product Managers will provide an update directly regarding such information. I'm hoping for everyone's patience regarding this and always keep an eye on our Zendesk update page.
Unfortunately it is not right Dane .
Actually, if I put my CustomField on top of all field (even standars one), on Standard Interface left panel I can have :
2.CCs [Standard]
3.Tags [Standard]
4.MyCustomField
5.Type [Standard]
6.Priority [Standard]
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...
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
This is obscenely frustrating. Our company does not use chat or any other kind of support. We just use email, and for email purposes the standalone support view is so much better. There are also minor quality of life issues, like (as others have pointed out) the sort order of the thread being oldest to newest, and the fact that the fields are more spaced out in the context view, wasting a bunch of space.
Any thread of loyalty I had to Zendesk has been lost at this point. I'd like to say it explicitly: I am going to do everything I can to switch our team away from Zendesk and towards a company that actually serves their customers.
Thank you for sharing Matthew - your words capture our situation perfectly. It is plain sad to see that legitimate customer requirements are flat-out ignored and trampled on.
Does anyone know some Zendesk alternatives that are better suited for email support?
Hey Olivier MAS!
Placing custom field(s) in a form above the type/priority fields should keep them there (also just double-confirmed this in my demo account), this looks like an issue/regression you’re experiencing, could you file a ticket to our support team so that they could help you troubleshoot? https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408843597850-Contacting-Zendesk-Customer-Support
Cheers,
JJ
And hey y'all!
We hear you, in Agent Workspace the position of the conversation log is now at the top and the composer is at the bottom, and the order of messages in the conversation log is now oldest-to-newest, top-to-bottom.
We’ve found that the majority of the tens of thousands of customers who are on Agent Workspace are more productive in terms of ticket resolution time (TTR) and first resolution time (FRT), so we would encourage you to try Agent Workspace for a little bit as your agents may quickly acclimate to the changes. Though, not all customers experience productivity gains, so our PMs plan to explore different ways to improve the current experience so that everyone could benefit.
If you would like to be opted-out of this round of activations or if you've been migrated and you wish to roll back, our Advocacy team would be able to help you out. This article guide you on how to reach out to them: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408843597850-Contacting-Zendesk-Customer-Support
Cheers,
JJ
Hello JJ Miclat,
what does the following mean?
For all of us that support exclusively via email, does it mean that we now do have the option to put the composer at the top and to see the newest messages at the top in Agent Workspace?
And also, why don't you provide ALL customers with an Agent Workspace sandbox? This would help alleviate fears, allow teams to be prepared for the migration, and gives everyone the chance to give relevant feedback before being thrown in the deep end with an interface that makes their work harder.
Regarding the improvements in TTR and FRT, could it be that accounts that rely on messaging etc. did see an improvement, while accounts that handle more complex issues via email have hesitated with the switch?
Hey Gábor Körtvélyessy!
In AW, the composer is at the bottom instead of the top. Our product team is considering / assessing functionality to make composer/log positioning interchangeable.
Believe me, we would if we could. Sandboxes are only available to accounts on the Enterprise plan, as they would pose significant cost overhead to the business if they were available to all accounts, unfortunately. That being said, customers in the past have spun up Zendesk trial accounts to successfully test out Agent Workspace before enabling it in their accounts.
Our data science team took a look at TTR / FRT across all accounts in aggregate that have turned on AW, so the improvement was a conflation between messaging-centric accounts and email-centric accounts.
We were just forced to the new Agent Workspace, this is extremely frustrating. We do not utilize chat and socials. The entire design is upside down which is hard to learn when you are taking live calls back to back, and the action box where we write our external reply's to our clients in support tickets used to default back to internal once sent. Now when you send an external email it stays external, maximizing the risk of an Agent sending the following internal documentation note out to a client. Also, when we are drafting our emails in internal and we flip to external to send, now everything deletes. NOT A FAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hi Cassandra,
I'm sorry you're not happy with the experience. Here are a couple tips that may help.
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
Lisa Kelly When we are drafting our email in the internal setting, and then click external to send the email, the information disappears. It remains saved back on the internal setting. This is a nuances and causes extra steps. Further, the did locate the Draft mode for the external setting since now it stays in that mode, but again this create extra steps. We are a very high volume support center. The interface moving the most recent message to the bottom of the screen is not user friendly at all. Our team is 100% unhappy with the forced change. What steps do we need to take to be moved back to the old interface?
Hi Cassandra,
Please refer to this previous post for rollback information
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4484160121498/comments/5532403680026
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