Customer profile pages in Zendesk Support are getting a new look within the Zendesk Agent Workspace. The new page pulls together important data, actions, and context about the customer. Agents can focus on delivering support rather than collecting information from different places.
This change does not affect viewing team member profiles in Admin Center or viewing user profiles in the help center.
About the customer profile page
With the new experience, when you open a customer profile page, you see the following:
- A banner with the option to turn the new experience on or off.
- A static, non-editable Key details section. It includes important information about the customer and is meant to be easy to read, easy to consume, and something that you can scan quickly.
- Tabs for Activity, Tickets, Customer details, and Related.
- A list of the customer’s requested and CC’d tickets.
- Options to Merge customer or create a New ticket on their behalf.
- Additional record-level actions under an Actions drop-down.
- Zendesk Apps can’t control field values or field states (hidden or read-only) on the new page. If you’re using an app to control customer profiles, such as one that hides user fields, you shouldn’t turn on this beta version.
- Actions not yet available in the beta include upgrading the customer to agent and setting or resetting their password.
- Lookup fields are not yet included.
- The activity timeline doesn’t yet include page view events.
- In many cases, the events shown do not include historical data. In particular, it doesn't include previous help center and community events, or ticket events from before July 2022.
Turning on the customer profile page at the account level
Before anyone on your team can turn on and use the customer profile page, an admin needs to turn it on at the account level first. You can turn it off at any time.
- In Admin Center, click
Workspaces in the sidebar, then select Agent tools > Agent interface. - In the Customer profile page section, select Activate Customer profile.
The option is turned off by default.
- Click Save.
Turning on the customer profile page at the team member level
After the new customer profile page has been turned on by an admin at the account level, each team member (agents and admins) in your company needs to decide for themself whether they want to use the new experience. If you decide to use it, you need to turn it on for your personal account before you see any changes.
- Open a customer profile in Support (see Viewing a user's profile in Zendesk Support).
If the new customer profile page has been turned on by an admin at the account level, the profile includes a box at the top left.
- In the box, click Switch to the new profile experience.
When the new profile experience is turned on, a banner appears across the top of the page. You can go back to the old experience by clicking Switch back in that banner.
Viewing customer activity
You can view a timeline of the customer’s recent Zendesk user events, as well as custom events for integrated applications, from the Activity tab on the right side of the page.
The timeline displays up to 10 events listed in order of newest to oldest. Click Show 10 more to display the previous 10 events, if there are any.
For individual events, there’s a brief description, a timestamp, and the name of the system where the event happened. Click on an event to see more details about it.
In the beta, the Activity timeline doesn’t yet include page view events. It also doesn’t include previous help center and community events, or ticket events.
To view a customer’s activity
- Open a customer profile in Support (see Viewing a user's profile in Zendesk Support).
The Activity tab is open by default when you arrive on the customer profile. To revisit it later, click the Activity tab.
- Click the drop-down filter menu to select the events you want to view.
You can view:
- All events for all applications (selected by default)
- All events for a specific application
- A specific type of event for an application
Viewing customer tickets
You can view a list of the customer’s tickets from the Tickets tab on the right side of the page. The information and capabilities are the same as in the current version of the profile page.
To view a customer’s tickets
- Open a customer profile in Support (see Viewing a user’s profile in Zendesk Support).
- Click the Tickets tab.
- Click the drop-down menu and select the type of tickets you want to view.
Requested tickets is selected by default. The other option is CC’d tickets.
Viewing related tickets, users, and organizations
From the Related tab on the right side of the page, you can view tickets, organizations, and other users with which the customer has a lookup relationship. For example, the organizations where the customer is selected as the Key Contact.
To view a customer’s lookup relationships:
-
Open a customer profile in Support (see Viewing a user’s profile in Zendesk Support).
-
Click the Related tab. All available lookup relationships are displayed.
-
Expand each lookup relationship by clicking the expand icon (
) on the right side. -
If the user has any relevant relationships, the source object is listed.
Editing customer profiles
To edit a customer profile
- Open a customer profile in Support (see Viewing a user’s profile in Zendesk Support).
- Click the Customer details tab.
- If needed, expand the sections by clicking the expand icon () in each section heading.
- Make your changes.
For more information about the options in these sections, see Editable Customer Information.
- Click Save.
Editable customer information
In the Customer details tab, you can both view and edit detailed information about the customer. Information that is editable in the current version of the profile page is also editable here.
Contact information
The first section on the Customer details tab includes the following information:
- Name: The customer’s full name.
- Primary email: The email address used for notifications sent to the customer. The email address must be unique to the user and must be verified (see Managing end users). If it’s not verified, a warning icon appears next to the label. Click the three dots to the right of the field for options to Resend verification, Send email, and Remove.
- Other email: An additional email address for the customer. If it’s not verified, a warning icon appears next to the label. Verification is not required for a non-primary email address. Click the three dots to the right of the field for options to Resend verification, Send email, and Remove.
- Phone (direct line): The main phone number associated with this customer (see Understanding how phone numbers are linked to end-user profiles). Click the three dots to the right of the field for the option to Remove this number.
- Phone (shared): A phone number associated with this customer that is also used by others (see Understanding how phone numbers are linked to end-user profiles). Click the three dots to the right of the field for the option to Make direct line or Remove this number.
To add additional contact information about the customer, click +Add contact information in the upper right hand corner of this section. Select the type of contact information from the drop-down list (Email or Phone number) and a new field appears for entering the new data.
More information
- Language: The language the user views your instance of Zendesk Support in. The customer’s help center appears in the selected language. Some system messages and email notifications may also be in the selected language. This setting affects this user only.
- Time zone: The customer's local time zone, used to timestamp tickets submitted by this user. This setting affects this user only.
- Details: Optional additional details about the customer, such as address. Details are visible to agents only, not customers.
- Notes: Optional notes about the customer. Notes are visible to agents only, not customers.
- Tags: A list of tags automatically added to new tickets created by the customer. This is an optional feature and you might not be using user tagging. See Adding tags to users and organizations.
- Created: When the customer record was created in the system.
- Updated: When the customer record was last changed in the system.
- Last sign-in: When the customer last signed into the system with user credentials. It’s common for this to say “Never.”
Organizations
If you use organizations to manage users, a third section on the Customer details tab lists any organizations the customer belongs to.
Information about the organization itself (Domain and Number of users) is displayed but cannot be edited here. See Managing organizations for more information.
Click the three dots to the right of each organization’s row for the options to Make default or Remove for this customer.
To add an additional organization, click +Add organization in the upper right hand corner of this section.
Custom user fields
If you use custom user fields to capture information about customers, a fourth section on the Customer details tab includes those fields.
27 Comments
Any word on supporting flexible sidebar apps for those new profiles?
They currently still show the old interface, not flexible and boxed compared to the new UI that ticket sidebar apps get.
I'm not thrilled to see that user fields are being buried in a fourth tab. These changes are going to make it very difficult to surface the correct, recorded information in user fields about users, that our agents need to be able to easily see and access.
Will this change also impact the user information sidebar in tickets? I'm mildly concerned about this phrase and whether it applies to the ticket sidebar app as well:
"Information about the customer is no longer cramped in the sidebar. The new Customer Details tab provides generous space for managing customer data, including a new organizations table."
Thanks for the question Thomas (internalnote.com). In short, yes. We're working on a new apps panel for the Customer Profile Page now, and it will be flexible. We will release the new apps panel before the page moves out of open beta. The team working on this are just getting started, so I can't comment on a release date yet.
Thank you so much for the feedback, CJ Johnson. The tab order is something that we're testing at the moment and paying great attention to. Am I right in assuming that your team's main use case for this page is viewing and updating the custom user fields?
No. This change has no connection with the customer context panel in the ticket experience. If you have feedback on the customer context panel I'd be very interested in that too.
is there a consideration into making this editable (including custom fields)? I think the definition of "key" details should be something we have to option of selecting since this would be subjective for each customer.
Hi Brett,
It's not about editing so much as being able to immediately first see any important notes, or custom fields, such as a VIP field. It's also extremely common and needed to be able to see the language.
In the new version, all of these things have been removed from the default view. I also see no way to return to the ticket you clicked through from. Will this be possible in the final version? Will there be any flexibility in allowing us to choose what shows in Customer Details vs what is in "More Information"?
Will this impact what admins can see for agent profiles as well as end-user profiles?
Thanks for the question Dan Cooper. I completely agree, the Key Details section should be configurable and we are working towards that. I don't have a release date that I can share yet, but it is something that is actively being worked on and we're really excited about it.
I'll address your questions one by one below, CJ Johnson. Please let me know if I've missed anything.
Given a team member has navigated to the Customer Profile Page via a ticket, then they can navigate back to the ticket via the breadcrumbs at the top of the page. Please do let me know if you're after something different and I've misunderstood. Image below:
Yes. We're working towards making the key details section configurable. I don't have a release date to share yet, but we are actively working on this.
No. The new experience is for viewing your customer (end user) profiles only. If you navigate to the profile page of a Team Member (agent, admin or account owner), then the existing User Profile Page will be shown.
It looks like a great feature and improvement, but we have some issues preventing us from using new profile:
1. There's no "Verify now" button for emails yet, which is very important to our customer support flow
2. And we have found a bug, steps to reproduce:
- open ticket from user with a primary email (primaryemail@test2.com) and secondary email (secondaryemail@test2.com)
- from ticket open Profile - Customer details - Make primary for secondary email (secondaryemail@test2.com is now primary)
- get back to ticket
- new primary email displays correctly in User profile section, but in Public reply To tooltip old primary email is visible which is very disorienting for agents (screenshot attached)
Also, feature request: Change of primary email should be reflected in Activity tab as it is very important part of user's data and interactions in tickets
A few more things:
- At the tab 'Customer details' in the Organization section all the emails from the organization are visible. It is very inconvenient for Organizations with a huge amount of domains, it adds a lot of absolutely unnecessary scrolling. Domains list should be omitted or shrank on this page.
- Also, Custom user fields should be a separate tab and not a section of Customer details, which is currently overwhelmed with information.
Thank you for the feedback, Tommy!
This is a bug. Thank you for pointing it out! One of our engineers is working to fix it now. It will be fixed today.
Firstly, this is some expert level bug finding! Thank you so much for letting us know. I went through the reproduction steps and I noticed that the customer context panel reloads, where the page itself did not. This is likely causing the discrepancy. I'll pass this feedback onto the team that owns the Agent Workspace.
Thank you for again for the feedback. We will consider this as we add more events to the activity timeline.
I agree. Thanks for pointing this out. I've added a task to our backlog to address this. I don't know yet when we'll be able to address it. I'll update here when I know.
I’m working with our design team now to improve the placement and visual treatment of the custom user fields section. I’ll update in the comments here when I have more information to share.
Happy to help! Waiting for the fixes/updates :)
Tommy, the fix for the Verify bug has been released. Thanks again for pointing that out.
What does suspend access and delete customer do? Is this something we can manage who has access to? I would not want to allow any agent to delete a customer or suspend access (assuming if only admin has access to this)
Additionally merge customer - is there a way to unmerge if you accidentally merged? Is this search only by email or other data? Can this also be access driven?
Hi Mohit Saigal,
Thanks for your questions.
Agents and Admins can suspend users. Suspended users can't sign in and any new support requests you receive from that user are sent to the suspended tickets queue. You can learn more about suspending access here.
Agents and Admins can also delete users. There are two types of user deletion; soft deletion (deletes the user from the account, but does not permanently delete the user from the Zendesk database.) And hard deletion (permanently deletes the user from the Zendesk database, usually used for GDPR related purposes). You can read more about deleting users here.
Merging users is a destructive action, which means the losing user is deleted and not recoverable. You can learn more about merging users here.
An agent's role controls if they have permission to edit an end user's profile page, which includes the ability to delete, suspend and merge users. There's currently no way to control access to these actions individually. Either an agent can make changes to the user's profile page or they can't. If you're on an Enterprise plan you have access to custom roles, which you can read about here. If you're on a Professional or a Team plan then you can learn more about roles and permissions here.
Will I be able to surface my custom fields in the Key Details section?
As of the moment, you cannot edit customer profiles from the Key Details section on the left side of the page. According to our product manager, the Key Details section should be configurable and we are working towards that so you'll be able to surface custom fields in this section.
I hope this answer your question. Thank you!
Gabriel Manlapig that is fantastic news! Thank you!
There is a lot of wasted white space, feels really large and blown out.
Hello!
We have a custom User Field called "SPAM" that allows us to mark a customer profile as SPAM. This adds a tag to the customer profile to prevent them from sending us future emails. This was working in the New Profile experience until today. When we attempt to mark a profile as spam, we get an error message
If I switch back to the old profile experience, I am able to check SPAM with no errors
Zendesk Support directed me to post here for the issue. Case #11277908
RE my post here:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4582102680858/comments/5459007029274
It looks like this is working again. Not sure if there was an update.
Hi Dan not sure if you can help me or not....
(edited) Looks like my login to the Zendesk (your) help desk issue may have been resolved. Let's hope my sign-out issue to my company help desk will also be resolved :) apologies for the message left on your article.
I have found that I cannot search for Orgs in the new customer profile to add the org if a customer does not have it. I've been having to switch back to the original view in order to add an org.
Hi Mistyamber Reynolds,
I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble searching for orgs in the new customer profile page! Please see the Organizations section of this article. You can click the Customer details tab of a user's profile and then click +Add organization. In the text box, start typing the name of an organization and the organization will appear if the user can be added to it. I hope that helps!
@Colleen Hall. There is currently a bug in the Beta that makes the search not accept spaces or special characters.
Meaning if you search for an Organization which includes a space, with the space already typed out, it will not find the Org.
For example when attempting to search for „Test Org“ - and I type in „Test“ the correct Org will be suggested.
However when I type in „Test Org“ the Org will not be found.
This can be worked around by typing an underline instead of a space into the search field:
„Test_Org“ which will then display and find Test Org.
When the Organization name contains other special characters, these cannot be used in the search, or the displayed Organization will not be found.
This behavior has been present for months with no fix. Is this Beta actively being worked on?
I'm going to create a ticket on your behalf since this is a potential bug with the beta. You'll receive an email shortly stating your ticket has been created.
Thanks for taking the time to report this!
Hi
Apologies if I missed this in the above comments but under the Custom User Fields it'd be great to have these in 2 columns and also conditional similar to forms. Our VIP team use these fields to keep records of various customer information such as hobbies, prize types etc, but then we have additional info required that say if they enjoyed going out to eat, then we'd want to know favourite cuisine.
As you can imagine the options are endless so to be able to have these conditional would be amazing, and also 2 columns to save endless scrolling, theres a lot of white space over to the right hand side.
Thanks
Ollie
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