Migrating to the Zendesk Agent Workspace

Fastpath: Admin Center > Workspaces > Agent tools > Agent Workspace

This article describes how to migrate your account to use the Zendesk Agent Workspace, which enables agents to manage email, chat, voice, and messaging conversations all within a single ticket interface.

The workspace enables agents to work seamlessly across all Zendesk channels. Agents can use the appropriate channels to address issues, without being restricted to the channel in which the customer originally made contact. Zendesk has found that, on average, companies see these improvements after moving over:

• 17% faster replies to customers
• 18% faster resolutions of customer requests

This article includes the following sections:

• Before you migrate
• About the migration
• Starting the migration
• After the migration

Related articles

• About the Zendesk Agent Workspace
• Resources for migrating to the Zendesk Agent Workspace
• Migrating social messaging channels to the Zendesk Agent Workspace

Before you migrate

The Agent Workspace provides a completely-new working environment for your agents with a great set of tools to manage interactive, cross-channel conversations. The benefits are significant, but there are some considerations.

Make sure you consider these items before you migrate:

Account management

• Activating (or deactivating) the workspace applies to your entire account. You cannot restrict the activation to individual agents or agent groups. If you have an Enterprise account, you can test out the activation in a Sandbox first before you activate it in your production account. See Preparing to activate or deactivate.
• With migration to the Agent Workspace, Chat is integrated with Support. To make it more a seamless experience, chats are created as tickets and have the ticket rules applied to them. This means that both Support triggers and Chat triggers can have an impact on chats or other messaging types in the Agent Workspace.

  For example, a trigger that changes the status of the ticket to Solved and is encompassing enough to catch an incoming chat, might force an incoming chat to be auto-closed. Before you migrate, Zendesk recommends checking any triggers that change ticket status to make sure they are compatible with Chat and other messaging channels and don't have any conflicts.

• If Data Center Location (DCL) is important to your account, make sure you understand our Zendesk Regional Data Hosting Policy. Also, make sure you understand which Agent Workspace features support DCL.

Chat and messaging

• To migrate your Chat account, you need an account with Chat Phase 3 or Chat Phase 4. See Determining your Zendesk Chat account version.
• Chat departments and agent groups are merged. Admins manage agents through Support groups instead of departments on the Chat dashboard. Admins have a single location for managing collections of agents instead of switching between interfaces. See Managing groups of agents.
  Important: This merge cannot be reversed. After migration, all activities associated with adding, updating, and deleting groups of agents in Support will impact Chat departments.
• Chats are served directly from the ticket interface, agents cannot serve chats from the Chat dashboard. Agents have one single location to manage all their conversations (chats, social messages, web messages). See Answering a message.
• Agents cannot see the contents of a chat or message before accepting it, but chat routing for messaging has been improved to help get chats and messages to the right agents at the right time. See Setting triggers, automations, and views for messaging and Business rules for messaging.
• Multi-agent chats are not supported, but agents can transfer chats to other agents. See Sharing chats with other agents. The chat visitor path is only available during a live chat.

Ticket interface

• To provide a more-natural flow, conversations are arranged with the most-recent comments at the end of the flow. This takes some adjustment for agents who work with email messages and are familiar with seeing the latest comment at the top of the ticket. See Sample ticket.
• Customer context has moved to a new location in the ticket interface. It has been expanded to include information from third-party applications. See Viewing customer context.
• The ticket tab interface in the workspace has changed to work better with interactive conversations. Ticket numbers aren’t included on chat and messaging ticket tabs, but conversation status, recent comments, and channel type are highlighted. See Using ticket tabs to manage conversations.
• The composer maintains separate text buffers for each conversation type (for example, internal notes vs public comments). This may be confusing for agents when they first start to use it, but it enables them to switch quickly between threads without losing content. See Switching channels in the composer.
• The Zendesk Agent Workspace includes native ticket redaction which provides additional functionality that the Zendesk Ticket Redaction app doesn’t support. Zendesk recommends uninstalling the app and using Zendesk Agent Workspace native ticket redaction. Ticket redaction via API commands is also fully supported with the workspace.

Composer updates

The Agent Workpace includes a new composer, powered by CKEditor, that combines support for both rich text formatting and Markdown commands. You no longer have to switch between composers.

• Because the Agent Workspace handles markdown and formatting syntax differently, it is expected and intended for new markdown conventions to apply on pre-existing tickets comments. This can cause minor ticket formatting and spacing issues for legacy comments that were generated in the standard agent interface.
• After migration, Zendesk recommends that you review and possibly update any API scripts you use to that generate comments. This will help make sure your API scripts work as expected with the new composer.

Finally, it’s important to check out the current product limitations to see how they might impact your particular situation. For example, if your account serves a very high volume of chats. See Limitations for the Zendesk Agent Workspace. Zendesk recommends evaluating your account for migration before you migrate.

About the migration

Before you can activate the workspace, you have to migrate your account. During migration, your Chat departments are merged into Support groups. This enables you to manage collections of agents in one location, rather than switching between two separate locations. Mapping Chat departments to Support groups is necessary for Chat transfer to work properly in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

Note: The migration from Chat departments to Support groups can't be reversed.

Before migration:

• Chat agents are arranged in departments.
• Support agents are arranged in groups.
• Groups and departments are managed from Support and Chat respectively.

After migration:

• Agents are organized in groups, instead of departments. You add agents to groups rather than departments. 
• Administrators manage groups (for Chat and Support) from Support settings.

Migration is required only once for your account. After that, you can activate and deactivate the Agent Aorkspace as desired, without restarting the migration. Going forward, you’ll manage all your agents from Support settings. The migration from Chat departments to Support groups can't be reversed.

Important: Only migrate your account when Chat traffic is stopped and there are no ongoing chats. Otherwise, your active chat sessions may be lost.

If you prefer, you can test out the migration on a Sandbox account first. This gives you time to try out the Agent Workspace and train your agents before using the workspace in a production environment.

Starting the migration

To prepare your account for the Zendesk Agent Workspace, Zendesk Support provides a migration wizard to help you update your account.

Starting on July 28, 2020 the Zendesk Agent Workspace is activated by default on some new Zendesk Suite and Support accounts. Also, some accounts have been automatically upgraded. You don't need to migrate your account unless you see a Get started button on the Agent Workpace page.

Before you migrate, do the following to ensure a smooth process:

• Plan your migration for the beginning of day or when you'll have the lowest possible volume globally for your account, ideally before your agents start working on tickets for the day.
• Send a communication to your agents to let them know the migration is about to start. Ask them to close out their tickets and refresh their browser as soon as they see the Switch workspace message in the Zendesk interface.
• Deactivate the Web Widget on your contact form to help agents refresh faster.

  

To start the migration

1. In Admin Center, click Workspaces in the sidebar, then select Agent tools > Agent Workspace.

   If the Agent Workspace is available on your account, you’ll see a description of how to migrate.

   If you see this message, migration has been disabled for your account. Work with your account representative or Zendesk Customer Support to get your account migrated.

   

2. Click Get started.

   A page appears with a description of what happens during the migration.

   

3. Review the description, then click Next to proceed.

   If you have groups and departments with the same names, a page appears with instructions on How to handle duplicate names. If there’s no duplication, this page does not appear.

   To fix the duplication, you can:

   • Automatically merge groups and departments with the same name into a single group. This is the default.

     For example, if you have a Chat department named General and a Support group named General, all agents in the General Chat department are combined with all the agents in the General Support group, resulting in one large General group that included both types of agents.

   • Keep the groups separate and append the word copy to similarly-named groups.

     For example, if you have a Chat department named General and an Support group named General, the Support group is renamed General_copy to distinguish it from the existing Chat department. The Support agents remain in the renamed General_copy group and the Chat agents are moved to the General_copy group.

4. If necessary, select Automatically merge or Don’t merge, then click Migrate.

   Depending on how many departments you have, it may take a few minutes or hours for the migration to complete.

   When the migration is complete, return to the Agent Workspace setup page. You will see a checkbox to turn on the workspace. You may need to refresh your browser to see the change.

5. Select Turn on the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
6. Save your changes.

   A tutorial appears that shows you how to use the new workspace.

After the migration

Once migration is complete and the workspace is activated, agents can start serving chats from the Zendesk Agent Workspace and administrators can manage agents in Support groups, instead of Chat departments. For more information on how to work with the Zendesk Agent Workspace, see Documentation Resources.

After migration, open (or refresh) the Chat dashboard.

• All groups are listed in the Department tab on the Chat dashboard.

  

• Department settings on the Chat dashboard are changed. See example below. To edit group names, descriptions, and group memberships, you are automatically redirected to the Groups page in Admin Center.

  
  Although agents are managed in groups instead of departments, departments still exist in Chat and can be used in routing triggers.

Note: If you use custom apps in your account, after migrating Chat departments to Support groups, your app developers should update all public APIs for Chat department Create, Update, and Delete to public APIs for Support group Create, Update, and Delete.