What's New quarterly roundup: August 2022

Click Follow in the What's New section to be notified when the monthly What's New is published.

Check out what's new in the last quarter:

• Make it easy for your customers
• Set your teams up for success
• Keep your business in sync
• Sell smarter, not harder
• Coming soon

Make it easy for your customers

• You can now create Support tickets directly in a Slack Connect channel. Slack Connect lets you interact with people outside your company. Both external and internal users in the channel can create tickets by using the @zendesk mention. See Creating tickets in a Slack Connect channel.

  

• Simplified email threading provides a more conversational experience for your end users and agents in modern email applications such as Gmail. It removes redundant messages to make conversations easier to follow and more productive for both end users and agents. It's enabled by default for all new customers. Existing customers can implement it if they want. See Understanding simplified email threading.

  

• Use Flow Builder to add a conversational bot to your social channels, including Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram Direct, Twitter DM, and WeChat. See Using Flow Builder to create a social messaging bot.
• Add an allowlist of website domains to control where your Web Widget can be shown to end users. When you enable the allowlist:
  • The widget can be embedded and accessed on any web pages within the domains (or subdomains) added to the list.
  • The widget cannot be accessed on any web pages from domains not included in the list.
  • Admins can quickly block the Web Widget from appearing on a domain or subdomain by removing it from the widget’s allowlist.

  See Creating an allowlist for the Web Widget.

• Improved bot-building experience. Admins can now create separate answers the bot can use to address individual customer topics. When a customer requests assistance, the bot goes to work by matching and delivering relevant answers to customer questions before an agent gets involved. This new experience also allows admins to train their bot by adding common phrases customers may use to describe their intent to ensure the bot matches incoming questions to the right answer. See Comparing the bot building experiences for a roundup of the differences between the changes, and Building a bot using answers for information on working with the new features.

• Connect your bot to external systems using the Make an API call step. This step allows your bot to surface data, like subscription ID or order status, into a bot’s response that is stored from an external system, such as an internal CRM or an enterprise resource planning product. It can also be used to send events, such as emitting events to Google Analytics or Pendo. See Using the Make an API call step in Flow Builder.
• Web Widget now supports custom launchers within the messaging experience. The new  Custom launcher option allows users to decide where the Web Widget is triggered from on their website (whether that be from an image or navigational item) and use our simple APIs to open (& close) the widget (plus show any unread message notifications), as needed. See Configuring the widget launcher.

• The search crawler lets you implement Federated Search in your help center without the use of developer resources. You can set up multiple crawlers in your help center search settings to crawl and index different content in the same or different websites.

  When users perform a search, relevant external content discovered by the crawler is ranked and presented on the search results page. See About Zendesk Federated Search and Setting up the search crawler.
  
  

Set your teams up for success

• Modernized and consistent experience for creating and managing custom fields for tickets, uses, and organizations. See About custom field types.
• Agents can change both text and background color in ticket comments if activated by an admin in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. You can use several combinations of different text colors with different background colors to enhance comments. See Changing text color.
  
  
• Zendesk has made switching to Agent Workspace a lot simpler and easier. You can now turn on Agent Workspace for your account with just a couple of clicks. See Turning on Agent Workspace. 

  

• Ticket views include an updated interface for managing tickets in bulk. You’ll see a new toolbar in the ticket views interface to help you take action on multiple tickets at the same time. See Managing tickets in bulk.

  

• Zendesk has new resources for setting up your account. Click the help icon to open  to open a panel on the right side of the screen. The panel includes simple setup instructions and videos, plus links to additional learning resources, including training courses and help center search.
  

  

• New Chat dashboard redirect links are available in Admin Center. You can use these links to navigate to Chat settings from Admin Center. The links include redirects to Chat shortcut settings, Chat trigger settings, and Chat routing settings. See Using Zendesk Admin Center.  
• New trial intent questions are included at the beginning of the Zendesk Suite trial. Zendesk uses this information to make sure you have the best trial experience possible. See Introducing Zendesk Suite trial tasks.

  

• You can now more easily view and search for verified and suspended users on the Customers page of Admin Center. See Zendesk Support search reference, Verifying an end user’s email address, and Suspending a user.
  
•  The skills-based routing page has moved to Admin Center > Objects and rules > Business rules > Skills. There are no changes to existing functionality or settings.
  

• It’s now possible to localize the name of a macro, making it easier to support multiple languages for your agents. You can use dynamic content in macro names so that localization can be done efficiently without the need for duplicating each macro. See Translating macros using dynamic content.

  

• New set of upgrade videos and other resource planning documents are available to help you prepare for your migration to the Zendesk Agent Workspace. See Resources for upgrading to the Zendesk Agent Workspace. 

  

• Behavior for pasting content into ticket comments in the Zendesk Agent Workspace has changed slightly to improve the user experience:
  
  • Color isn't retained when you copy and paste colored text from any source. See Changing text color. 
  • If you copy text with Markdown commands from a plain text editor, the content is automatically formatted as soon as you paste it. Other pasting rules apply. See Formatting text with Markdown. 
• You can now contact the US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (988) using the Talk call console. The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is a national network of local crisis centers that provides free and confidential emotional support to people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress 24 hours a day, seven days a week in the United States. See Emergency calling in Talk.
  

• The content block editor sidebar now displays more precise content block placement information. Specifically, the sidebar shows the articles in which a content block is placed, as well as the exact translations where it is used and their status.

  See Managing content blocks in articles.
  
  
• A new prebuilt Community dashboard and dataset for Guide help you monitor your Zendesk community activity, including the number of posts and comments, upvotes and downvotes, community members, and more. The dataset enables you to build your own custom reports on community activity. See Analyzing community activity with Explore and Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Guide.
  

Keep your business in sync

• You can add a new custom field called the lookup relationship field to tickets, users, and organizations. After adding the field, team members can use it to establish relationships with other users, organizations, or tickets. You can use the field in creative ways to serve your specific business needs. For example, you could create a lookup relationship field called Manager, tie that lookup field to your account's users, and add the field to your ticket form. See Using lookup relationship fields.

  

• You can now have up to two active SAML and two active JSON Web Token (JWT) SSO configurations. Previously, Zendesk only allowed one SAML or JWT configuration to be set up for team members and end users. Now you have the option of creating two SAML configurations or two JWT configurations for both groups or a different configuration for each group. See Using different SAML and JWT SSO (single sign-on) configurations.
• Malware scanning service scans file attachments to tickets and blocks any that are flagged as potentially malicious. See Managing malicious attachments.
• Zendesk Integration Services (ZIS) is now part of Conversational Data Orchestration. Conversational Data Orchestration is a feature set for automating workflows based on events. See About Conversational Data Orchestration.
• You can now trigger ZIS flows based on custom Sunshine user activity events. See Activity events in the ZIS trigger events reference documentation.
• Zendesk now scans file attachments on tickets for malware in Support and Zendesk Suite. In some cases, malicious attachments are labeled with a warning and admins can evaluate and manage access to the attachments; in other cases, malicious attachments are hidden from users. See Managing malicious attachments.
• A custom agent role can now include permissions to manage only automations instead of all business rules. See Creating custom roles and assigning agents.
• Zendesk will alert you when you’re adding team members and you use the last seat in your self-service account. This gives you time to buy more agent seats before you run out. Previously, this feature was only available to eligible sales-assisted accounts. See Adding agent seats when the last seat is used.
  
  

Sell smarter, not harder

• A new prebuilt Activities dashboard and dataset for Sell help you monitor information about your sales emails, calls, tasks, appointments, and visits. The dataset enables you to build your own custom reports on sales activities. See Analyzing your Zendesk Sell activities and Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Sell.
  
• Apps and integrations bring additional functionality directly into Sell. Shopify relays crucial and timely info to reps, PandaDoc makes light work of creating professional documents, and MailChimp highlights your most popular content. See the Zendesk Marketplace.
• New instructions on how to set up a sales CRM in your account are available in the Zendesk Suite trial task wizard. You'll see the new sales CRM task If you trial an account with both support and sales capabilities. See Introducing Zendesk Suite trial tasks.

  

• New instructions on how to set up a sales CRM in your account are available in the trial task wizard. You'll see the new sales CRM task If you trial an account with both support and sales capabilities. See Introducing Zendesk Suite trial tasks.

Coming soon

• Optimize bot interactions with tags that take you to the right agent, provide context, and give insights into bot efficiency.

  

• Capture useful info like device, browser, and language by adding an extra step into the bot flow. See Understanding bot flow step types.

  

• New dashboards and datasets for Explore—about messaging, side conversations, and historical agent status—help you dig into more data about your use of Zendesk.
• New conditions and actions for triggers:
  • The Ticket: Attachment condition checks whether or not the ticket has any attachments.
  • The Ticket: Custom fields action has been expanded to include text and number, in addition to checkbox, drop-down, and date.
    See Triggers conditions and actions reference.