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Announcing the macro suggestions EAP

Ryan McGrew
  • Edited
Zendesk Product Manager
Announced on Rollout on
January 16, 2023 January 16, 2023

We’re excited to announce an early access program (EAP) that will help you create the macros your agents are looking for.

Macros are a valuable tool that save agents time and help provide end users with consistent support. But knowing which macros to create is not always straightforward. This EAP makes it easier to determine which macros will be most useful for your agents and end users.

This announcement contains the following topics:

How does it work?

The macro suggestions EAP uses machine learning to scan the agent comments across all your tickets and to find common replies that could be turned into useful macros for your agents.

If many agents are repeating similar comments without the use of existing macros, then you’ll receive suggestions to create new shared macros to help agents respond faster and more consistently in the future.

Admins will be able to see a list of available suggestions in Admin Center. From the available suggestions, they can choose to create new macros that they can publish for agents or reject any suggestions that seem irrelevant.

For more information, see Creating macros from macro suggestions.

Who can participate in the EAP?

This early access program is available to customers on any plan with Support Enterprise. The macro suggestions early access program is absolutely free to participate in; however, this functionality will be part of a paid plan once it’s launched.

We’re looking for customers who want to closely collaborate with us to establish a robust recommendation engine for macro generation that is considerate of your needs. It’s our expectation that participants will:

  • Use the feature and provide feedback
  • Participate in customer interviews if needed

How do I participate in the EAP?

To participate, we invite you to sign up through this EAP signup form.

We cannot guarantee that everyone can join at this stage, but we’ll do our best to support as many as possible. In the meantime, we invite everyone to join the conversations and provide feedback in our EAP community.

We look forward to working with you on this exciting new feature!

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6 Comments

  • Maxim Nason

     Hi!

    Can you tell me if it will be possible to edit us those macros that Stuff Intellect offers?

    0
  • Tuomas Savonius

    This is great, but I wish the Macro admin management would be easier. I have a lot of personnel with great personal macros that I would like to make available for specific groups, this is currently not easily possible. Also, as a Admin I should have more control over personal macros, I see many mistakes the agents do when they create them (for example tags), and I would like to correct them.

    2
  • Joel Hellman

    I would agree with Toumas. Macros are too hard to manage for both agents and admins. At least if you have several teams. We want to offload the macro maintenance to our teams - but they really struggle because of awkward UX. 

    Improvements with AI based suggestions is 'nice' - the problem remains it's too hard for our agents to manage macros. Instead of (solely) these AI improvements, I would love for Zendesk to improve the UX for macro creation and administration. Nice we can add more macros - we still need to administer them, ensure they are valuable and useful. 

    Here is my list of stuff that makes macro management hard to use in practice:

    • We put macros in categories. Its hard to add a new macro into categories, because these categories are not a system feature guided by the platform, it's a convention with double colons (::) - a little thing, but the result is when agent create macros, they are often uncategorized and clutter the UI.
    • Creating a new macro is too hard / too awkward. This should be the simplest possible thing with very few clicks, and much guidance. For example. there could be a clone macro action on each entry in the existing list in Zendesk Support UI, so an agent can clone a macro that is already in the right location and that does it job. Instead, agents either have to use the "Create Macro from ticket", which is kind of useless: it doesn't categorize the macro correctly and adds lots of often unwanted actions. Or agent need to open the preview on a given macro, then open it in admin center with another click, then hit clone in a hidden menu, and then save it. Or, agent needs to open admin center, browse to macros, then they see 100s of macros, have find and clone a specific one, or create a new from there. Too many clicks, too confusing, too awkward.  
    • There should be a good interface to review many macros at once, and garden them, looking on usage and their content. Instead, its a list where you only see the macro name, and it takes lots of work to review each one. We should be able to quickly review content for each macro quickly - not click into each macro one by one.
    • There is no built in review feature for macros, so its hard to know if a macro is up to date or not - using some mechanism similar to what Zendesk Guide has for maintaining articles would address this. 
    • Placeholders in macros is too hard to understand and work with for non-admin users. Why cannot Zendesk resolve custom ticket fields to human readable strings / make it easier to reference fields? Right now, we need to get an admin to help whenever a user wants to e.g. pull data from a form field into a macro. Because technically, using a placeholder like {{ticket.custom_field_XXXXXX}} is the MVP what is needed to reference a field - but it's very bad UX and agents don't comprehend it. There is also a weird behavior where if you go back and try to change the custom placeholder, the cursor jumps wildly around, preventing want you want to do, since like forever. 
    • Also as mentioned, admins cannot see (and assist with) personal macros, and they get destroyed if a user is (might be temporarily) downgraded to an edn-user, and then upgraded to an agent again. 
    • In the end, we could educating every agent how to create a macro, but it is a chore - I don't want a solution where such basic stuff needs an onboarding, the system should guide agents to do the right thing. 

    Sorry if that come across as a bit negative. I'm sure there are some customers that might have use for this. For us, the issue is that macros are too hard to use effectively, because they are too hard for out teams and admins to create and maintain. An solution to add more macros that we cannot maintain is not what we need, speaking for my teams.

     

     

     

     

     

     

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  • X. Adam Steinberg

    Couldn't agree more.

    1
  • Sebastiaan (Sparkly ⭐)
    Community Moderator

    Hey Joel Hellman

    Great feedback as always!

    Would you like to review our Zendesk App Macro Suite? We've developed the app with both the admin, as agent needs in mind. I think it will cover most (if not all) of your points.

    1
  • Stephen

    +1 on Joel's comments - particularly around issues managing personal macros. I see lots of users have their own macros, which conflict with standards on global macros and can be destructive in terms of the actions they apply (set tags instead of add tags D:).

    Categorisation and managing large numbers of macros would be massively welcome features.

    0

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