What's New quarterly roundup: March 2023

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Check out what's new in the last quarter:

• AI-powered conversational experiences
• Intelligent operations at scale
• Open and flexible platform
• Trust and security
• Coming soon

AI-powered conversational experiences

• The Branch by condition step can be configured to evaluate data stored in variables, then determine which branch the conversation should follow based on the condition it meets. See Understanding Branching conditions.

  

• Customize the look and feel of your Web Widget:
  
  • New launcher shape: Rounded square.  A new slider lets you refine the launcher's appearance by curving its corners. 
  • Better control of widget and launcher position on your website or help center. You can now offset spacing from the bottom and side of the page.
    See Configuring the appearance of the Web Widget. 
• New answer flow step type: Add carousel. You can add a carousel with up to ten informational panels for the customer to scroll through, each with a link to an external URL. See Understanding answer flow step types. 
  

  

• You can now authenticate API calls in answer flows. Create a connection to use for authenticating external services or systems in the Make an API call step in Flow Builder. See Authenticating the API call.
• A new prebuilt Flow Builder Performance dashboard helps you better measure bot and answer performance, including answer-level and resolution feedback metrics. You can use this information to improve conversational interactions with customers. See Analyzing your Flow Builder activity.
• New answer flow step type: Ask for details. The customer data capture portion of the Transfer to agent step has been separated into its own step type: Ask for details. Transfer to agent steps continue to include optional ticket tags and a final bot message before passing the conversation off to an agent. All existing Transfer to agent steps used in answer flows will automatically be updated. The customer data capture section will become an Ask for details step, and the initial message display will be handled in a Send message step. See Understanding answer flow step types.
• New recipe for messaging: Getting external data for your messaging bot shows how a messaging bot can use Flow Builder's Make API call step to fetch data from an external system, such as Shopify or Salesforce. In the recipe, you create a bot answer that retrieves weather data for a location provided by an end user. You can use the answer's flow as a starting point for your own API-powered answers.
• New rich content options are available for use in your answer flows. You can add button links, images, and gifs to both the Send message and Add carousel step types. See Adding rich content to answers in Flow Builder.
• The Using AI to summarize conversations in a Support app tutorial shows how to use the Zendesk Apps framework (ZAF) to extend Zendesk using external AI systems. In the tutorial, you'll create a client-side Zendesk app that uses GPT-3 to summarize Support ticket conversations.

Intelligent operations at scale

• You can create now create custom ticket statuses. If you've enabled Agent Workspace, an admin can enable custom ticket statuses for your account. Once enabled, you can begin to create new, custom ticket statuses that indicate a more meaningful ticket status name. You can also create triggers, automations, views, and more based on custom ticket statuses. See Activating custom ticket statuses.

  

• In the beta dashboard builder, you can now control what data a user can see when they view a dashboard. The new dashboard restrictions feature lets you create one shared dashboard that can be quickly and easily tailored to different audiences, preventing the oversharing of data while still saving you time and effort. See Dynamically adapting dashboard data based on viewer.

  

• The icons for unified agent status have a new look to improve accessibility. The icons no longer rely on color only to distinguish them. See About the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
• Control image layout and alignment when adding images to content blocks. When you insert an image in a content block, you can click the image to display a toolbar where you can now select text wrapping and image alignment, in addition to the existing image display size and ALT text options. See Inserting images in articles and content blocks.
  
• Apply filters to a Knowledge search by typing a filter keyword or value in the search field. For example, when you enter the word “type” in the search field, you can choose to search for the word "type" or you can select one of the available subfilters for content type.
  Type-ahead filtering is only available for Content type, Brand, Language, and External content. It is not available for Article placement. You can continue using the filter icon to access all filters. See Searching, linking, and quoting content in tickets.
  
• Publish changes to content blocks directly to your help center without impacting article status. Previously when you edited a content block, you had to republish all articles that contained the content block to see the changes in your help center. Now, you can update this content block everywhere it’s used, including published articles, without changing the article status. See Managing content blocks in articles.
  
• The content blocks editor contains new text formatting tools to help you create and format text in content blocks.  Specifically, you can use the new tools to change text size, alignment, indentation, color, and background color. See Help center article editor toolbar reference. 
  
  
• Content can now be redacted on email, child ticket, and Microsoft Teams side conversations. Similar to redacting ticket comments, you can redact side conversation content by opening the redaction editor and marking the text you want to redact. See Redacting ticket content.
• The steps to change a ticket requester have been simplified in the standard agent interface to make it compatible with the Zendesk Agent Workspace. You don't have to click a change link to view the field and make updates. Now, the Requestor field appears by default in the ticket interface. See Changing the ticket requester.

  

• You can now merge one or more content tags to combine duplicate or related tags into a single tag. When you merge content tags, you retain the name of the tag that you are merging to, and the tags that you merged from are deleted. Content associated with the merged tags is then associated with the tag that you merged to. See Creating and managing content collections with content tags.
  

Open and flexible platform

• Install the Shopify Premium for Zendesk to get a single, chronological view of all relevant details across the entire lifecycle of an order. Businesses can connect multiple storefronts to allow a single, unified view of customer orders. Learn more about the Shopify Premium App.
• Admins can now subscribe a webhook to user or organization events for Zendesk Support. Prior to this release, admins could only connect a webhook to a Support business rule related to ticket activity. See Creating webhooks in Admin Center.
• New trigger condition: Channel name. You can now use the name of the messaging channel through which the ticket was created as a trigger condition. All active social, web, and mobile messaging channels appear in the list. See trigger conditions reference.
• The Support - Tickets dataset now includes two new attributes that help you report on received tickets and requesters. The new attributes are:
  • Ticket email address: The support email address where a ticket was first received.
  • Requester phone number: The primary phone number associated with the user’s profile.
  See Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Support. 
• To encourage plan upgrades, Admin Center includes new notifications for customers who are eligible to try out an upgrade. Notifications also appear when eligible customers search in Admin Center for features they don’t have yet. See Trying out a plan upgrade. 
  
• Self-service customers now receive an in-product message if any issues occur with an account credit card payment. Previously, only email notifications were sent. This enables customers to quickly address any payment issues and avoid account suspension. See Preventing account suspension.
  
• Zendesk Suite trial tasks include additional tips about advanced setup topics. These tips appear if you answer the trial questionnaire and indicate that you have some experience with customer support solutions. See Introducing the Zendesk trial tasks. 
  
• The context panel has come to Sell (complementing the context panel in Support). Now you can have at hand all of the relevant information that you need for your daily sales workflow. You can customize the information you want displayed and resize the panel to fit your needs. See Using the context panel in Sell.
  

  

• You can now use the Deal Funnel report in both Zendesk Sell and Explore. This is helpful to get an overview of your deals and the different stages they are at, as well as the historical progression of the deal stages. See Explore recipe: Deals in sales pipeline (funnel report) and Understanding the Sell funnel report.
• The Zendesk Sell Best Practices ebook is now available. This long awaited ebook covers everything you need to know to get started and be successful with Sell, including tips on staying productive on the go, automation strategies, connecting all of your communication channels, streamlining your communication, creating smart lists, and using triggers and reporting. See Zendesk Sell Best Practices: How you can make the most of your sales CRM.
• An updated experience for modifying team member email addresses is now available. Admins can now change a team member's primary email address, manage team member email addresses, including adding and deleting additional email addresses, and resend verification links. Previously, the Team members page allowed admins to change a team member's email address without the new email being verified. Now when an admin adds an additional email address, a verification email is sent to the new email address. Once verified, the admin can change the primary email address, if needed. See Updating team member (user) profiles.
• Automatically change your agent's status if they're idle for too long. If you use unified agent statuses with omnichannel routing, admins can now configure an idle timeout threshold, after which the agent's status is automatically change to away or offline. See Enabling idle timeout for unified agent statuses.

  

• Unified agent statuses now support dynamic content. If you want to localize custom unified agent statuses, a feature available to Professional and Enterprise accounts using omnichannel routing, you can now use dynamic content placeholders as the custom status name. See Translating custom agent statuses using dynamic content.

  

• The Guide - Knowledge Base dataset and prebuilt dashboard have been updated to give you an even better understanding of your knowledge base performance. The dataset now includes an article category attribute and metrics for the number of article comments, subscriptions, upvotes, and downvotes. The prebuilt dashboard includes new and updated reports that take advantage of this data. See Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Guide and Analyzing your knowledge base activity with Explore.

  

• Better support for Asian languages is now available in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. The ticket composer has been upgraded. Previously, support for Japanese and Korean languages was listed as a composer limitation. See Limitations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.  
• You can now use Google Analytics 4 to track your help center traffic. If you are migrating to Google Analytics 4 from either Google Universal Analytics or Google Analytics 360, you can run Google Analytics 4 alongside the previous versions to ensure that you’ll have historical data when the migration is complete. To use both Google Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4, you can add both tracking IDs in Guide admin. See Enabling Google Analytics for your help center.
  
  
• Star and open all message types in Thread view: To make it easier to filter your messages, you can now star emails, SMS, and notes and add them to a thread. All of which you can do from leads, contacts, and deals details cards, or directly from your Activity feed. For more information see: Managing your Sell email, phone calls, and text messages, Working with notes in Sell, Viewing and filtering the Sell Activity Feed.
• Group lead and contact attributes into sections on lead, person, and company details pages: Sell Admins can now customize the layout of attributes on lead and contact details pages, including creating sections and then grouping standard and custom fields into them. For more information see: Customizing the layout of your records.

Trust and security

• Custom roles now have separate deletion and redaction permissions. Admins now have more granular control when defining delete and redact permissions for custom agent roles. See Creating custom roles and assigning agents.

  

• Admins can now filter the audit log by the Item column, which includes changes made to specific settings, users, and business rules. This new level of filtering by item makes it easier to find what you’re looking for without having to page through or export results. See Filtering the audit log.
• Soft-deleted users are now automatically permanently deleted after 30 days. This saves you a step and makes it easier to perform deletions compliant with international legal regulations. You can continue to manually delete individual users from the Deleted Users page in Admin Center before the 30 days. See Deleting end users.
• You now have the flexibility to allow multiple sign-in methods for team members and end users. For example, if you configured SSO for team member sign-in, you can provide another authentication mechanism (such as email and password) if you have a subset of users who can’t sign in through SSO. See Allowing multiple sign-in methods for team members and end users.

  

• You can now use the new Allow agents to update content blocks permission to restrict updating of content blocks from the default value of Agents and Admins, to Admins only. See Allowing agents to update content blocks.
  
• Zendesk messaging is now covered by the BAA when purchased as part of Zendesk Suite. See Advanced Compliance.  

Coming soon

• Actively reach out to customers in a more meaningful, timely, and personalized way. Proactive messages help drive customer engagement, acquisition, and retention.
• Infuse bot messages with key user details, differentiate responses for authenticated versus unauthenticated users, and build different escalation experiences based on the end-user profile.
• Historical agent activity reporting helps you understand agent utilization and workload across channels to support forecasting. This historical reporting builds on the already-released live reporting for agent statuses and work items. See Seeing live agent status and activities.
• Agents using Zendesk can now start side conversations with channels in Microsoft Teams when you join the Early Access Program (EAP).
  

  

  Learn more about Microsoft Teams in side conversations.
• Get a single, chronological view of all relevant details across the entire lifecycle of an order. Businesses can connect multiple storefronts to allow a single, unified view of customer orders. Learn more about the Unity SDK with Messaging EAP.
• Advanced Encryption empowers enterprises with management and control over encryption keys, ensuring that Service Data stored in Zendesk Services can’t be read in plain text by an external party and is only decrypted just in time to enable our services. This feature also helps our customers comply with data protection and privacy obligations and strengthens their security posture. Learn more about the Advanced encryption EAP.