What's New quarterly roundup: Q2 April-June 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

• With pre-trained intents, you can tackle high volume requests for message and email. These bots classify customer requests by intent to increase response accuracy, and tag tickets with customer intent so agents can resolve issues faster. See Pre-trained intents in Flow builder to learn more.
  
  
• Sunshine conversations with Zendesk Suite are eligible for coverage by the BAA to help you fulfill your HIPAA obligations. Legacy standalone Sunshine conversations are not covered. See Advanced Compliance.
• Improvements to answer flow steps.  You can now add up to 10 button links in the Send message step and up to 10 preconfigured quick replies in the Present options step. See Understanding answer flow step types.
• Proactive messages are now available for Web Widget and mobile channels. With proactive messaging, you can deliver targeted messages to your customers through your Web Widget or mobile app, without waiting for the customer to start the conversation. See About proactive messaging.

  

• New messaging metadata variables are available for use in your answer flows. The new variables use the signed JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) used for messaging authentication to get information about a customer's identity and authentication status. A messaging bot can use the variables to customize its responses or branch a conversation's flow. See Using authentication metadata in a bot answer.
• Migration guide for messaging API connections. Starting May 31, 2023, you can only use API connections to authenticate REST API calls from a messaging bot. This article walks you through the process of updating your bots to use API connections. See Updating messaging bots to use secure API connections for API calls.

Intelligent operations at scale

• Zendesk Advanced AI allows you to achieve even more of your business goals, like increased cost savings, improved customer interactions with your bots, reduced agent onboarding time, and more. It’s available as an add-on for Suite Professional and Enterprise plans. See About Zendesk Advanced AI.
  
  
• Manage agent availability via APIs. The Agent Availability API enables you to view real-time agent availability information across Zendesk channels and update agents' unified agent statuses. See Agent Availability API
• Semantic search in Guide makes it easier to find the right knowledge base article. Using advanced machine learning and NLP, search results are generated based on the intent and context of user search queries. See About semantic search and how it works.
• Sunshine conversations are now included with Zendesk Suite Professional plans and above for any plan purchased after April 13, 2023. See About the Zendesk Suite plan types.
• Two new add-ons are available to increase the number of Monthly Active Users (MAU) and notifications supported by Sunshine conversations with Zendesk Suite. You must have a Suite Professional plan or above to purchase these add-ons. See About Zendesk Suite add-ons.
• The information that appears in ticket tabs has been updated in the Zendesk Agent Workspace to help you better manage conversations for different channel types. The tabs for email and ended chat tickets now show the ticket subject and ID, instead of the requester name and last message. See Using ticket tabs to manage conversations.
  

  Email and ended chats	Active chats and messaging

• A new ticket merge warning message appears if a mismatch across organization, brand, or requester fields is detected. This message allows agents to reassess the ticket merge and can help prevent accidental merges from taking place. See Merging tickets. 
  

  

• The ticket event log now includes "offered to" events for messaging tickets offered via omnichannel routing. When omnichannel routing offers a messaging ticket to an agent, this is logged as a ticket event. If the agent accepts the messaging ticket, the ticket status changes to Open. If the agent doesn't accept, the messaging ticket is offered to another agent with eligible status and spare capacity, and this second "offered to" event is also logged. See Viewing all ticket events for ticket updates.

  

• Improved readability and accessibility for the Lead Capture form. The updated design also means the new URL for hosted forms is based on your Zendesk subdomain. See Setting up and publishing a Lead Capture form.
• Star and view messages in thread view on contact, deal, and lead cards. Sales reps can better manage important messages and enhance their message view by grouping them by threads. See Managing your Sell email phone calls, and text messages.

Open and flexible platform

• Lookup relationship fields are now available in Explore for datasets that support custom fields. These types of custom fields are available in the following folders of the dataset: Ticket custom fields, Requester/User organization custom fields, and Requester/user custom fields. See Using relationship lookup fields and Finding custom fields in Explore.
• You can now search the content block list to quickly find the block you need. The content block list includes a new search field that you can use to search for content blocks you want to use in your articles. See Viewing the content blocks list.
  
  
• The number of images you can upload and use in Guide articles and content blocks is now dependent on your plan. This limit does not apply to images and assets that you upload to themes, or to images that you use in community posts and comments. The new plan-based product limits are as follows:
  
  • Suite Enterprise and above or Guide Enterprise and above: 100,000
  • Suite Professional and Growth or Guide Professional: 40,000
  • Suite Team (includes Guide Lite): 10,000

  See Guide product limits for your help center.

• Sunshine Conversation configuration in Admin Center. If you have a a Sunshine Conversations license, or are on Suite Professional or above, you can access the Sunshine Conversations API through Admin Center. See About Sunshine Conversations in Zendesk Suite.
• Understanding help center article verification and how it works. Verifying articles is an important part of keeping your knowledge base healthy and up to date. However, understanding how to set article verification rules or manage reminder emails can be confusing.
  This article describes how article verification works and provides answers to common questions, such as "How do I stop receiving reminder emails?" and "Do I have to use article verification rules to implement a verification strategy?" See About article verification and how it works.
• You can now generate team-member data exports from the Team members page. The data is exported into a CSV file that contains information such as team members’ primary email addresses, the date their profiles were created, product roles, and more. See Exporting team-member data.
• You can now search and filter on images in the account level gallery for content blocks. The account level gallery contains images used in the content block you are working in, as well as all images you've uploaded to any content block in your account. To make it easier to search and filter on images, you can use the new search and filter fields to:
  • Search for images by title
  • Filter images by the date they were added to the gallery or updated
    
    

Trust and security

• Get control over where data is stored, hosted, and replicated. Most of your data is already covered by data hosting location commitment. We’re continuing to cover additional Zendesk services so you can host data in a specified region. Learn more about the Data Center Location add-on.
• 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.

  

• We’ve introduced a new security measure for dashboards with public links. If a user attempts to access a password-protected dashboard and enters an incorrect password five times, the dashboard becomes inaccessible for all users for five minutes. See Sharing Explore dashboards outside Zendesk.
• Webhook subscriptions to Guide events. Use the subscription connection method to send requests based on organization, user, help center, or community activity. For a list of supported event types, see Webhook event types in the API reference. See Creating webhooks to interact with third-party systems.
  
  
• Use the Changelog in the Developer Portal to learn about important changes at a glance. The Changelog captures significant changes, additions, fixes, deprecations, removals, and betas and EAPs related to Zendesk APIs and SDKs, and the list is filterable by event type. See the  Changelog.
  
• You can now specify the email address where you’d like to receive notification of a confirmed security incident that has impacted your Service Data. See Designating an email address to receive required security notifications.
• The Status API has new endpoints that reduce the number of requests required to identify incidents affecting your account and also enable you to check for maintenance incidents as well. These new endpoints will replace the original Status API endpoints later this year. See Announcing the deprecation and replacement of the Status API endpoints.
• Webhooks now support custom headers and API key authentication. In addition to the new authentication method, you can add up to five custom headers to a webhook. Custom headers enable Zendesk webhooks to integrate with systems and services that have unique header requirements. See Creating webhooks to interact with third-party systems.

Coming soon

• With the Flow Builder: Interactive previewer you will be able to test bots prior to deployment and improve their quality. To learn more, see Zendesk bot resources.
• Flow Builder support for restricted help center articles will allow your restricted articles to be used within flows, giving you the opportunity to use bots to answer common questions from employees or authenticated customers. To learn more, see Zendesk bot resources.
• Bots for Slack will help you seamlessly build answer flows and publish them to automate conversations with end users. To learn more, see Zendesk bot resources.
• The Voice API will allow you to quickly add a hyperlink or call button anywhere on your website, enabling customers to seamlessly start a call using the messaging Web Widget without leaving your website. These conversations will function like regular phone calls in the Zendesk Agent Workspace, except the caller does not need to dial or know a number.
• Skills-based routing will enable you to route email tickets to agents with matching skills who also have an eligible status and spare capacity. Customers on Professional and Enterprise plans will be able to turn on skills-based routing when configuring omnichannel routing.
• Group service level agreements (SLAs) will allow you to set targets for your internal teams working on tickets. Customers on Enterprise plans will be able to set target times for those groups and separately track resolution times between departments. To learn more, see Announcing group SLAs.
• With App shortcuts, agents will be able to pin their most-used apps as icons on the context panel. When an admin pins apps, they will be displayed to all agents for easy access.
• You will be able to get an export of Explore data from selected datasets for a predefined weekly time period. The export is performed asynchronously and saved as a CSV file with a unique private key to be able encrypt the data. You’re notified by email when the export starts and finishes. 
  
• The Data Importer will help admins import large volumes of data without the need for developers and use of APIs.
  
• The newly redesigned reporting experience makes data exploration and report creation more efficient and intuitive for beginners and advanced report builders alike. See Working with the report builder (Beta).
• With the agent state and activities dashboard, you can get an overview of a specific agent, including capacity by channel and work items. See Explore EAP: Agent status historical reporting.
• Guide events will be available in the audit log, allowing admins to track changes in their help center and stay compliant with both internal and industry standards.
• A new permission will allow agents to access suspended tickets, regardless of their group ticket access permissions.
• Conversational Commerce Beta by Zendesk Labs will help you turn everyday support conversations into revenue generating opportunities. Agents will be equipped with product recommendations, promotion sharing, and payment handling, all within the conversation.