What's new in Zendesk: June 2023

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

Check out what's new in the last month:

• Support
• Explore
• Guide
• Admin Center
• Messaging and bots
• Agent guide
• Zendesk Suite

Also don't miss:

• Zendesk early access programs
• What's New quarterly webinar

Support

• The Groups page in Admin center has been redesigned with a new look and improved performance. You can now manage which team members belong to a group, search your groups, view a group's open tickets, and sort your groups by name and number of team members. See About the Groups page.
  
  
• Group service level agreement (SLA) policies are a new type of SLA that allow you to set specific targets for groups working on tickets. Commonly known as operational level agreements (OLAs), you can now use group SLAs to set target times for groups working on tickets and separately track resolution times between departments. See About SLA policies and how they work and Defining group SLA policies.

Explore

• A new Group SLAs dataset and dashboard in Explore help you measure your results against group SLAs you configured. The dataset enables you to build your own custom reports on group SLAs, and the prebuilt dashboard gives you an at-a-glance view of your group SLA performance. See Analyzing your Support activity and Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Support.

Guide

• The account level image gallery is now available for all articles in your help center. You can use the account level image gallery to manage images used in the articles and content blocks you are working on, as well as all images you've ever uploaded to any article or content block in your account. The image gallery enables you to quickly and easily replace outdated images in all content blocks or articles where they're being used or permanently delete images as needed. You can also now copy and paste images from one article to another without breaking the image links. See Working with the image gallery.
  
  
  
• Featured articles in search displays up to six articles you want users to see when they click in the search box. When this feature is configured, and users click in the search bar, the selected articles appear in a drop-down list beneath the search field. Users can pause their search to select and view one of these articles or they can continue to type. When they start typing, the drop-down automatically disappears, and when they type the third character of their search query, instant search results appear in a new drop-down. See Listing featured articles in the help center search box.

  

• Guide has begun to use semantic search as a way to generate the most accurate search results possible. Unlike search methods that find literal matches to keywords, semantic search captures the meaning of search queries, helping end users and agents search for and locate content without prior knowledge of the exact keywords to use.
  
  By improving the search relevance overall, and specifically ranking the most relevant results at the top of page, semantic search produces the following help center improvements:

• • • End users can find the information they are looking for more easily, increasing the deflection power of your help center.
    • Agents can be more efficient as they can find answers more quickly.
      
      
  See About semantic search and how it works.

• You can now create and update translations for articles containing content blocks via the help center article translations API. Previously, for articles with content blocks enabled, the help center API did not allow for creating or updating the body of an article translation, unless an empty translation had previously been created in Guide Admin. This limitation caused issues for customers that had integrations with external translation services or other API-based integrations. With this release, we are removing this limitation. See Help Center API limitations with content blocks.

Admin Center

• You can now track important help center changes in the audit log. These are the changes you can monitor:
  • Help center activation/deactivation
  • Community activation/deactivation
  • Enabling/updating user profiles
  • Display unsafe content turned on/turned off
  • Require sign-in turned on/turned off

  

  For more information on using the audit log, see Viewing the audit log for changes.

• You can now bookmark audit log filters in your web browser after you apply them. The filter displays in the URL. See Filtering the audit log to learn more about using filters.

Messaging and bots

• Zendesk is streamlining how our bot offerings are presented, priced, and packaged. This includes:
  • Rebranding our bot capabilities from “Answer Bot” to “Zendesk bots”. Zendesk bots come in two versions: standard and advanced. See About Zendesk bots.
  • Usage-based pricing. New usage-based pricing with a metric of monthly active users (MAU) now applies to Zendesk bots for customers on Zendesk Suite plans. This replaces the former resolution-based pricing model. See About monthly active users.
  • Unifying the in-product experience. Customers now have a new single entry point in Admin Center for creating and managing Zendesk bots.

    

    See Announcing updates to Zendesk bots for a complete description of these changes.

• New advanced bot feature: Pre-trained intents. With the Advanced AI add-on, qualifying customers can use pre-trained intents in place of training phrases to help your conversation bot match and deliver the most relevant answer for a customer's question. See Using pre-trained intents in answers.
• Test unpublished bot changes. The Test Bot button lets you preview a new or updated bot without publishing them. See Testing a conversation bot before publication.
• Data Locality is supported for messaging and live chat with select exceptions. For more guidance, see the Zendesk Regional Hosting Policy.

Agent guide

• Microsoft Teams are now available in side conversations. You can view Microsoft Teams side conversations in the ticket and the Microsoft Teams application. See Using Microsoft Teams in side conversations.

  

• When you resize the composer window in a ticket in the Agent Workspace, the window size is saved across multiple tickets. It stays the same until you resize it again. See Composing messages in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. 

  

• In the Agent Workspace, agents can compose public replies as drafts first, before updating a ticket. This enables agents to make sure everything is correct before replying to a customer. See Writing drafts of public replies in tickets. 

  

Zendesk Suite

• The Advanced AI add-on is a new offering for eligible customers on Suite Professional and Enterprise plans. It expands on the AI offerings already built into the Zendesk Suite, and includes the following features: intelligent triage, advanced bots, Intelligence in the context panel, and macro suggestions for admins. See About Zendesk Advanced AI.
• Eligible accounts can include sample ticket data in Zendesk Suite trials. Ticket samples are based on your business type. See Adding sample data to your trail.