What's New quarterly roundup: Q3 2023

We also publish a monthly What's New article in addition to this roundup. Click Follow in the What's New section to be notified when it's published.

This article provides a roundup of new features released in the last few months or that are coming soon. Check out the What's New webinar to learn more about these features.

What's new and coming soon:

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

AI-powered conversational experiences

• Answer templates give you a head start creating useful bot answers. These templates, based on commonly asked questions, help admins determine the types of answers they should build, and provide a framework for creating answers using some of the more complex answer step types. See Building a conversation bot using answers.
• Add a bot to your Slack Direct Messages channel using bot builder to offer conversational support through your Slack DM configuration. See Using conversation bots in Slack DM.
• Routing based on skills with omnichannel routing is now supported on Professional plans and above for email tickets, messaging conversations, and calls. Omnichannel routing logic considers agent skills in addition to ticket priority, agent status, and agent capacity. When omnichannel routing is turned on, you can use triggers to add and update skills upon ticket creation as well as updates. See About using skills to route tickets.

  

• You can send metadata related to a given Messaging conversation directly to Zendesk via the Zendesk Web Widget, Zendesk SDKs for Android or iOS, or Zendesk SDK for Unity, and make that data available in Zendesk Agent Workspace for better context, ticket routing, and third-party bot building experience. See Using Messaging Metadata with the Zendesk Web Widget and SDKs.
• Self-service customers with eligible accounts can now purchase the Advanced AI add-on directly from the Subscription page. See Buying the Advanced AI add-on.  
  

  

• Enhanced assignment and capacity management for messaging conversations in omnichannel routing means admins can choose how inactive messaging tickets are handled. Turning on messaging activity routing causes both active and inactive messaging tickets to be counted towards an agent's capacity. Leaving this option off means inactive messaging tickets aren't counted towards agent capacity. See Creating capacity rules to balance agent workloads.

  

• Preview a bot before publishing it to a live channel using the Test bot button. You'll also be able to preview any unpublished changes. See Testing a conversation bot before publication. 
• 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.
• Use Sunshine Conversations variables in bot answers to access SunCo data in the Make and API call step. You can call the user, conversation, and app ID variables. See Using variables to personalize bot answers.

  

• Include automated clarification options as standard responses to help your agents better understand customer support requests. Send automated responses when the bot doesn't understand a customer's comment, or when a comment matches more than one intent. See Building a conversation bot using answers.

• API calls now support OAuth 2.0. You can authenticate Bot API calls using the OAuth 2.0 protocol, providing a more secure way to integrate business systems with Zendesk. See Creating API connections for bot builder.

Intelligent operations at scale

• Reassign reopened email and messaging tickets with omnichannel routing. Reopened tickets are defined as tickets changing from a status (or custom ticket status within a status category) of Solved, Pending, or On-hold to Open. Admins can turn on reassignment for reopened tickets for email, messaging conversations, or both and, for each channel, can specify which agent statuses they want to reassign reopened tickets. See Managing your omnichannel routing configuration.

  

• Activating omnichannel routing results in all agents being set to Offline automatically now. Previously, there was a problem in reporting on agent statuses when omnichannel routing was turned on because it also activated unified agent statuses. To fix this, that status of all agents had to be set to Offline manually. Now this happens automatically when omnichannel routing is turned on.  See Turning on omnichannel routing.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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. 

  

• Improvements to channel switching logic in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. This change helps to ensure the right channel is automatically selected in the ticket composer, reducing the time agents need to reply to customers. See About channel switching logic. 

  

• Improvements to search via slash (/) for chat shortcuts in the Agent Workspace ticket composer. The search includes matches for both chat shortcut bodies and titles. Title matches are prioritized over body matches in the search results. See Using shortcuts in chats. 
• Agents working on a ticket can now pin articles or posts to the ticket to give other agents working on the ticket visibility to the most relevant content. Specifically, when you are in a ticket, you can now click the new pin icon on the search result card to pin the content to the active ticket. Pinned content is visible in the knowledge section to all agents working on the ticket. See Linking, quoting, and pinning content to tickets.
  
  

Open and flexible platform

The Explore beta dashboard builder has had several updates to increase its availability and feature set:

• Availability for Professional plans. The beta dashboard builder, an easier and more intuitive way to create dashboards, is now available to Professional customers. See Working with the dashboard builder (Beta).

  

• Multi-filters for live data. Multi-filters for live dashboards created with the beta dashboard builder allow you to filter by up to five attributes per filter, instead of the previous limit of only one value in one filter. See Adding a filter.
  
• Default time selection. From now on, any dashboard built with the beta builder and having a time filter will show data from the last 30 days, rather than all time. The All time value is no longer available. See Adding a filter.
• Drill in. We are releasing the drill in functionality for the beta dashboard builder. This feature provides a flexible yet consistent tool for digging into your data, enabling you to easily discover trends, investigate spikes, and more. See Toggling drill in on a dashboard.
• Responsive width. Dashboards built in the beta dashboard builder now automatically resize to fit the width of the viewer’s screen, allowing dashboards to utilize the whole screen and be viewable on different devices. See Resizing components and changing the dashboard layout.
• A new metric for service level agreements (SLAs) called Total resolution time is now available. This metric measures the entire life of a ticket, from when it is created until when it is solved. See Defining SLA policies.
  
• Sample ticket data is now available for all Zendesk Suite trials. Previously, sample ticket data was available for a curated set of trial accounts only. Ticket samples are based on your business type. See Adding sample data to your trial.
  
  
• In addition to sample tickets, you have the option to include sample views and macros in Zendesk Suite trial accounts. This sample data provides you with a better idea of how your Zendesk account works with tickets, views, and macros. See Adding sample data to your trial.
• Enhanced support for third-party document type styling means that you can now copy and paste content from Google Docs or Microsoft Word into help center articles without having to fix broken formatting in the article editor. See Supported help center styles for third-party document types.
• Side conversations settings are now available from a new page in Admin center. This new, centralized location makes it easier to find their settings from the menu or search in Admin Center. See Activating and deactivating side conversations.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

  

• The user essentials card in the context panel is now configurable for customers on Enterprise plans and above. Admins can configure the essentials card by adding, deleting, and reordering standard and custom user fields within the card. See Configuring the essentials card.
  

• The Zendesk Agent Workspace is automatically activated in accounts created after July 12, 2023. Settings to activate or deactivate it are no longer required. See Activating and deactivating the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
• The SLA admin page has been redesigned so that the SLA targets are split into three sections for the different SLA metric types: reply, update and resolution targets. Additionally, you can now separately select calendar or business hours for each of these three sections. See Defining SLA policies.
• Macro suggestions for admins now include suggested groups. The suggested groups are based on the group membership of the agents who made the similar comments that prompted the macro suggestion. See Creating macros from macro suggestions for admins.
• New metrics and attributes in the Zendesk Messaging dashboard and Messaging tickets dataset provide additional insights into staffing and backlog management across all messaging channels, including web, mobile, and social messaging channels. See Analyzing your messaging tickets and Metrics and attributes for Zendesk messaging.
• Admins can now use the Zendesk API to view or edit any macro in their account, including personal macros created by and available only to individual users. The visibility of macros in Agent Workspace won’t change, meaning that admins will still only see their own personal macros, plus shared or group macros. See Announcing visibility of all macros to admins and Zendesk's API endpoint for macros.
• Building a help center integration. In this tutorial, you'll create a to-do list integration using a custom page of your help center. The integration uses API requests to let users load, add, and remove to-do items stored on a third-party web server. See Tutorial: Building a help center integration.
• Best practices for planning your routing workflow. Before deciding how to route your tickets, there are several factors you should consider. This article walks you through a series of questions that can help inform your routing workflow decisions. See Planning your routing workflow.
• Routing options for incoming tickets. This tutorial has been rewritten to make it easier for you to understand exactly what routing solutions, business rules, and configuration options you can use to influence ticket routing behavior. See Routing options for incoming tickets.
• Using skills to route tickets. This informational article explains what skills are, and the different methods you can use skills to route tickets. See About using skills to route tickets.

Trust and security

• Restrict access to private comments and agent-only fields when an agent requests a ticket so internal departments can collaborate privately within tickets without alerting the requester of the details discussed. Click "follow" for up-to-date information on managing team member permissions.
• Enhanced custom role permissions for accessing and managing suspended tickets. On Enterprise plans, agents can now be granted permission to view, recover, and delete suspended tickets separate from their access to other tickets. See Creating custom roles and assigning agents.
• Direct debit payment (via ACH) is available as a payment method for eligible sales-assisted accounts in the United States. See Managing payments. 
  

  

• Zendesk has a new name for the Main Services Agreement. Previously, this agreement was called the Master Subscription Agreement. This is a name change only. See Main Services Agreement. 

• Spam prevention tools available in the help center are now available for CSAT surveys. Previously, customers reported bad satisfaction ratings due to email link expanders that can inadvertently trigger bad ratings when they click every link during verification. Since CSAT ratings store the last rating link clicked, a script that clicks every link sequentially was registered as a bad satisfaction response. 

  The spam prevention tools now available for CSAT surveys prevent the bad rating by analyzing requests, properly identifying link expanders as bots, and offering them a CAPTCHA. See CAPTCHA FAQs.

• New Guide security settings are available to allow restricted content to appear in the body of notification emails sent to section followers. Zendesk recently released a change to how we send out email notifications to section followers in Guide. For public articles, the full content of the article is embedded in the body of the email. For restricted articles that can only be viewed in the help center by users with permission, the email contains a notification and link to view the new article within the section. 

  We received feedback from our customers that they would rather accept the security risk of their customers keeping the full content of the articles in their mail folder than losing the chance to send out full notifications. 

  The new security settings let our customers decide how the email notifications should behave. See Configuring Guide settings.

  
• Improved performance and reliability for Talk with updates to Talk's network requirements. See Talk network requirements.
• 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.

Coming soon

• First reply time and next reply time SLA metrics will be available in messaging tickets to help you make better strategic decisions. SLAs in messaging data will also be available for reporting in Explore.
• The custom objects early access program (EAP) helps give agents a complete customer view by connecting and storing data from third-party services. Learn more about participating in the custom objects EAP.
• The data importer tool will let admins add and update users and organizations in bulk by importing a CSV. Admins will also be able to view a log of all attempted imports in the last 50 days.
• The layout builder EAP allows admins on Enterprise plans and above to create custom layouts to support different ticket workflows for agents. You can sign up for the EAP here.
• Admins can deploy triggers to production from a premium sandbox on Enterprise and above plans. Learn more about the deploying to production from premium sandboxes beta.
• The storage usage dashboard helps you monitor storage usage on your account. The dashboard is currently available as a closed EAP for a select set of customers.
• The ticket delete schedules permission will allow agents to take ownership of managing routine deletion schedules.
• Team member management for non-admins will give you more granular control and flexibility in assigning responsibilities, without compromising overall security or granting excessive privileges.