Deep Dive on Zendesk Platform Event Summary

The Community hosted a Deep Dive on Zendesk Platform event on June 29. At the event, the Zendesk product team shared the importance of data customization and change management, as well as two new features that give your team more flexibility and speed in custom objects and sandbox push to production. They presented some great live demos, and we had an insightful discussion on how easy customizing and adapting support on the Zendesk Platform can be and answered a ton of excellent questions. We’ve included the top questions answered live and all our event resources that you’re welcome to share with your team.

Video Recording

Top 10 Questions from the Q&A

Q1: Is it possible to upload a CSV with object records?

Yes, it will be possible. We will be releasing a data importer tool that will allow you to import custom objects (and other data) in CSV format.

Q2: Can a Custom Object be called, connected, or used in some way in a User Record?

Yes, you are able to create Lookup Relationship fields that point to a Custom Object.

Q3: If you are using custom objects for orders, does that link into our current order systems or replace them?

You can add an external id to custom objects that reference an object in an external system if you need a reference to it

Q4: How can Zendesk Platform help increase my agent's productivity and resolution time?

Triggers and automations enable you to automate repetitive tasks, and Macros allow agents to have pre-defined responses and actions to save agents time!

Q5: What are the best methods for tracking changes in Zendesk?

The best tool for tracking changes is the audit log. The audit log is a permanent record in the Admin Center of all of the changes made to your account.

This includes changes to:

Account information and settings
Users
Organizations
Apps
Business rules
Ticket settings
And the web widget

Each audit log entry shows information like the time and date the change occurred and which user made it. We’ll share a link where you can learn more about the audit log.

From the triggers side, you have the revision history to help track changes to individual triggers. This enables you to see who made the change when the change was made, and what changed, as well as how that differs from what is currently implemented.
Another option is to view the trigger that made a specific change from the ticket event log. From the ticket events view, you can select the name of the trigger and navigate to the trigger that was executed on that ticket.

Q6: What’s coming soon for Zendesk Platform?

For sandboxes, we’re working on the ability to visualize changes you make in your sandbox before deploying them live, as well as the ability to easily roll changes back. The team is also working on the ability to automatically keep your sandbox and live environment in sync.

For custom objects and triggers, we’ll be releasing the ability to execute triggers based on custom objects outside of the ticket. This means triggers won’t be limited to ticketing workflows and can create custom workflows based on your unique data right from Zendesk and without the need for external integration.

You can also look forward to other new features like:

Layout builder, which let you adapt the out-of-the-box layout of the agent workspace to fit your agents' workflows.
Data importer, which will make it easy to bring organization, custom objects, and other data into Zendesk in CSV format.

Q7: What can I test in a sandbox?

The sandbox is the same as any account. Anything you can do in an account, you can do in a sandbox.

For example, you can use the sandbox to test and fine-tune new templates and branding, Zendesk bots that you want to set up, and new features like advanced AI. As long as it’s present within your production environment, you can test it in your sandbox

Resources:
About Premium Sandboxes

Q8: Why would a company develop a custom app on Zendesk?

The Zendesk marketplace has over 1,200 prebuilt apps that you can choose from. These apps meet many companies’ needs, but some have more unique needs and need a custom solution. This is why a company would choose to develop its own app on the Zendesk platform.

System integration is a common example. Say you need to integrate Zendesk with an external system that there isn’t a pre-built app - either because the other system is one you’ve built in-house or because an app just hasn’t been built for it yet. Or say there is an app for the system you want to integrate with, but the app doesn’t sync the specific data or automate the specific tasks you need it to.

In both cases, you could build a custom solution with the Zendesk Application Framework (or ZAF). ZAF is open and standards-based, so you can build with any technology or language you like.

Q9: How can we can customize the data we capture in tickets for analysis and insights?

You can customize the data you capture in tickets based on the workflows you want to set up. For example, if you want to set up a workflow around setting as high priority tickets from VIP customers coming in through messaging channels, you would apply VIP and messaging channel tags to those tickets. Tags in support are mapped to ticket field values, which are easier to report on than just tags.

As far as analysis, for each workflow, you’ll have different metrics you care about. In the VIP customer example, that might be things like first response time and one-touch resolution.

To help you analyze common metrics like these, we have a list of simple recipes for setting up reports on them.

Resources:
Explore recipes reference

Q10: What are the best practices for restricting data access for large groups?

The best practice here is to create private ticket groups. This is an advanced feature that lets you give the right agents the right access to ticket data.

When you assign a ticket to a private group, only agents who are members of that group can see the contents of the ticket unless an agent is the requester or specifically added as a CC or follower. Private ticket groups also prevent agents working on a private ticket from @mentioning or opening side conversations with team members outside the private group.

Resources:
Private ticket groups

Presentation Material:

Event Slide Deck

Event Home Page