What's New quarterly roundup: Q4 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

• Intent suggestions for advanced bots highlight the common topics customers are asking about based on past bot conversation data. Admins can use this information to build answers for those intents, improving ticket deflection and the bot’s overall performance. This feature is part of the Advanced AI add-on. See Using AI-powered intents with conversation bots.
  

  

• Add a bot to your Slack Direct Messages channel using bot builder to offer conversational support through your Slack DM configuration. See Using a conversation bot in the Slack Direct Messages channel.
• A new pre-trained intent model tailored to the insurance industry can be used with intelligent triage and advanced bots. This new model offers automated and consistent classification of incoming tickets and conversations, which can be leveraged in business rules, workflows, routing, and more. This feature is part of the Advanced AI add-on. See Automatically detecting customer intent, language, and sentiment.
• You can edit the names of intents used for intelligent triage. This allows you to better reflect the terminology preferred by your organization. See Editing intent names.

  

Intelligent operations at scale

• Agents can create shortcuts for their favorite apps and pin them in the Agent Workspace context panel. App shortcuts enable agents to quickly open apps without searching through the full list of apps in the Apps panel. Each agent can add their own personal set of shortcuts. See Managing app shortcuts.

  

• Improved tag handling in the Zendesk Agent Workspace to prevent ticket collision issues. When two agents update ticket tags at the same time in a ticket, the updates are merged and all tags are included, regardless of who saves the ticket first. See Avoiding agent collision.
• There are new restrictions on ticket comment visibility when an agent is the requester and the ticket is assigned to a private group that the agent doesn't belong to. These restrictions enable internal groups that handle sensitive information, such as Human Resources, to add private comments to tickets that aren't visible to the agent who created the request. This doesn't apply to tickets agents request on behalf of others; only when the agent is set as the requester on the ticket are they blocked from seeing the internal notes. See About private ticket groups.

  

• Agents can now redact side conversation child tickets from the side conversation drop-downs in the parent and child tickets. Previously, the Redact option only appeared in the parent ticket. See Redacting ticket content in side conversations. 

  

• The Views panel has been updated to automatically display 30 shared views and 10 personal views in collapsable sections. Previously, the Views panel displayed up to 12 shared views and 8 personal views. See Accessing your views of tickets.
  
  (Enterprise only) Admins can also control agent access to views with two new permissions - Limit number of views and Access view filtering.
  
  See Creating custom agent roles.
• The new record preview panel lets you view details about records related to the ticket you're working on. Record preview is part of the context panel and allows you to view relevant information about the ticket without navigating away. See Interacting with related object records in tickets.
• Enhanced trigger conditions and actions drop-down menus enable you to create triggers around Object (ticket) fields, standard and custom ticket lookup relationship fields, and other ticket details. Rather than just selecting ticket fields, you can now go one layer deeper with conditions and actions to reference fields in related objects. See Trigger conditions and actions reference.

  

• Renaming media in Guide media library. You can now rename media (images and article attachments) in Guide media library. Specifically, you can access a detailed view for each media file in the library, including file name, size, and where it is used. From there you can change the name. See Working with attachments in the media library and Working with images in the media library.
  
• Article attachments are now managed in the Guide media library. Previously, the account-level image gallery allowed you to access and reuse images across your help center. With this release, you can now manage both images and attachments from the account-level media library, which provides:
  • Agents with visibility to all media they've uploaded across your account
  • Guide admins with visibility to all media uploaded by any agent across your account
  For more information, see Working with attachments in the media gallery.

  

• Bulk deleting of media in the Guide media library.  Previously, the only way to delete media files and attachments from the Guide media library was to do so one at a time. Now you can delete media in bulk in the Guide media library. You can select up to 30 media files at one time (images and attachments) and delete them together in bulk. See Working with images in the media library.
• Knowledge search settings in contextual workspaces. Previously, you could configure only account level default search filters for Knowledge in the context panel settings. Now you can configure different default filters for your specific workflows. You can use the new Knowledge tab in the contextual workspace configuration to set up the default filters that agents will use when searching for Knowledge content in their workspace. See Creating a contextual workspace.
  
• Content blocks are available by default in all help center articles. Previously, content blocks were an opt-in feature that you had to enable in every article in which they were used. Now, content blocks are available on all new and existing articles by default for Enterprise customers. See Creating and inserting reusable information with content blocks.
• Reply time service level agreements (SLAs) are supported for messaging channels. Reply time SLAs include First reply time and Next reply time metrics. See Understanding which SLA metrics you can measure.

Open and flexible platform

• Custom ticket statuses are gradually being automatically activated for all accounts with Agent Workspace activated. You'll be notified before your account is affected. See the announcement to learn more.
• Enhanced custom role permissions for searching for end users. On Enterprise plans, agents can now be granted explicit permission to search and view lists of end users. Without this permission, agents will only be able to access individual end user profiles. See Creating custom roles and assigning agents.

  

• Enhanced custom role permissions for managing team members. On Enterprise plans, agents can now be granted permission to view, manage, and assign roles for team members other than themselves. See Permissions that agents with custom roles can have.

  

• Zendesk provides an in-product report to help you view and manage seat usage for agent months, if your account is eligible. With this report, you don’t have to contact Zendesk to get seat usage information. See Managing agent months. 
  

  

• Admins can now view personal macros created by and available only to individual agents. This visibility allows admins to see a complete picture of all the macros in their account in Admin Center. See Organizing and managing your macros.
• Admins can assign permissions for macro suggestions within custom roles. This means that not only admins, but also other roles defined by the admin, can access macro suggestions in the Admin Center. See Configuring access to macro suggestions.
  
• Zendesk has increased the number of additional languages you can select on the Localization page in Admin Center. When you add multiple languages, you can choose from over 343 languages and locales. Previously, only 65 languages and locales were shown, and you had to contact Zendesk Customer Support to include other languages and locales that didn't appear on the list. See Selecting the languages you want to support. 
  

  

• New tools are available to help migrate your Zendesk Jira integration to a new Jira instance. You can now self-manage your integration migration when moving between Jira instances, such as from Jira Server to Jira Cloud. See Migrating the Zendesk Jira integration when moving Jira instances.

  

• A new and improved custom objects experience is now available. Admins can define custom objects, build out their schema with custom fields, specify object-level permissions for agents, and add lookup relationship fields to tickets to surface your custom data in tickets. Agents can add and manage custom object records and preview related records within tickets. Then, you can use your custom objects and records in triggers and analytics. See Understanding custom objects.

  

• Integrate Zendesk’s capabilities natively within your Unity game projects and leverage our new demo game to experience the SDK in a real-life scenario with no additional coding required. Learn more about Unity SDK & Demo Game.
  

• Create a one-stop shop for employee support by securely integrating third-party apps to help centers. Learn more about secure help center Integrations.
• Social identities appear in the essentials card. When a customer reaches out from a social messaging channel, their social identity, such as a WhatsApp phone number or Instagram handle, will appear in the essentials card. Social identities help agents identify customers across various platforms and better understand customer context when working on a ticket. See Viewing customer context in a ticket.
  
• Semantic search for all English language help centers that don't have external content. We've expanded the semantic search rollout to more customers and are working to bring semantic search support to more languages. To see whether your help center is enabled for semantic search and to learn more about the rollout plan, see About semantic search and how it works.
• Messaging triggers and transcript settings are now in Admin Center. Customers on new Suite accounts can manage these settings without visiting the Chat dashboard. Over the next few months, all account types will have these and more messaging settings migrated to Admin Center. See About messaging triggers in Admin Center and Managing messaging transcript visibility.

  

• Webhooks are now replicated when you create a new premium sandbox. To prevent unintended interactions with the live APIs webhooks connect to, replicated webhooks are all deactivated by default in the sandbox environment. See Understanding premium sandboxes.
• Deploying triggers from premium sandboxes to production is now available. Now you can test new triggers or updates to existing triggers safely in your premium sandbox environment and then deploy the trigger configuration directly to production with just a few clicks. Dependency mapping is detected automatically, and it's easy for you to resolve any missing or duplicate dependencies that are identified. See Deploying business rules to production from a premium sandbox.

  

• Webhooks can subscribe to agent availability events to automatically run when an agent's channel status or unified agent status changes, a work item is assigned or unassigned to an agent, an agent gains or loses access to a channel, or an agent's maximum number of work items for a channel changes. Agent availability events also include events that detect the activation and deactivation of omnichannel routing. See Creating webhooks to interact with third-party systems.
• Talk Partner Edition (TPE) APIs has added two features to help with Computer Telephony Integrations (CTI): Standard Call Object and a new Voice Comment. Standard Call Object is a way to store third-party, industry-standard call data in Zendesk. Voice comment is ideal for voicemails to display information, such as end-user number, name of the agent that took the call, call duration, and more. See Understanding Talk Partner Edition and Announcing: New Talk Partner Edition capabilities.

  

• Custom ticket status attributes are included in more Explore datasets. The Ticket custom status name, Ticket custom status category, and Ticket custom status state attributes are available in the following datasets:
  • Support: Updates History (See Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Support)
  • Support: SLAs (See Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Support)
  • Support: Group SLAs (See Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Support)
  • Talk: Calls (See Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Talk)
  • Chat: Engagements (See Metrics and attributes for live chat)
  • Messaging: Tickets (See Metrics and attributes for Zendesk messaging)
• The prebuilt Explore live dashboard supports unified agent statuses. If you use omnichannel routing, the Explore live dashboard now includes more granular information about agents' statuses and capacity. See Seeing live agent status and activities.
  
• Protect customer privacy and meet your data residency needs with more options for in-country data locality. You can also store select service data in one of several countries, including Japan, Australia, Germany, Ireland, and the U.S. This way, you have more options to store and safeguard your data where it makes the most sense for your business. 
• Twitter has rebranded in Zendesk. All mentions of Twitter in the Zendesk UI and documentation have been updated to X Corp or X (formerly Twitter). See the announcement Rebrand of Twitter to X Corp.

Trust and security

• The Advanced Data Privacy and Protection (ADPP) add-on is now available for customers with advanced data privacy and security needs beyond the strong security we already provide for every Zendesk customer. The Access Log API is the first feature available with this add-on. Additional features, including advanced data retention, advanced redaction, data masking, and advanced encryption, are expected in future releases.
  
  You can buy the ADPP add-on directly from the shopping cart if you have an eligible online-assisted account. See Buying the Advanced Data Privacy and Protection add-on.
  
• You can export a detailed log of access events in your Zendesk account using the Access Log API. Access events are instances where an agent or admin has viewed data even if they didn't take action on it. This API is offered with the Advanced Data Privacy and Protection (ADPP) add-on. See Monitoring agent activity with the Access Log API.
• Add multiple SSO buttons to the Zendesk sign-in page if you have more than one SSO configuration. We’ve also added the ability to customize the button label and delete inactive SSO configurations. See Managing single sign-on (SSO) configurations.
  

  

Coming soon

• Advanced Encryption allows your company to encrypt your Service Data using your own enterprise key management system (KMS), ensuring data stored in Zendesk can’t be read in plain text by an external party and is decrypted just in time to enable the Zendesk Services. This feature is currently in an early access program (EAP). Learn more about Advanced Encryption or sign up to participate in the EAP.
• Zendesk now provides a storage usage dashboard to help you monitor storage usage on your account. You can use this dashboard to view your current usage and compare it against your storage limits. This feature is currently in an early access program (EAP). See Monitoring storage usage (EAP).

• Eliminate bot building time and have your bot summarize and generate replies to customers from your existing knowledge base in a natural, conversational way. This feature is currently in an early access program (EAP). See Using generative replies (Generative AI EAP).

• Customize the tone of your bot to match your brand better. This feature is currently in an early access program (EAP). See Using bot personas (Generative AI EAP).

• AI-powered text expansion helps you to quickly and efficiently create expanded content for articles and content blocks. This feature is currently in an early access program (EAP). See Using generative AI to expand help center content (EAP).
• Equip agents with contextually similar tickets for fast and consistent resolutions. This feature is currently in an early access program (EAP) and requires the Advanced AI add-on. See Viewing similar tickets in Intelligence (EAP).
• Use generative AI to summarize and enhance ticket comments, empowering your agents to work smarter and deliver empathetic conversations. This feature is currently in an early access program (EAP). See Using generative AI to summarize and enhance ticket comments (EAP). 
• Consolidate work for agents into one unified Agent Home. Agent Home is the one-stop shop for agents to manage all their work, including tickets, messaging conversations, and CCs and followers tickets. To learn more about Agent Home and the beta program, see Announcing Agent Home (beta) and Using Agent Home to manage your work efficiently (beta).
• Use layout builder to create custom Agent Workspace layouts for agents based on different brands, roles, workflows, and more. Layout builder is currently in an early access program (EAP). See About custom layouts with layout builder (EAP).
• To create the optimal conversation flow for your agents, you can use the layout builder to configure how conversations and the composer appear in a custom ticket layout. You must have an Enterprise plan with the Zendesk Agent Workspace to make these changes. See Configuring the conversation flow and composer location in tickets (EAP).

  

• Delete customer data your business doesn't need and customize what is deleted based on brands, tags, custom fields, and other conditions. Learn more about Advanced Data Retention Policies. 
• A new pre-trained intent model tailored for IT and HR organizations will soon be available to be used with intelligent triage and advanced bots. This new model will offer automated and consistent classification of incoming tickets and conversations, which can be leveraged in business rules, workflows, routing, and more. This feature is part of the Advanced AI add-on. See Automatically detecting customer intent, language, and sentiment.