Recent searches
No recent searches
[Closed for comments] Customization of the dashboard
Posted Dec 10, 2012
In the new Zendesk Interface, the dashboard by default displays a "Tickets Requiring Your Attention" view. (I realize this is not a "view" in the Zendesk-defined sense) This way of looking at tickets is not customizable - the fields displayed cannot be altered, the column widths cannot be changed, and there's no way to "anchor" alternate views on the left side where the existing icons (for dashboard, reporting, settings, etc) reside. Those are features we consider vital in order for us to use the Lotus interface. The most glaring omission on the default dashboard is the absence of the ticket number. It would be great if Zendesk started by making that change, and then making the dashboard customizable so that it has real value to those users who need a different dataset than Zendesk has provided by default.
267
203 comments
Daragh Everett
Hi John
How do you login every time? Do you google Zendesk and go down that path?
If you want to save click, I would strongly recommend bookmarks! Especially as you can now sign in to your browsers (Chrome/Firefox) and it will not only pull across all your bookmarks but remembers your passwords to the sites you allow.
When working from home, I find this perfect as everything I use for work is web based.
It would be way easier and quicker option to go with the bookmarks than wait for anything to come from this post.
Check out the bookmarks and take that step ;)
(They also sync with mobile too).
0
John Tolle
Thanks, Daragh, for the suggestions. I stopped using bookmarks years ago because it made my memory lazy and I bookmarked so many sites that the bookmarks because worthless (finding the right bookmark took more time than simply recalling the memory in my own head).
Right now, I simply type in our support URL which goes to our Zendesk site... and loads the infamous dashboard.
But my habits, as far as To Bookmark or Not To Bookmark, are a distraction from the issue at hand.
0
Andrew Jacobson
The updates to your tickets bar is valuable, you don't get that on a views page. So booking marking a views page or using the standard landing page, both give you half of what you need.
So either please make the updates to you tickets available as on option in views, or make views selectable on the home page?
0
Nicole Saunders
Hi all -
An update for you here, the product team that works on support has let us know that the agent interface is something that they're working on in 2019, and I have flagged this thread as a primary one for those product managers to review.
We are deeply aware that communication in the product feedback topics in the community has not always been good. The truth is that using the forums to collect feedback hasn't scaled well as the company and the size of our user base has grown, and the amount of feedback that we receive has significantly outpaced both what we can respond to as well as what we can actually address in our development cycles.
We are re-evaluating how we collect, use, and respond to feedback from our customers this year and will be changing this process so that it's a better experience for everyone involved, and doesn't leave community conversations languishing for years. Thank you for your participation in our community, and for your patience with us while we find a better way to process your feedback.
3
Conor McLaughlin
Hi Nicole,
Thank you for the response and the update. As a new customer, I wanted to plus one this as well. It definitely affects both beginning and long-retention customers. I googled how to do change the default because I immediately assumed it was possible and ending up arriving here, much to my surprise.
Problem-centric problem solving sounds good (sounds like your Product team is looking for Zendesk's next S-curve with products like Sunshine), but I'd also encourage your product team to embrace the 80/20 rule. The suggestion by others to just allow setting Home as a shortlink to a default view specified by the admin is a good one and likely a small fraction of effort compared to other initiatives.
It would resolve all of the core issues highlighted while the team takes its time to think about how they want to re-architect the dashboard. It would also push the Product team to think about why they need to thoroughly re-architect it in the first place, a dangerous prospect. That thinking may be what has delayed this issue on the backlog for so long. This ticket has now been around longer than my company has been in existence :)
Thanks and all the best.
2
Nicole Saunders
Thanks for the feedback, Conor, and welcome to the Zendesk Community!
As I mentioned earlier, the product team is currently working on some improvements to the agent interface, and the comments in this thread have been shared with them to consider as a part of the project. I don't have any details yet on what these improvements will encompass or look like (i.e. I don't know that it will be a full re-architecture), but we'll share more as we're able.
I appreciate your feedback and will share it with them as a possible interim way to handle things.
As for the longevity of this conversation... there are a number of threads that have been around for a long time. I am sorry about that, but the reasons for these things lingering so long predate me by several years. My team and I are doing the best we can to address things, communicate what users are asking about to the product teams, communicate what they're working on back out and so forth. It's a process in need of improvement, and one we're actively working on. There are just a whole lot of boats to get moving in the same direction on this one.
0
Gary Donoghue
As a relatively new user to ZenDesk I am still coming to terms with a lot of the missing functionality but, to me, it does seem rather extraordinary that the main interface to ZenDesk when a user logs in cannot be customised at all - particularly as this appears to have been an issue for so many users for 7+ years. This lack of ANY customisation of the dashboard hit me today when I realised that, irrespective of any settings, your closed/solved tickets are always archived out of your views after 120 days - you do not have a choice about this - and it is not possible to define an easy method of observing these.
You can get to these records either directly via the issue number or via organisation and/or users associated with them but you cannot obtain them via views - weirdly this isn't allowed so you can't just create a simply view to see what ZenDesk records have been archived.
I do think this all points to a general observation I have about ZenDesk - that it seems very prescriptive about the nature of what is, after all, your data - insisting that ways of viewing that data (hardly rocket science nor beyond end-user's expectations) are pretty limited - the lack of dashboard customisation being one such example.
I have also raised issues on other threads relating to the lack of interaction between the tickets, user and organisation elements (and the fields within them). To me it should, for example, be a simple case of being able to utilise organisation and user fields within tickets but this isn't possible - and so duplication of data results, completely needlessly to my mind. When I first started out with ZenDesk I thought it would be a simply case of creating users (clients who we interact with at our customer sites) and organisations (customers) that could be seamlessly used within our tickets. To discover this was not the case was a massive shock.
I do think ZenDesk need to work on making their interface more open to customisation so that it is easier for users to obtain/see the data (their data!) they need directly from views and also a dashboard. I love the stability of the environment but it does need some concerted effort from the development team (or maybe it's a mindset issue at ZenDesk itself) to make the environment as leading edge as we are being told. Less focus on new products and more focus on the base product that everyone uses and needs.
Ok. Rant over! Thanks for listening.
0
William Chase Myer
I don't even know where to begin here.... YES, PLEASE! If chat EAP has the functionality to integrate both interfaces into the support environment, why can't explore have the same?
Naturally, I mean the ability to migrate your custom dashboard into either the analytics page, or the home screen. Lord knows that nobody truly uses that page on the support instance. This brings 2 questions:
1
Mason Snyder
Adding to this extremely long issue. We should absolutely have the ability to customize our "Home" Dashboard. Who decided to force Priority order here?
1
Ollila, Felecia A
The Dashboard would be super useful if it was customizable. If we cannot get complete customization right now the next best thing would be to add the SLA countdown to the view. It is easier to gauge what needs to be worked on first when we can see how our SLA applies to each issue.
0
Gary Donoghue
Does anyone else not think it decidely odd that this discussion about a customisable dashboard has been ongoing now for over 6.5 years! I'm a relatively new user to ZD but some of the (missing) functionality does strike me as very strange in this context. And I'd also like to fully understand the enhancement process at work within ZD if something as fundamental as the opening screen for users of ZD has not seen any major reworking or improvement since this thread first opened in a previous epoch.
0
Daniel Oakley
@Gary Donoghue I'm a newcomer to this issue/thread (only joined it around three years ago) but yeah even back then there were a number of different... seemingly fairly fundamental 'features' and requests like this one that felt strange and like obvious missing functionality. I can't speak for ZD of course but yeah when I've run into issues like this in the past in terms of products it's normally either the developers being *too* shielded from users or the user advocates (CS team, QA, etc) not having enough say in the direction of the project and in bringing up pain points to those making the decisions.
Luckily a cooouple (like one?) of the big issues we were having trouble with seems to have a solution in testing for some tiers. We've since moved to a different solution but while we were using ZD one of our in-house devs spent time creating userscripts to hackily try and fix up some of these interface issues for our agents -- preloaded the scripts onto the relevant browsers and etc. Wish I still had 'em to share. That helped us out a bit, though yeah it was a dodgy solution. Best of luck!
0
Alperro
It'll be much appreciated if Dashboard screen can be customizable. Currently, this screen does not satisfy our needs entirely. For example, If I update the ticket status to Pending, then I can't be able to see this ticket in Dashboard screen, this is unbelievable.
For example, I should be able to display any of my views in Dashboard screen.
I'll appreciate if this customization is in place, and will be applied soon.
Can I get any feedback on this ?
Thank you,
0
Nicole Saunders
Hi Alper -
There is a project currently underway that is working on improving the agent interface. We do not yet have any information on how customizable it will be, but those product teams have been made aware of the feedback in this thread to take into consideration during the development process.
0
Alperro
Thanks a lot for the feedback Nicole,
Regards,
0
Gary Donoghue
Many thanks for the update Nicole. Much appreciated. Do you have any idea when the first elements of this agent interface update will be deployed? Will it be a phased update or simply a significant functional upgrade in one big launch? Will we have the opportunity to beta test anywhere and offer feedback before any GCA release?
If there is a roadmap for this aspect of the ZD product offering it'd be useful to have this as additional context too methinks if at all possible.
Kindest Regards
Gary Donoghue
0
LogiLaurie
It's almost 2020 and we still need this, please! ;)
1
Gary Donoghue
I continue to be rather surprised (and disappointed) at the lack of visibility or priority being attached to what, to me, seem like fairly basic requirements for the front end of a CSM system - you'd expect to have a customisable dashboard to help optimise your workflow. I've been having a look at AirTable recently and I could do with that, in 5 minutes, what I fundamentally expect from my subscription based service with ZenDesk...namely configurable front ends, ability to store customer contact information and cross relate this to fields within my ticket views - hardly difficult concepts in a relational system but, with ZenDesk, such obvious connections and denormalised data are not seemingly possible...leading to data duplication, entry errors and wasted effort.
I feel these are weaknesses that are holding back ZenDesk, at least for small organisations like ourselves, that cannot justify the Enterprise level subscription but still want to make use of the stability and security of the ZenDesk architecture. However, functionally, ZenDesk still leaves a lot to be desired and this apparent inability (or indifference?) to improve matters continues to undermine ZenDesk for would be evangelists like me.
It certainly makes it harder to drive acceptance of the tool internally when I have to advise my colleagues that they have no way of relating a customer list with a ticket one - a basic requirement of most CSM systems.
I do hope that ZenDesk start to take note.
Gary
0
Curt Smith
There was a post by Nicole in the Community Team 4 months ago that gave some hope. Nicole, can you please give us some idea of progress?
0
Alperro
I'll also appreciate if there is any progress on this.
Zendesk is flexible but you can not customizate the main dashboard screen, this is really interesting..
0
Crystal Bishop
At this point, this request is 7 years old. Seven years old. Many many customer comments have said that this would be a very valuable addition to ZenDesk for their ease of use and productivity.
If there ever was a requirement to pay attention to customer requests and elevate them to a more urgent timeframe OR make a statement of 'Will not fix/implement', a seven year old request should fit that definition.
In a previous sustaining engineering management position I held in the past - a seven year old request would never pass muster.
Act to move forward. Remove the request as un-doable, or make it happen! Don't leave us hanging any longer...
1
Terry Knox
It's particularly galling to see this request still languishing in the doldrums, given that the plan for the much-vaunted and long-awaited "live" dashboard (showing Support, Chat and Talk data in one place finally) has now been announced as an additional purchase.
1
Amisha Sharma
Hey everyone,
Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback with us! My team is responsible for the agents home page and we're currently re-thinking this experience at the moment.
We don't have a timeline to share right now but we are actively reviewing your comments and use-cases on this thread.
We understand the need to be able to customize the dashboard: add your preferred column fields in the dashboard view, hide or minimize the view, remove certain fields from the dashboard and more.
We are listening and will make sure to include your use cases when we start making progress on this. Thanks!
1