Agent Workspace: view conversation permissions for Light Agents

Feature Request Summary

Light Agents should be able to view messaging conversations in Agent Workspace (regardless of ticket status).

Image: source article

Description

Light Agents can in fact view the conversation up to a point, actually. When a bot reaches the final question in a flow and makes a transfer to an agent, Light Agents can still open that ticket and see the conversation details.

However, as soon as the end-user writes following an agent transfer, or an agent engages in a conversation, the UI blocks the conversation and shows the messages: "Conversation in progress" and "An agent is talking to this customer" (which can also be inaccurate, as no one has picked that conversation).

According to Zendesk, as received via support ticket: "This is expected behavior with Light Agents and messaging conversations. The reason you're seeing this happen once the end-user submits a comment in that messaging conversation is because it's considered an active messaging ticket at that point."

So although it confirms it's a 'feature', it doesn't really explain why it's like that, operational or product-wise.

Use case #1

The first use case is Zendesk's own examples as provided in the docs:

• "As a light agent, team members can access Support, view tickets, and leave internal notes." » this is currently false
• "By making the members of the Engineering team light agents, they can be added as followers on a ticket." » it is true, they can be added as followers, but can't view the conversation... So what's the point of me following a ticket whose conversation is inaccessible?
• "The engineer can then sign in to Support to view all the details and leave internal notes." » this is currently false: they can't view the conversation and they can't leave internal notes

Use case #2

• New conversation is created as a ticket (i.e. bot transferred to agent) and it's automatically put On-hold (i.e. no one should accept it)
• We trigger a Slack notification in a specific back-office channel
• One of the Light Agents in that Slack channel clicks the ticket link to check the conversation for evidence and other details
• They access the ticket and can see everything, until...
• ...The end-user replies "Thanks!" and the system hides the conversation from the UI ("Conversation in progress", "An agent is talking to this customer" -- no one is talking to the customer)

Business impact of limitation or missing feature

We understand that a full agent license is required for someone to serve chats and actively engage with end-users in conversations. This is not the case!

I completely agree with Light Agents being prevented from editing ticket properties, but they should be able to have enough privileges to be in accordance with Zendesk's own product description of the role, i.e. being able to access a ticket, view its details and provide much-needed additional support.

Other necessary information