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Zendesk Visibility (Release Notes, updates, etc)



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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

Posted Apr 27, 2023

Feature Request Summary: 

We are needing more visibility into what changes Zendesk makes on a daily basis (code changes, etc).

Description/Use Cases: 

There have been a few instances where Zendesk has made updates to code that directly impacted instances and resulted in core features not working. It was stated that not all updates are included in Release Notes so there is no way for us to make the connection that a code change was made or to keep an extra eye out for anything that may break around this time.

The reason I was given was because they do so many that don't seem to have any expected impact that a notification would not prove useful. I would like to provide a counterpoint that we should decide for ourselves what will prove useful. Perhaps a way to subscribe to exact changes that they are adjusting

ie. if they are adjusting placeholders and we use them, I should be notified

Business impact of limitation or missing feature:

If the update results in a feature breaking this results in escalations, extended periods of time where the issue is not noticed, or worse, it is never noticed which results in wasted time figuring out what happened, when, where, why and how to fix it. Here are a few examples of code updates that impacted us:

  1. We were utilizing a placeholder that had a bug (unaware) and ZD fixed the bug which broke the placeholder. This resulted in blank messages being sent to requesters
  2. Side Conversation Child tickets recieved an update (it appears an change was made to how they process updates for these types of trigger events that resulted in the system user responsible for handling the event (ie the 'current user') not being recognized as an agent) which prevented a trigger from firing that would reopen the Child ticket every time a parent ticket updated it. This resulted in teams not getting notified of follow ups
  3. We were getting blank responses in tickets where you could only view the response within "View Original Email" option. A code fix was to be implemented April 18th according to our CX team however it was not published in Release Notes so we would not have been aware it was fixed if they didn't directly tell us.
  4. DNS was broken. We had an internal escalation to fix and was on a chat with ZD (who confirmed our DNS was broken). After 2 hours of investigation, found that the DNS error was just a visual bug that was already reported
  5. There is an ongoing issue with being unable to search for Triggers unless you delete your current search then retype it. This was reported by us weeks ago but there has been no communication sent out stating this is an issue

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9 comments

I second this 100%.

Zendesk is pushing changes to production without adequately informing their users about it or testing them beforehand.

There is a reason why EAPs and Betas exist so I don't see why they handle it this way.

Other recent changes that had direct impact on the agent experience / caused bugs were:

1. In the customer context panel, when opening the Organization,a  page reload is now forced
2. In the customer context panel, the timezone is now included and spans two rows

 

The worst part about this is, that some admins might not even notice the bugs/changes in time causing deficiencies. 

Zendesks USP is their easy useability and intuitive design - so I really struggle to understand why they do not keep a focus on exactly that. 

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One specific issue is when changes are announced far in advance (i.e. Slack Legacy integration deprecation, or Pagination updates), no further announcements are made when the rollout occurs or is delayed.  Even if the change was announced ahead of time, it should be mentioned in the Release Notes at the time the change occurs. If the change is delayed, that should be noted through a post or in the release notes. 

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Dan Cooper

Community Moderator

This has happened several times over the last few months for us as well.  I've chased some really weird bugs that resulted in an internal rollback from Zendesk.  I've also stumbled on some nice API endpoints that would have been great to hear about. 

Some examples that come to mind:

  • Cloudflare updates started blocking comment creation if certain code strings were included. 
  • Comments just stopped loading unless you were on the events view
  • The hyperlink popover no longer displays when clicking a link in side conversations
  • The cc_emails_id attribute on the tickets API endpoint stopped being populated
  • New API endpoints have been introduced (we'd love to know about these as some address pain points we are working around in more complex ways)

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hey all, thanks so much for the feedback here - this is really helpful and constructive. The team that works with our customer impacting change communications is interested in setting up a call to discuss your thoughts in more depth; we're going to find a time in a couple of weeks to bring you together for that.

I'll update here once we've sorted that out. If others have feedback or would like to participate in that conversation, please post your thoughts here and we'll get you in the loop as well. 

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We've just heard from a Zendesk team member that it's policy to not announce changes in advance unless it meets some arbitrary threshold. I would really suggest that this policy should be re-evaluated - for example with this new Draft feature, we can see that all the relevant Guide articles were drafted in mid-to-late April based on their authorship dates, but were not published, and no announcement was made until the day of the rollout.

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

Hi everyone - 

Thanks for sharing your feedback on this topic! It's really helpful to hear from you, and some internal teams are working on how we can make our communications around release notes, updates, etc. more useful for you. 

We've planned a live listening session and conversation on this topic on October 27. Please RSVP below if you'd like to join us to share your thoughts, ask questions, and provide feedback to the team that works with this area of our customer communications: 

https://usergroups.zendesk.com/events/details/zendesk-zendesk-community-events-presents-listening-session-on-visibility-into-release-notes-and-other-zendesk-updates/


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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

As this does have eyes of PMs, I want to add another visibility suggestion which is adding a scale to feedback posts. Rather than the current thumbs up or thumbs down option of a post, if we could rate how much the post would impact us.

 

For example, I use triggers every single day and have the same pain point that I need fixed vrs the chat dashboard that I go maybe once a week. But when I go there once a week, it is a pain point. If I had to pick, I would opt for the triggers to be updated as that is something I interact with daily rather than weekly.

 

Having an option for a scale would give ZD and others exactly how many folks are impacted by this on a daily basis rather than a weekly one or rarely. While it is still a pain point, it may not be that heavy of a pain point for everyone.

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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

There was another change with no communication - this is something that needs to be examined: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/7431999772954/comments/7510195899290

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Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

Thank you for sharing this feedback Sydney. I wanted to close the loop here that we reached out to our internal communications team to better understand why this information was not shared. We believe that there was an honest mistake of our communication process that led to confusion and ultimately the update did not get posted. We are committed to providing up to date and accurate information to our customers and understand the negative impact that is has when that is not done. Rest assured, we have taken this note and will continue to make sure we are improving in this area. Thank you again for raising this and our sincere apologies for the impact this has caused. 

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