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Early Access Program: Configuring the conversation flow and composer location in tickets



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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

Posted Oct 09, 2023

Happy Monday my fellow community friends! I'm excited to share that we have launched an new early access program for Enterprise users which now provides the ability to optimize the conversation flow for your agents using our layout builder. This feature enables configuration of how conversations and the composer appear in a custom ticket layout. Please note, you must have the Zendesk Agent Workspace activated and participate in the Layout Builder EAP to make these changes.

Key Features:

  1. Change the order of comments: Customize the sequence in which comments appear in a ticket.
  2. Change the composer position: Decide where the composer will appear in relation to the conversation.
  3. Default Composer Window View: Set the default view of the composer window in a ticket as either collapsed or expanded.

These settings are applicable to each individual ticket layout, allowing you to tailor the configuration settings to match the needs of different ticket types. For instance, a layout configured for messaging tickets can have a different setup compared to one used mainly for email tickets. Find out more about this early access program here: Configuring the conversation flow and composer location in tickets (EAP)

We’d like to thank our community for sharing their feedback in the following threads that directly impacted these changes: 

This update aims to enhance your agents' workflow and adapt the ticketing system to suit your specific needs better. Thank you so much for sharing your feedback and happy customizing!

Update (12/8/23): We expect a set of these capabilities to be available on the Professional plan level in 2024. - exact date TBD. 


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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

Hey everyone, another quick update for you. We expect a set of these capabilities to be available on the Professional plan level in 2024. - exact date TBD. 

Thanks again for all the feedback and be sure to follow our Announcements for more information in the future. 

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Is there any intention to specifically allow the conversation order to be fixed on other account types at a later time?

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Why are standard features being hidden behind a pay wall of pushing your customers to enterprise?

This is a HUGE addition to the agent workplace. And zendesk always sees itself as a costsaving tool.

Now we are being PUSHED to the agent workspace v2 without the possibility of actually managing the agent workspace v2 in professional license.

This SHOULD at least be pushed to professional??

Hiding standard features, which were present in workspace v1, behind a pay wall in workspace v2 is absolutely fubar.

This is just plain money grab.

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Hi, first off - it is great to see the functionality be returned. It will make the rollout of the Agent Workspace much easier with my team. It is frustrating that it appears to be Enterprise only at present, as I think this is something other plans would benefit from.

I also wanted to add the following feedback based on my initial testing:

  • The editor in the legacy workspace would dynamically resize as you posted larger pieces of text, including if this text was generated via a Macro. The new editor does not dynamically expand - this means if you are writing longer messages OR using a macro with a lot of text, the user has to manually expand the editor themselves.

    Having the option to allow the editor to automatically expand would be great.

  • The legacy editor would only appear at the top of the ticket thread and if you scrolled down it would not follow you. The Agent Workspace editor is pinned to the top of the conversation and can take up valuable reading space. This means a user has to click the editor and shrink it manually.

    Having the option to have the editor auto-shrink when you scroll and auto-expand when you reach the top of the screen would be a great option to have.
  • As you type in the old editor, the entire ticket thread would move down dynamically. In the new editor, if you manually expand the editor, it will simply cover the comments beneath it, as opposed to scrolling them down the pane. This again blocks valuable reading space.

    This would likely be resolved by my previous suggestion.

As I continue to test and eventually rollout this UI, I will add additional feedback.

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Lisa Kelly

Zendesk Documentation Team

Hi Stephen
Thank you for the valuable and thoughtful feedback! I've forwarded this along to the Product Management team. 

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Look, if you intend to cook the frog this way, why don't you simply tell us (your loyal customers) that in a year or two, you will simply terminate all lower plans and forcefully migrate all of us to Enterprise level charging us 5x what we're paying now for 90% of the features we don't need. Because, what you're doing lately smells of what I just said. Do you understand there are other alternatives to your system which is becoming so expensive that it's cheaper to run in-house ticketing system and manage it internally?

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Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

Hi all, thank you very much for your continued feedback here. We appreciate your transparency about how these changes are affecting your business. I want to confirm that as your feedback comes we are logging it internally and also following up with your AE to pass along the feedback as well. Thank you again. 

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Any feedback on this? Or are we going to have to stick with just: "We are going to send this feedback to our team!" Response?

At this moment, there are - many - zendesk instances which still stick to the previous interface. Zendesk is forcefully trying to push everybody to the new interface. Whilst, the new interface is absolutely not accustomed to your core communication system: e-mail. 

When a "feature" like this is pushed to all plans. Where you can customize the workplace v2 entirely, you will see a complete and easy switch to workspace v2. 

The workspace v2 was promoted to be a flexible interface. Then, you should, make it flexible for everybody and not just enterprise customers. 

There is a reason why zendesk has grown in stock price until the end of 2020. And now is dropping in price. Now they are back to where they were in mid 2018. 

Start, actually, listening to your community and not to stubborn execs. Thanks

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Just switch my organization to Zendesk from Zoho after being a previous Zendesk Admin in a previous company... searched around for about 2 hours trying to find the layout option to reverse this order. 

If this is only for Enterprise, it is a feature that will cost my Support Engineers on average 2-3 minutes through the life of each ticket they work. That's A LOT wasted on scrolling through comments. Quite baffled this wasn't added in to the agent workspace nonsense. 

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We are ESAPIENS company, one of the first Zendesk users in Brazil, our ticket number 1 is dated August 2010! We currently have 6 products from our company using Zendesk... we spend a fortune every year!

Zendesk has never released a feature aimed at bringing agility to agents without it being necessary to have an Enterprise license. It's an unprecedented shame to charge for changing the order of comments in a ticket.

I am seriously considering migrating our operation to ZOHO/FRESHDESK/MOVIDESK, or similar platforms, where they promise to respect the customer.

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Pablo Kenney

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Jonas Libbrecht:

Thanks for your feedback. I'm a VP here at Zendesk, stubborn at times for sure, but also focused on listening to you and our customers. You've taken the time to lay out why you view this as a bad change, and I and many other people at Zendesk are using that weigh our options with this feature and other features that we're delivering in 2024. Feel free to reach out directly if you'd like to share more pkenney @ zendesk . com

Hi Richard Frey

I hear the concern, and appreciate you providing the feedback. If you'd like to discuss more please feel free to reach out directly at the email above. I cannot promise that we're going to change course, but based on this feedback we are reconsidering plans and weighing our options. 

Hi Leandro Gomes

A customer since 2010! Thank you so much. We sincerely appreciate your business, and take your feedback very seriously. As I mentioned above, we're reviewing our options based in part on the feedback, and I extend the option to discuss directly if that would be helpful. We have many features that improve agent agility in the professional plan, but I understand your frustration that this is not one of them. Again, thank you so much for being with us for such a long part of our journey. 

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Hi Pablo Kenney,

there's no point in 'reviewing your options'. Customers want to have simpler look for the workspace in a way they were accustomed to before this 'workspace v2' nonsense. We never asked for customizations nor we need any. Agent interface was one of the things that was working perfect and there was no need to change it. You guys are constantly playing the silly game of fixing the things that work fine - will you ever understand that what is not broken should not be fixed? Never heard of it? If it ain't broken, don't fix it?

 

There are other things that are BROKEN! Literally broken, as they were working until few years ago. Eg. what about auto-refresh of the ticket views? If I don't manually hit refresh, I don't even see there is a new ticket in the queue! Fix things like that first and leave 'workspace' alone, it wasn't broken, it was working fantastic!

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EXACTLY Damir Lukic

You nailed it!

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Pablo Kenney

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Folks, 

I was able to check with the team today, and they are planning on releasing capabilities such as reversing the order of the comments and other conversation configuration settings to the Professional plan and not just the Enterprise plan. 

This article hasn't been updated yet because the team is determining resourcing and timelines for delivery, but I can confirm that we are planning to deliver the capabilities mentioned above to the Professional plan. 

Again, thank you for your feedback. 

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Hi Pablo Kenney,

 

what about old style comment boxes? I like the box at the top which would expand only if necessary, but would expand automatically! This new 'workspace2' comment box is some kind of window that I have to manually move up/down. I do not want to touch anything with the mouse when I'm typing, and that simple automation of expanding the entry box was essential!

 

Also, did you notice that sender's email address is not shown anywhere anymore? Not it just says 'via Email'. Like I didn't know that ticket was opened via email, ALL of our tickets are opened via email! I need to know WHICH EMAIL ADDRESS was used to send that email! I don't even need to see the name of the person, I literally need to see the email address to confirm if it's a valid or fake email!

 

Anyway, if you want to improve this product, simply ask your customers what to focus on. Create Customer Council, invite everyone who is using Zendesk for 7+ years, offer some incentives (like AWS Customer Council does) and then you'll have free access to product experts and you could run your ideas by them or ask them to proactively report what's not working properly, what could be improved, etc. And then you'll be able to polish and fine tune this product and bring more customers. Offer these product experts to write use cases, case studies, whitepapers and then publish them - for you and for them it's far better than 2 sentence testimonial. You'll get 100% involvement, customers will be very proud that their name is associated with the formal whitepaper published by Zendesk. It's a bragging thing after all, ego-tripping of some sort, but we all love it.

 

Also, I believe you guys are all familiar with the fact that it's 6x more expensive to bring a new user onboard than to keep old one happy. Old users will grow with time and they will find a use for new features, upgrade plans and become product experts. And then you can get access to their expertise almost for free.

 

Now that we're talking - what about auto-refresh for ticket views? When will this be implemented?

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Pablo Kenney

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Damir Lukic

Appreciate your ideas for gathering feedback. At this point, this thread is moving off topic, and I'd appreciate any additional follow up either going directly to me, or even better going into our community threads to provide feedback in the relevant area (which I know you already do/have done - thank you). I do not have additional information to add on comment boxes or auto-refresh that isn't already in the community posts. 

 

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Pablo Kenney Thanks so much! appreciate to your decision, congrats to all

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Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

Hello everyone. Thank you for your continued feedback in this space. I want to echo Pablo's sentiments and say that as of now that what has been shared is the current update on this feature area.

Of course, we are always open to hearing your ideas and ways we can improve. I will continue to monitor this space however I would encourage you to share specific feedback or ideas about this area into our product feedback support forum found here

Thank you all for being valued members of our Zendesk Community.

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Let me get this right.


If you like our product, we take what you love and take it away. But bring it back as a paid feature. This is a basic feature. This isn't asking you about enterprise groups or security changes.

So done with Zendesk.

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Damir Lukic - to address your refresh views complaint which I also had. I found an extension through a community post that works flawlessly. Had my entire team install it. It's a gamechanger.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/zendesk-refresher/kbnadckimgmhcchlnoddmihobfmloocp?pli=1

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Brett Bowser is this feature generally available? If not, can we join the early release?

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Lisa Kelly

Zendesk Documentation Team

Hi Michael, 
This feature has gone GA. See this article for details: Configuring the conversation order. You need a Professional plan or higher to use it. 

Brett Bowser: I recommend archiving this EAP article. 

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