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Mick O'Donnell
Joined Apr 14, 2021
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Last activity Feb 21, 2025
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Latest activity by Mick O'Donnell
Mick O'Donnell commented,
Hi Reshma,
Thank you for your feedback, and to the follow up comments. I'm happy to say that we're making these changes a priority on our 2025 roadmap, with emphasis on the export conversation log feature. Fully agree that this will make the conversations easier to analyze. As we can closer to this delivery, I'm happy to share further information, but it may not be until the second half of 2025, but we'll see if we can get this out sooner.
View comment · Posted Feb 06, 2025 · Mick O'Donnell
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Mick O'Donnell created an article,
Announced on | New plan levels roll out on | Enhanced capabilities roll out on |
February 3, 2025 | February 3–7, 2025 |
For new* AI agent customers: February 3–7, 2025 For existing* AI agent customers: March 25, 2025 *See below for definition of new and existing AI agent customers. |
As part of our commitment to AI innovation, Zendesk is excited to introduce two new, flexible AI agent plans and enhanced capabilities for AI agents. Backed by cutting-edge generative AI technology, these plans are designed to guide every customer on their path to automation maturity.
Both new and existing AI agent customers will benefit from enhanced generative AI capabilities. Existing AI agent customers will notice a few adjustments in their AI agent experience, as outlined later in this announcement.
This announcement contains the following topics:
What’s changing?
We’re introducing the following changes:
- New plan levels for AI agents
- Enhanced capabilities for AI agents
- Features becoming legacy
- Features being removed
New plan levels for AI agents
AI agents now come in two flexible plans, Essential and Advanced, to meet your unique business requirements. Starting February 3, 2025, any customer that starts using AI agents will be automatically placed on AI agents - Essential, which is included in your Zendesk plan. Any customer can upgrade to AI Agents - Advanced, which requires additional costs.
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AI agents - Essential: Included in all Zendesk Suite and Support plans. Allows you to start automating in minutes with generative replies powered by the latest AI technology.
- You're automatically on this plan unless you had any drafted or published AI agents as of February 2, 2025, or unless you previously purchased a plan from Ultimate.
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AI agents - Advanced: Available as an add-on for any Suite and Support plans. Includes all features of the Essential level in addition to advanced functionality such as conversation flows, APIs, and advanced analytics. Encompasses the functionality previously available through Ultimate.
- You’re automatically on this plan if you previously purchased a plan from Ultimate.
These plan levels go into effect starting February 3, 2025. For more information about the levels, including the specific features included in each, see About AI agents.
Enhanced capabilities for AI agents
In addition to the new plan levels, Zendesk is enhancing our AI agent capabilities by replacing the underlying technology of generative replies with the latest generative AI technology from Ultimate, an AI company acquired by Zendesk in 2024. This change introduces:
- Revamped AI agent settings. A more intuitive interface for managing your AI agents. See Viewing and editing general AI agent settings.
- Enhanced generative replies. Improved response accuracy and automation through the upgraded generative AI technology, enabling more contextual conversations, the ability to handle small talk, and scan entire articles from your knowledge base for more precise responses.
- Upgraded AI agent personas. Enhanced settings allow your AI agents to deeply understand your business and deliver responses that drive a cohesive, on-brand customer experience. See Customizing an AI agent’s persona to add personality to AI-generated responses.
- Improved onboarding experience. A streamlined process for setting up your AI agents, reducing setup time and making them easier to deploy.
These changes are available to new AI agent customers starting on February 3, 2025 (with the rollout continuing through February 7, 2025), and will be available to existing AI agent customers on March 25, 2025. For details, see What do I need to do? below.
Features becoming legacy
The following features, which don’t support the new, more generative AI agent experience, are no longer available to new AI agent customers and are not included in the Essential plan:
Customers who had any drafted or published AI agents as of February 2, 2025 still retain access to these legacy features. These features will no longer receive functional improvements, but will be fully supported with important bug fixes and technical upgrades.
Additionally, the AI agents - Advanced plan includes similar functionality. For details, see Getting started with AI agents - Advanced.
Features being removed
The following features, which are no longer relevant due to enhanced AI agent capabilities, will be removed on March 25, 2025 for all customers:
- Disambiguation. Process by which an AI agent presents and prioritizes relevant intents when a question matches multiple intents. See If a question matches more than one intent.
- Clarification. Automatic response that can request more information from an end user when the AI agent does not understand the user's comment. See If the AI agent needs clarification.
- Generate variations. Ability to customize or create different versions of a greeting message based on an AI agent persona. See Setting the standard responses for an AI agent for messaging (Legacy).
Why is Zendesk making this change?
Zendesk is making these changes to:
- Streamline our AI agent offerings to provide a clear automation maturity path to empower our customers to reach 80%+ automation rates.
- Enhance AI agent performance with the latest generative AI technology recently integrated from Ultimate, leading to higher accuracy and automation rates.
- Provide a smoother conversational experience that is more contextual and capable of handling small talk, as well as the ability to scan entire articles in your knowledge base instead of just the first 75 words.
What do I need to do?
The impact to you and what you need to do depends on whether you’re a new AI agent customer or an existing AI agent customer. You’re considered a:
- New AI agent customers if you didn't have any drafted or published AI agents as of February 2, 2025 (regardless of when your Zendesk account was created).
- Existing AI agent customers if you had any drafted or published AI agents as of February 2, 2025.
For new AI agent customers
Starting on February 3, 2025 and rolling out through February 7, 2025, you’re automatically on the AI agents - Essential plan. To get started, you can:
- Create your first AI agent. See Getting started with AI agents - Essential.
- Explore upgrading to AI agents - Advanced. See About the AI agents - Advanced add-on.
For existing AI agent customers
On February 3, 2025, you continue to have the same access to AI agent features as you previously did. No action is required from you at this time.
However, on March 25, 2025, you will have access to the enhanced capabilities listed above. You can explore the resources linked in that section to be ready to fine-tune your AI agent experience and maximize your automation potential.
Additionally, on March 25, 2025, the features listed above will be removed. No action is required from you, as the enhanced generative capabilities replace the need for these features.
Feedback or questions?
If you have feedback or questions related to this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support.
Edited Jan 31, 2025 · Mick O'Donnell
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Mick O'Donnell commented,
Many thanks for your suggestion on this point Tanya! We'll consider this product improvement in a future release.
View comment · Posted Nov 01, 2024 · Mick O'Donnell
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Mick O'Donnell commented,
Hi Langston,
Full screen videos from YouTube isn't a feature that we support today on the Support SDK, sorry. You may be able to find a way to do this with customer code as you mentioned.
I haven't tested this, but allowfullscreen is a legacy attribute according to Mozilla, so you could try the allow allow="fullscreen" as stated in their docs.
Good luck!
View comment · Posted Mar 26, 2024 · Mick O'Donnell
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Mick O'Donnell created a post,
What does it mean to use Zendesk Web Widget or Web Messenger in Mobile Apps
Our Zendesk Web Widget and Sunshine Conversation Web Messenger are designed to be implemented on your websites or embedded inside your help center. However, we understand that customers have the need for more complex integrations such as using a web-based widget or SDK within a mobile app. The aim of this article is to provide you with guidance, best practices, and to outline our recommended approach to using Zendesk widgets and SDK across your range of platforms.
Breakdown of different in integration types
Recommended integration paths
The Zendesk widgets and SDKs are built with the highest level of reliability and optimal end user experience in mind. We follow specific testing protocols to ensure that this is always the case, and your customers have not disconnected from your business - especially important for best in class customer service. As such, the following are our recommended integration paths to use our widgets and SDK across your web, mobile and gaming platforms:
Your business website and/or help center: We recommend using the Zendesk Web Widget. The Zendesk Web Widget is optimized for embedding on your website or inside your Help Center. This offers the best in class experience for your end users. For some customers, you may require features that are supported on the Sunshine Conversations Web Messenger (currently in maintenance mode), and not yet supported on the Zendesk Web Widget. More info here.
Your business' Mobile Apps for Android and iOS: We recommend using the Zendesk Android and iOS SDKs. The Zendesk Android and iOS SDKs are developed using the latest native technologies made available by Android and iOS. For some customers, you may require features that are supported on the Sunshine Conversations SDK for Android and iOS (currently in maintenance mode), and not yet supported on the Zendesk SDK for Android and iOS. More info here.
A game that you have developed in Unity: We recommend using the Zendesk SDK for Unity. This SDK has been purposefully built to run well within a Unity game environment.
Social Channels (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, etc.): It is not possible to use Zendesk widgets or SDKs on social channels.
By following these recommended integration paths, you'll be ensured of:
- A high level of stability across your web, mobile and gaming platforms.
- A high level of security compliance across your web, mobile and gaming platforms.
- A high level of accessibility compliance across your web, mobile and gaming platforms.
- Optimal end user experience of Zendesk messaging for your customers.
Running web-based clients on mobile apps
Some businesses have mobile apps built using web based technologies, most commonly the use for WebViews within their native mobile apps. While it's possible to use the Zendesk Web Widget or the Sunshine Conversation Web Messenger in this manner, it's important to be aware of certain limitations and challenges that this integration path presents:
Lack of notification support: Push notifications will not operate when using a web-based client on native mobile apps. Push notifications are an integral part of a conversational experience for mobile users. Notifications alert users to conversation updates, such as incoming messages. Lack of awareness of conversation events can potentially increase the amount of time that your customer service personnel are preoccupied with individual queries, lower overall customer service efficiency.
Application lifecycle management: The performance of web-based clients running on mobile apps, from an application lifecycle management point of view, can be inconsistent due to the challenges presented with the back-grounding and fore-grounding of mobile applications. The Zendesk Web Widget and the Sunshine Conversation Web Messenger both use a number of different networking technologies in order to maintain active conversations seamlessly, including Web Socket (WS) connections. Web Socket connections are susceptible to disconnections when mobile apps are backgrounded, and as such, end users may experience strange behavior following app back-grounding.
Challenges to Zendesk support: This type of integration is not tested by Zendesk. As such, Zendesk cannot ensure the stability or optimal performance of running web-based clients on mobile apps. In addition to this, investigating customer integration issues requires specific reproduction steps and clear information provided about the environment of the Zendesk widget or SDKs. This makes it more complex to investigate certain issues when there is a mix of native mobile and web technologies in play.
A note on Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
Progressive Web Apps are a specific type of mobile web application that can be bookmarked on the home screen and notification bubbles presented - closely aligning it with the behavior of the native mobile app. For integration with PWAs, similar advice and caution should be taken as when integrating Zendesk web-based clients on mobile devices. It should be noted that from iOS 17.4, Apple are removing home screen apps for users in the EU because bringing them into compliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Bring Your Own Channel
While these are the supported integration types available Zendesk, we offer another flexible option to allow you to build your own messaging platform. To learn more, please see this article on bringing your own channel.
In Summary
Whenever possible, Zendesk always recommends that customers use the client that is native to the platform on which you are integrating. I.e. Zendesk Web Widget on websites, Zendesk SDKs for Android and iOS or Unity for Mobile apps, etc. If this is not possible, the web-based clients will operate on mobile platforms, however it is important to be aware of the limitations and challenges (listed above) of this type of integration.
Edited Mar 01, 2024 · Mick O'Donnell
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Mick O'Donnell commented,
Hi Tatiana & Ethan,
Thats fair feedback. We are activately working to close this gap in the product so that users who are authenticated in Help Center are automatically authenticated in the Zendesk Web Widget as well. This should provide the help seamless authentication experience that you're looking for, and enable better personalization for the end user as you stated.
It's not possible to share an expected delivery date for this improvement at the moment, but we are targeting a 2024 delivery. Please continue to follow this thread for updates.
View comment · Edited Jan 25, 2024 · Mick O'Donnell
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Mick O'Donnell commented,
Hi all,
I can confirm that we're currently to delivery for this update of displayed verified email address in Agent Workspace once the end user is authenticated by the end of this month (January).
View comment · Posted Jan 10, 2024 · Mick O'Donnell
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Mick O'Donnell commented,
Hello everyone and thank you for your follow up on this post. Waiting on feature releases that get pushed out is understandably a frustrating experience.
This feature is still on our roadmap but due to internal changes we've had to prioritize other releases in 2023 which has moved this launch date of this feature to late 2024.
We are aware that there are opportunities for improvement in our communication around product releases and managing expectations. I understand how our recent updates about moving the timeline beyond the previously communicated might have caused frustration because we didn't reference our guidelines in this post. Roadmap timelines are always estimates and can change for various reasons. In this case, we had a prioritization change which caused us to adjust our workflows. Going forward we will be sure to be more clear about timeline estimations and provide updates when changes to the timeline come up so as to avoid confusion in the future.
I want to assure you that this is still on our roadmap and we will provide an update in this thread in the coming year when we have more information. For the time being, since our internal teams have the information we need to prioritize this feature, we are going to close this thread for comment. Please "follow" this post to be alerted of any future updates as we provide them. Others will still be able to up/down vote this post in case there is more interest in the meantime. Thank you again for sharing your feedback and for being valued customers of Zendesk.
View comment · Posted Jan 08, 2024 · Mick O'Donnell
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Mick O'Donnell commented,
Hi Wathanyoo Khaisongkram,
Thanks for that information, that's helpful. I checked internally, and we're currently targeting January for this update of displayed verified email address in Agent Workspace once the end user is authenticated.
View comment · Posted Dec 05, 2023 · Mick O'Donnell
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Mick O'Donnell commented,
Hi Ashley,
Yes, you can use the Metadata APIs supported in the Zendesk Web Widget and Mobile SDKs to collect this type of referrer data, and sent it to Zendesk. As of today, if you wish to use this data for conversation conditionality in the bot flow, you would have to retrieve that data's value from the Conversation object using an API step in the conversation flow to query the the Sunshine Conversation REST API. We'll be making this part of the process simpler in the future, but this is required today.
View comment · Posted Dec 04, 2023 · Mick O'Donnell
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