Announcing Service catalog EAP

Announced on | Enrollment starts | EAP rollout begins
January 27, 2025 | January 27, 2025 | February 3, 2025

Note: This EAP is now closed.

We’re excited to announce the launch of the service catalog early access program. This new feature allows employees to easily make and manage service requests directly within the help center while ensuring quick resolution with minimal back and forth.

This announcement contains the following topics:

What’s changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

Future plan availability

EAP participant requirements

Limitations

What’s changing?

The service catalog is a ticket channel built for employee service that lets employees easily find and request employee services and assets from internal departments via the help center.

When an employee requests a service or asset from the service catalog, a ticket is automatically created and linked to that item. Internal support specialists can manage and resolve requests through their unified workspace, and employees can manage their requests through the request management interface in the help center.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

The process of creating and maintaining forms and conditions for hundreds of employee services and assets can be complex and inefficient. Employees often struggle to find available services and provide the necessary information as they make their requests. This can lead to unnecessary back-and-forth communication with internal support specialists, which wastes time and frustrates employees and specialists.

With the service catalog, customers can easily create a single, manageable destination for employees to engage with internal services. The service catalog ensures that employees can easily find and request services, while specialists receive all relevant information about the request upfront. This reduces the time spent on ticket resolution and improves overall service efficiency and employee satisfaction.

What do I need to do?

First, sign up here. We’ll activate the EAP on your account as soon as possible when we start rollout. Once you get confirmation that you've been enrolled in the EAP follow the steps outlined here to set up your service catalog.

Second, 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.

Future plan availability

The service catalog EAP is available for users on Zendesk Suite plans Growth or higher. However, when the service catalog moves out of EAP, it will be available only for customers on Employee Service (ES) Suite plans. This means that while you can try out this feature on your Zendesk Suite instance, to continue using the service catalog after the EAP ends (expected to be June 30, 2025, plus a 3-month grace period), you will have to switch your instance to a Zendesk Employee Service Plan or purchase a new Zendesk Employee Service instance. Reach out to our support or your CSE or Account executive for help.

EAP participant requirements

Zendesk Suite Growth or higher or Zendesk ES Suite Growth or higher plan (Service catalog will be made available for all ES plans ASAP)

Enabled Guide/Help center or be able to to enable Guide/Help center

Enabled Agent workspace (use Agent workspace and not legacy Support)

Enabled or be able to enable custom objects v2 (not legacy custom objects)

Not have depleted your custom objects limits as per the plan dependent limits

Not have depleted your lookup fields limit of max 10 lookup relationship ticket fields.

Not have created a custom object with the key service_catalog_item

Limitations

Because this is an EAP, there are some limitations to be aware of. However, this is not necessarily an exhaustive list.

You can only have one service catalog in one of your help centers.

For each service catalog item with input fields, a new ticket form is automatically created while service catalog items with no ticket fields share the same ticket form. This means that the number of service catalog items you can create is currently limited by the number of ticket forms your account still has available within the product limits. We are working to remove this limitation.

Form based ticket statuses are not yet supported - will default to default ticket statuses.

Conditional fields are not supported.

You will not be able to share a ticket to other accounts.

If you have multiple help centers, you must enable the service catalog on the brand/help center where you want it to appear.