Announcing Zendesk QA Advanced Scorecards updates

Announced on

Rollout on

February 17, 2025 | March 17, 2025

Zendesk Quality Assurance (QA) is enhancing the scorecard management experience.

This announcement includes the following topics:

What is changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What is changing?

We’re making scorecard management easier and more efficient across workspaces.

Scorecard management at the account level: Scorecard creation and management now occurs at the account level rather than within a workspace.
Here, admins and account managers can seamlessly copy and transfer scorecards and categories, mark scorecards as active or inactive, and use them across multiple workspaces without duplication. You can also rename or delete scorecards without disrupting existing workflows.

Category management at the account level: For better consistency, category creation and management is also moving from workspaces to the account level.
Admins and account managers can create and reuse categories across workspaces and manage exemptions lists and exact text-matches for categories and custom AutoQA categories from a single location.

Improved Category features: The following improvements have been made to categories:

- All categories will be conditional by default now, with Show always as the standard setting.

- Category grouping and weighting now has more intuitive organization and streamlined logic.

- Weighting categories now uses a 100-point integer-based scale rather than a decimal point-based scale. With the migration, the decimal weights (for example, 0.7, 1.4) will be rounded to whole numbers. Your previous weights will be adjusted proportionally to maintain their impact on the final score. For example, a category weight of 1.35 (out of 2) in the old system will be proportionally scaled to 68 (rounded from 67.5) on the new 0-100 scale. This update makes scoring more user-friendly while preserving the weight relationships from the old system.

- Category criticality can be configured at the category or group level, which provides more flexibility because it allows for the failure of specific categories within a ticket (without affecting overall ticket quality) rather than requiring the whole ticket to be failed. This means when an entire ticket fails, it’s due to major mistakes rather than more isolated issues.

- Root causes can now be applied to all scores, including positive ones.

Categories dashboard enhancements: The new and improved Categories dashboard provides consistency and deeper insights while maintaining the core functionality. Specifically, the following improvements have been made:

Instead of one version of the Categories dashboard, there are now two versions: one for agents, which displays only their own data, and one for Managers (admins, account managers, leads, and reviewers), which displays data for the broader account.

Deeper insights are made possible by new data visualizations for Category score and Root causes, improved root cause analysis, more accurate average category score calculations, and drill-down functionality for category score values.

You can learn more by watching this overview video:

Why is Zendesk making this change?

Zendesk identified several key challenges related to using and managing scorecards. These updates make scorecard management more scalable, intuitive, and impactful, giving you more time to focus on insights and driving quality. Specifically, the goals of this release include:

Reducing the duplication of work by consolidating redundant scorecards and categories.

Making the process of setting up, editing, and testing scorecards more intuitive and streamlined. For example, now you can easily modify or remove scorecards without affecting workflows.

Enhancing the transparency of how categories affect scores by clarifying the scoring logic and category relationships.

What do I need to do?

Because management of scorecards is moving to an account-level, only admins and account managers will have access and permission to do this. Workspace managers, who previously had access to manage scorecards, are losing that access. If you want any of the current workspace managers to continue managing scorecards, you must change their role to an admin or account manager. To learn more see Understanding roles and permissions in Zendesk QA.

If you are an Admin or Account Manager, you can start taking advantage of the new Advanced Scorecard improvements.

We recommend merging duplicate scorecards across workspaces into a single scorecard. This way, it's easier to keep everything organized across the account.

To do this, follow the instructions to access your scorecard settings and make sure to:

Open the scorecards you wish to keep and select all workspaces where duplicate scorecards are currently used.

Ensure that the categories are configured as desired across all selected workspaces.

Mark redundant duplicate scorecards as inactive or delete them entirely. If you want to retain historical reporting data, mark the remaining duplicates as inactive. Alternatively, you can delete them permanently if they are no longer needed.

Review your category settings and conditions to verify how the new simplified weighting logic aligns with your needs.

Update your critical category logic. Since critical categories now impact scores at the group level, if a critical category fails, the entire category group will fail accordingly.