Getting started with Zendesk Suite - Introduction

This guide introduces the core concepts and capabilities of the Zendesk Suite
to help you get started.


The capabilities of the Suite

The Zendesk Suite includes the following:







Ticketing system. Ticketing is the hub of your support
experience. It provides ticket and user management, workflow, and other
administrative aspects of the core of your customer service solution.
The agent workspace is where all tickets and all interactions with
customers from all communication channels are managed.



Help center. A help center contains your knowledge base
articles and the customer request portal. Zendesk also provides an
authoring environment to create and manage your knowledge base articles.
There are also features to enable team member collaboration in
developing your knowledge base content.



Community forum. A community forum can be added to your help
center. It enables your customers to post topics (such as questions) and
interact with other community members.



Messaging. Messaging enables customers to request support,
converse with the customizable messaging bot, and connect with an agent
if they need further assistance. Messaging conversations become tickets
that agents can update after the conversation ends. You can add
messaging to your website, help center, mobile apps, and social
channels.



Voice. Agents interact with customers through the Zendesk
voice channel in Agent Workspace. Zendesk also provides tools for
monitoring all ongoing call activity, status for the agents currently
working this channel, and reports to show you, for example, your
customers’ average wait time and average call length. The voice channel
can also enable you to interact with your customers via SMS.



Reporting and analytics. Zendesk provides all the reporting
and analytics tools you need to monitor and evaluate your tickets and
agent status and performance with Explore. It contains reporting
dashboards for the important activity in the Suite. You can also use
query tools to build custom reports and dashboards.



Sunshine. This is Zendesk’s open and flexible CRM platform.
You can use it to develop custom apps that connect to external customer
data and to extend your messaging capabilities by adding additional
messaging channels and AI services using Sunshine Conversations.





In addition to these capabilities, Zendesk Suite contains additional features and
functionality that automates and streamlines your customer service, offers your
customers and agents rich conversational experiences, and helps to address the needs
of increased organizational and business complexity and volume.



The workspace where agents handle support requests

For agents, the hub of the ticketing system is the Agent Workspace. This is the
ticket interface where your agents manage all support requests for all of the
communication channels you set up (email, messaging, voice, and so on).
The Agent Workspace is the interface you see whenever you open a ticket (from the
list of tickets on the Views page, for example).

All the support conversations your agents have with customers are captured in a
single interface. In the example above, you can see that this ticket began as a live
chat, and then the agent followed up via an email message to the customer to provide
additional information. That’s all captured in the conversation flow (the middle
section of the ticket interface). The Agent Workspace allows all omnichannel
communication to be captured in a single conversation thread.
On the left side of the ticket interface, you see the ticket data, such as who’s
assigned to the ticket, its priority, type, any tags that have been added, and so
on.
On the right side, you see more details about the person who requested support, their
contact information, their interaction history (tickets), and the path they took within your help center before reaching out to request help.
The right side of the ticket interface also provides a context panel with access to the apps that you have the
option of adding via the Zendesk Apps Marketplace.
At the top of the Agent Workspace, agents can access and monitor activity for the
channels they’ve been assigned to (chat, voice, and messaging). They can also
set their availability status (online, away, or invisible) to make themselves
available (or not) to participate in incoming support requests via those channels.
To learn more about the admin tasks that are specific to the Agent Workspace, see
Optimizing the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
Continue to Part 1: Accessing Zendesk Suite admin
settings.