What's new in Zendesk: February 2024

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Check out what's new in the last month:

Zendesk Suite

Support

Objects and rules

Bots and automation

Guide

Explore

Security

Live chat

Workforce management

New and notable content

Also don't miss:

Zendesk early access programs

What's New quarterly webinar

Zendesk Suite

If you reach your plan limit for data storage, some customers can purchase more storage directly from the Subscription page in Admin Center. You must have an eligible sales assisted account to purchase via the shopping cart. See Buying more storage.

Sample Consumer (B2C) data is included by default in Zendesk Suite trials. Previously, you had to choose a business type first (B2B, B2C, or B2E) to get the associated sample data. Sample data provides you with a better idea of how your Zendesk account works with tickets, views, and macros. See Adding sample data.

Extending a Zendesk trial. Zendesk trials expire after 14 days. If you need more time to evaluate Zendesk, you can extend your trial for an additional 14 days. Self-service extensions are available only once per trial. See Extending a Zendesk trial.

An accelerated shopping cart experience is available for customers who trial a Zendesk Suite or Support plan, then purchase it. Once you decide to Buy your trial, you'll see a payment page that includes a summary of the plan you're buying. See Buying Zendesk Suite.

Support

Agents can now access their recent searches and recently viewed content records from a new search menu in Support. The menu displays their three most recent searches and their three most recently viewed content records, which they can click to navigate to. See Accessing your recent searches.

Objects and rules

Limited support for routing live chat tickets with omnichannel routing is now available to accounts that have activated messaging and created at least one web or mobile messaging channel. When using in this mixed conversational support mode, omnichannel routing will route tickets from live chat, web and mobile messaging channels, and social messaging channels. See Using omnichannel routing while migrating from Chat to Messaging.

Admins can restrict agent access to custom objects and records in the Custom object records page using the new object list and search permission. Agents don't always need access to a complete list of a custom object's records. Instead, they might only need access to custom data within lookup relationship fields in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. This setting enables admins to reduce agent distraction and prevent unnecessary exposure of data on the Custom object records page. See Configuring agent access to custom object records.

Bots and automation

New bot builder step type: Link to another answer lets you link from the last step in an answer branch to another answer in the same bot. Using this step, you can reuse existing answers, let end users restart a conversation from the beginning, and offer related answers at the end of an answer branch. See Understanding answer step types.

Restricted content support is available for Zendesk bots. Conversation bots will respect the article access permissions set in Guide. This update impacts two features available on web and mobile messaging channels: recommend help center articles and generative replies(currently in EAP). Accounts must be configured to use Zendesk authentication. See Designing a conversation bot using answers and Using AI to generate replies in a conversation bot (Generative AI EAP).

Guide

Support for HTML tags has been expanded in the content blocks editor. Previously, some HTML elements were supported in the article editor but not in the content block editor, which caused the unsupported elements to be stripped from the content block when the article was published. With this release, we expanded the support of HTML in content blocks so that all elements supported in the article source code editor are also supported in the content block source code editor.

With more HTML elements supported, you can use the source code editor to incorporate more HTML elements in your articles and content blocks. In addition, we are now allowing for adding classes on all of the HTML elements in content blocks, not only on <div> elements. To view the complete list of supported elements, see Editing the source code of help center articles.

Explore

Agent state historical reporting is now available in Explore. A new prebuilt dashboard (Zendesk Omnichannel: Agent state) and two new datasets (Agent state and Agent state daily) enable supervisors, team leads, and admins to gain a better understanding of how agents are spending their time. See Analyzing agent state and Metrics and attributes for agent state.

Security

End users can turn on two-factor authentication for help center. Since this option is only for end users to turn on for themselves to enhance the security of their account, no action is needed from the Zendesk admin. See Accessing help center with two-factor authentication.

Zendesk incident notifications are being sent from a new email address. In order to comply with new Google requirements, increase the security of our communications, and avoid being labeled as spam in your inbox, incident notification emails are now being sent from status@status.zendesk.com. See Announcing a change to the sender address for incident notifications.

Live chat

Reply-time SLAs for live chat let you set up reply-time SLAs for based on agent conversation responses, and include that data in Explore reports. Agent replies in live chats will be counted towards the First Reply and Next Reply SLAs. See Activating reply-time SLAs for live chat.

Workforce management

You can now add start times to automatic shifts in Tymeshift, our workforce management solution. For example, configure automatic shifts to start only at 9am, 10am, or 11am. The scheduling algorithm will then automatically select the best starting time option for each agent based on your forecast. See Setting up locations and shifts in Tymeshift.

Managers can now select a date range when publishing schedules, including dates up to 30 days in the past and 90 days in the future in Tymeshift. See Generating and publishing your workforce management schedule.

New and notable content

Getting started with Tymeshift workforce management (WFM). Expanding Zendesk’s feature set, Tymeshift improves the predictability and efficiency of customer service organizations through its wide range of planning, scheduling and monitoring tools. These guides provide an overview of Tymeshift for all roles involved in WFM, including admins, managers, forecasters, and agents. See Getting started with Tymeshift workforce management.