What's new in Zendesk: December 2023

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Check out what's new in the last month:

Support

Guide

Explore

Messaging and live chat

Bots

Talk

Account

Security

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Support

Enhanced permissions to restrict agent access to tickets they request provide a more granular way for admins on Enterprise plans to configure the visibility of private ticket comments to the agent requester, regardless of group assignment. On non-Enterprise plans, the agent experience remains the same: agents can only access tickets assigned to a private group to which they don't belong if they're the ticket requester or added as a CC or follower. See Changing the default privacy of ticket comments.

Macro suggestions now let you view more than three related tickets. Click Show more to open a list of example tickets in a new tab. See Creating macros from macro suggestions for admins.

With custom layouts, admins can use an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface, called layout builder, to create and apply custom layouts to tickets. No developer resources are required. Admins can specify which components are included in a ticket and control the location of where the components appear. You must have an Enterprise account with Agent Workspace activated to create custom layouts. See About custom layouts with layout builder.

Configure side conversations in the context panel if you have an account with side conversations and the Agent Workspace. When activated, a side conversations icon () is added to the context panel and agents can manage side conversations from there. See Activating side conversations in the context panel.

Specify additional conditions for group service level agreements (SLAs). Previously, group SLAs allowed you to specify the group as the only condition. Now, the conditions available for group SLAs include all existing conditions for SLA policies. See Defining group SLA policies.

The Support mobile app now supports malware scanning of files in tickets. On both iOS and Android, agents using the mobile app are alerted to files and attachments within tickets that contain malware. See Managing malicious attachments.

Pre-trained intent models for HR and IT employee experience have been released for use with intelligent triage and advanced bots. These new models offer automated and consistent classification of incoming tickets and conversations, which can be leveraged in business rules, workflows, routing, and more. Additionally, existing intent models have been updated to enhance the accuracy of intent predictions and add new intents relevant to the supported industries. See About intelligent triage and About advanced bots.

Guide

Improved integration with third party editors for Guide media library. Now, when you copy images from Google Docs or Word 365 and paste them into the article editor, those images are automatically imported into the Guide media library and are available for use in your article and across your help center. You no longer have to save the images in a separate file and manually upload them to the media library in order to use them in your article. See Working with images in the media library.

Explore

New messaging metrics and reports are available in the Zendesk Messaging prebuilt dashboard and Messaging tickets dataset to provide insights into first reply time. To learn more about the changes to the dashboard, see Analyzing your messaging tickets. To dig deeper into the new metrics, see Metrics and attributes for Zendesk messaging.

The prebuilt Explore live dashboard supports unified agent statuses. If you use omnichannel routing, the Explore live dashboard now includes more granular information about agents' statuses and capacity. See Seeing live agent status and activities with Explore and Seeing live agent status with Explore: Use cases.

Enterprise customers now have access to live data metrics for unified and custom agent statuses. This information helps you understand your current available staffing, allowing you to make decisions across channels about how much work can be done based on your available agents. See Live data widgets for Explore dashboards and Explore recipe: Creating a dashboard to report on live agent status.

In live dashboards, messaging metrics now include data from social messaging channels, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Twilio SMS. This new filtering capability lets you see your true incoming and currently assigned workload on messaging. See Overview of the Explore live dashboard.

Default Explore report configurations are now fine-tuned for common use cases and aligned with Zendesk accessibility standards. These changes help ensure that new reports created in Explore have the best possible configuration from the get-go. See Customizing your chart type and options.

Messaging and live chat

Auto-accept functionality automatically assigns messaging and live chat conversations to specified agents in the Agent Workspace. When admins turn on auto-accept the Conversations and Accept buttons no longer appear in the Agent Workspace. Incoming conversations are automatically routed to available agents. See Automatically accepting messaging and live chat conversations.

Automatic live-conversation translation lets agents communicate with end users even if they're using different languages. When activated by an admin, agents can manage automatic translation for each live conversation they’re currently serving in the Agent Workspace. See Translating live conversations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

Bots

Use your own bot avatar images instead of the default avatar for new or existing bots. You can choose to use your brand logo, a custom image that illustrates a bot conversing with customers, or any other image that suits your needs. See Creating a conversation bot for your web and mobile channels.

Conversation bots now offer dynamic conversations by fetching data from external systems and dynamically presenting this data through carousels and messages. The bot can also capture the customer’s selection from the carousel and store it in a variable for subsequent use, such as triggering another API call to perform a task. See Using the Make API call step in a conversation bot.

Talk

Use IVR to add tags to call tickets when using omnichannel routing. You can then use those tags to influence call routing and in Explore reports. See Routing incoming calls with IVR.

Expansion of data locality coverage for Zendesk Talk in Europe and Australia. Talk data (including phone number data, call logs, call recordings, and voicemail recordings) can now be hosted in the United States, the European Economic Area (EEA), and Australia. See Announcing: Zendesk Talk expansion of data locality coverage for Europe and Australia.

Account

Zendesk is adding additional data storage for Zendesk accounts and rolling out a data storage dashboard. All Zendesk Suite and Support plans will be granted an additional 10 Gigs of data storage and 10 Gigs of file storage. We're also rolling out a storage usage dashboard to help you manage how storage is used in your account. The storage usage dashboard is not available for customers with self-service accounts. See Managing data storage.

Test drive AI-powered tools with a plan upgrade in select Zendesk accounts. If your account is eligible, you'll see an AI upgrade banner on your subscription page. See Trying out a plan upgrade.

Security

A new Recommended password security level is available to help improve platform security. This security level is configured with strict password requirements, checks against known breached passwords, and is based on security best practices. See Setting the password security level.