Welcome to my last newsletter of the year. This one will not contain any Zendesk news or updates, but will be a bit more of a meta, personal end-of-year update.

I'm writing this note from a couch with our Christmas tree in sight. End of year is about family, friends and tying up loose ends, but it's also about looking forward towards next year and how last year went.

The Internal Note project was started during the holiday break at the end of 2022 with three main motivations:

1. Keeping up to date with Zendesk releases is a big part of my 9 to 5 job, and this blog gives me a good way to test and validate the new features while also having a good logbook of my experiences with them.
2. Train different muscles was also a big part of the reason I wanted to blog. At work I scope Zendesk setups, offer consultancy for customers and develop integrations. But technical writing and maintaining a newsletter that forces me to write ~3k words a week is a whole new skill that I want to get better at.
3. I wanted to see if I could build a project that was self-sustaining and gets an audience.

My goal was to write an article a week and reach subscribers through organic growth. I'm not a fan of targeted ads via LinkedIn or Google, so I wanted to run this without that kind of advertising. Neither did I want to inject myself into active conversations on the Zendesk Community and link to this website in any relevant thread. The end result should be self-sustaining blog that exists because people like it and find it because it's useful.

The past year I published 57 newsletters while growing the audience for this blog from 1 to almost 500 subscribers, so for each of you who subscribed: a big thanks!

My process

A few of you wrote in to ask how I managed to keep up with Zendesk's seemingly continuous stream of releases this last year. So, I thought it would be fun to use this final newsletter to give some insights in how I work, and what I plan to do different in 2024.

The best way to stay up to speed with anything Zendesk releases is to subscribe to the Updates category of the Zendesk Support website. This category contains all official releases, and includes a weekly Releases Notes section. You can easily subscribe to them via the Follow button, or, just subscribe to this website to make your life easier 😇

However, that's just the tip of the iceberg since every release is accompanied by its own set of support documents. Often articles and features are added to Zendesk without an official announcement. 
For example, Zendesk placeholders for Lookup Fields now support {{ticket.ticket_field_<field ID number>.id}}to capture the ID instead of the label, a feature was silently added and I only noticed because I follow updates to support.zendesk.com.

At the start of 2023 I subscribed to almost all sections, which resulted in hundreds of emails a week with updated articles. This was not scalable or maintainable, so halfway through the year I decided to approach this problem differently.

To make sure I got to see every change in Zendesk, I built a custom RSS feed to generate a list of updated or published articles, which I follow inside of an RSS reader. 

It's powered by the Help Center API and refreshes on the hour. That way, every change gets logged somewhere, making it easy to stay up to date.

Another source of good information is the quarterly What's new presentation. They serve as are a reminder of everything announced in the past few months. Those are basically me screenshotting at 24fps and noting down the announcements to compare to what was already released And see what I missed.

I also subscribe to the Upcoming Beta's page to request every EAP as soon as it becomes available. But getting the EAPs' quickly has been a bit of a hit and miss 😅

What's next for 2024

If it ain't broke, don't fix it

One thing I'm changing is the above mentioned RSS feed. Although it works, an RSS reader is not the best way to manage a large queue of data. I often move articles from my feed reader to a read it later list, just so I can remember to write about the topic later.

Similarly, you don't want to count the amount of times I accidentally marked all as read and had to scroll through pages of updates in order to check if I saw everything.

Content Management

Last summer I read Building a second brain, a book about storing every snippet of info you need in one place to make it easily retrievable.

So with RSS feeds being too loose a format (read/unread is too limited), it was time to find another place to collect all Zendesk info and documentation.

These last few weeks I decided to start using Slite to manage my growing collection of Zendesk information. It's a knowledge management tool that works based on documents and articles, and offers powerful AI-powered search and summary tool, while also offering similar knowledge management features as Zendesk with verification, review and flagging features for articles.

Slite - AI-powered knowledge base

Discover Slite’s AI powered knowledge base for quick access to trusted company info. Simply ask Slite and get the answers you need. Start for free.

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Unified Inbox

I updated my RSS feed script to push all Zendesk updates to Slite as unverified articles. This allows me to go over a view with all new articles and mark them as verified once I processed them. I can defer verification to a later date, or quickly copy over elements of documents into draft articles for the website.

Conveniently, updated articles in Zendesk will turn verified documents into unverified again, so detecting changes in documentation is quite easy now!

Retrieving data

Since I want to use Slite as a reference for all my Zendesk related data I also imported all Internal Notes and the entire developer.zendesk.com website into Slite too.

So questions like "What's Agent Home", "How to add lookup fields via API?" or "What did Zendesk release in October 2023" are now very easy to answer.

I really hope that this new tool will make writing the roundups a lot more efficient this next year.

But I promise: this blog will contain no AI written content. 🤞

Newsletter Structure

When I look at the newsletter, the content can be split into roundups, insights, previews and tutorials. Since a month has four weeks, and these are four kinds of content, you can expect one of each every month. With at least one of these exclusive to Internal Note Plus subscribers.

Thanks to, or due to, Zendesk efforts on Zendesk AI and the Zendesk Bot, the second half of 2023 was a little bit Chatbot heavy. For 2024 I want to have a better balance across all aspects of Zendesk.

• Agent Efficiency: Automations, Agent Workspace, Custom Objects,...
• Bots and Messaging: Zendesk Bot, Autoreply, Sunshine Conversations,...
• Knowledge Base: Self Service, Guide themes, Federated Search,...
• Routing and Intelligence: Omnichannel Routing, Zendesk AI, Custom statuses, SLA,...

Zendesk Relate

In April Zendesk will hold their annual Relate event, a big conference where they will hold product announcements, workshops and round tables with customers and experts alike.

My employer, Premium Plus, allowed a colleague of mine and me to join the conference in person this year, so that's already going to be a highlight of the year for me! I'll certainly write a same day round-up off all the announcements of the event, but will also try to give some impressions of the event itself.

And if I have to give myself one goal for the event it's to:

Write an article with answers, instead of an article with a lot of questions about the announcements.

Wrap up

So, there we have it, a roundup of what I did in 2023, and a view of what's planned for 2024.

If you've made it this far in the article, can I ask you one favour?

Enjoy the holidays and see you in 2024! 🎄