Preview of the new Essentials Card in Zendesk
A quick overview of the new Essentials Card for Zendesk user profiles.
A little over two years ago Zendesk moved to Agent Workspace and introduced the concept of Context Panels. These panels live on the right side of the interface and allows agents to view customer information, search the Help Center, interact with Zendesk AI to view intent, summary and sentiment, or use custom apps installed in their instance to reference external systems.
The Customer Context Panel shows an overview of a tickets' requester details. It also included a timeline of recent interactions (which can be expanded with custom events) and recent web pages visited (if they contain the Zendesk Widget and the ticket was created via the Messaging channel). For more information on the custom events, take a look at this article.
Thomas Verschoren
Essentials Card
The customer overview has been a rather static element that shows a fixed list of items (email, organisation, tags, details, locale e.a.). This has now changed with the introduction of the new Essentials Card.
With this new Essentials Cards you can now pick and choose which elements you want to show and in which order, giving your agents a lot more context while making sure only the required data is shown.
Take a look at the examples below. The first one shows a traditional profile card as we know it already. The middle one shows an essentials card that has a custom user field (VIP) enabled and the order of the fields changed. And the final one shows a fully configured card with social fields, custom fields, multiple email addresses e.a.
Compared to the first card you can see how this gives you a lot more insight in who your user is.
Configuring the cards works similar to how we already configure ticket Forms. Go the Admin Center > Workspaces > Agent tools > Essentials card and select the User card. Here you can then drag and drop the shown fields to reorder the fields, press the little X to remove the field from the view, or use the button at the bottom to add (custom) fields to the card.
If a field links to another Zendesk object (organisation, lookup fields, custom objects v2,...) the values will be rendered as links opening the related object in a new tab. In case of social profiles, clicking the link will open a users' profile on its respective social platform (e.g. Facebook). Note that if a field has no value, it will not be shown.
As for improvements, there's a few things I'd like to see different.
Checkboxes display as a YES or NO value, but a nicely rendered checkbox might be easier to read at a glance. It's also too bad there is no URL type field for user fields. When entering a webpage (e.g company website) in a users' profile it's rendered as text instead of a clickable URL.
What's next?
I really like this small improvement to the customer context panel. It allows you to change the shown data to match your use case, and allows you to show stuff that used to be hidden (or part of the now deprecated User Data app).
When looking at the Admin Panel interface, having just one Essentials Card named User makes me think there will be future cards? Maybe organisation cards? Context driven cards similar to layouts or contextual workspaces? A custom objects card? There's plenty of options here.
Parallel with this new Essentials Card Zendesk is also working on a new Profile Page layout. I wonder if the layout changes we add to the Essentials Card will also be reflected to the Key Details panel in that new layout? It seems unnecessary or redundant to have to places with the same data to have two different setup locations, but time will tell?
