Zendesk Roundup for February 2023
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These are software hands - Adrian McDermott
The biggest news of this month has to be the announcement of Layout Builder. This new feature, once released will allow you to rebuild the Zendesk interface with modular elements and organise the Agent Workspace to fit your needs.
After adding flexible sidebar apps, resizing the ticket field panel and moving a lot of elements around this last year, Layout Builder will, for the first time, allow you to really move big blocks around. Apps can alway be visibler, you can hide/show ticket fields, or even keep Customer Context and Side Conversations side by side for more context.
Really curious where this is going! Sign-up for the EAP is available here.
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🎉 New Releases
February was a quiet month for releases. They announced Google Analytics 4 support, unified the design of the ticket sidebar and allow for redaction in Side Conversations.
Upgraded Slack Integration
It slipped under my radar, and our Slack integration at the office broke last week, so take note: Zendesk migrated their Slack setup flow to Admin Panel last fall.
New Flow Builder steps
Flow Builder keeps getting better one step (sorry..) at a time. After the API flow, and Ask for Details step, we now get some more logic by adding a conditions. I'm working on a full tutorial for March, but take a look at the article below for more info.
Multiple SSO Options
💡Insights
Slack Collaboration in Zendesk
Insightful blogpost that shows a nice set of use cases for Slack + Zendesk
Zendesk Customer Service Professional Certificate via LinkedIn
Might be interesting for those following LinkedIn closely. After listening to this episode of Decoder, I'm certainly more interested in the platform than before.
Support Tech Landscape
Backblaze
Backblaze is an awesome backup tool for your Mac or PC. On their blog they shared a fun little detail: the entire support branch runs of Zendesk, offering both chat and email support via Zendesk. (I wonder if they’ll ever implement the Zendesk SDK in their mobile app?)
The Support team uses Zendesk, a customer service management application, to handle their workload. When a customer submits a ticket, it gets distributed to the next available Support Technician. Same with chat—as users reach out, they get routed to whoever is available for a response. What this means is that new challenges flow into each of the Tech’s queues all day long. They address the issues as they arrive and work to close out each one in turn.
Ramya Ramamoorthy
⚠ Major Changes
Social Messaging add-on
If you're still using the old Social Messaging add-on, you should move to Messaging asap. (Though luck for non-Suite users, they lose access to socials all together it seems..)
Flow Builder Authentication
If you use Authentication in Flow Builder to make API calls, take note, the authentication credentials moved to their own spot in the Admin Panel. Rumour has it that Webhooks will also use this in the future, so you might want to explore these feature already to prepare.
🎥 Videos
And finally...
Nice demo from Ultimate on how they can leverage ML to automate ticket categorisation and tagging. Zendesk launched a similar flow for Retail in a private beta last year, but Ultimate offers similar capabilities for any type of company or industry.
Ultimate
