Zendesk Roundup for January 2023
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In January I had the chance to go to Zendesk's Sales kickoff and see/learn what their focus for 2023 will be, including a sneak peak of their roadmap for 2023. In short: it looks good! So good.
From a product standpoint January was mostly wrapping up releases from end of last year. Some UI items got a redesign, Flow Builder got some small improvements and we saw the release of a major new update for Statuses.
We can also see the first steps of Zendesk tidying up it's offering. They're shutting down some old add-ons, and pointing customers' to partner software as a replacement. I like this. Focus on the core CX offering, and leave distractions like NPS to others who do it better. A healthy ecosystem is better for everyone.
Some customers also got alerts that they will see a mandatory move to Agent Workspace in February. Can I say: FINALLY? I really hope we'll see full feature parity for Messaging in 2023, so they can finally kill Zopim Chat, the Classic widget and the old agent interface. Having two versions of Zendesk running parallel is confusing and annoying to implement as a consultant.
Now on to the stuff I found interesting this month!
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🎉 New Releases
The full list of releases is found here:
Custom Ticket Statuses is now GA.
This is the biggest update this month for me. Finally being able to break away from the classic set of statuses opens a world of possibilities for Zendesk customers, and was a major reason why some chose Freshservice over Zendesk.cFor more information, see the announcement.
I also wrote a few tutorials on the subject:
- Build a Task Manager in Zendesk Support via Custom Statuses
- Custom Status API exploring
- Better Pending Ticket flow with Custom Statuses
Flow Builder Updates: Add carousel and API Authentication
You can add a carousel with up to ten informational panels for the customer to scroll through, each with a link to an external URL. Currently text only, I hope we get images soon. The Get API Details step also got a better UI and way to store credentials.
Link
💡Insights
Zendesk Customer Experience Report
From the key take aways in this report two that seem the most important for me are "Breaking down silos" and "Lean into personalisation". Both are about giving context and sharing input to get to a solution quickly and efficiently. This is something we're Zendesk's Sunshine tools can deliver results quickly and easily.
Zendesk Engineering Blog
Not many people know that Zendesk's Engineering team has a pretty good Medium blog that gives insight on how the platform is built and run.
Sam Lockart
Conversational Interface
A nice overview of the different bots and conversational interfaces available in Zendesk. They discuss the technology behind chatbots, voice assistants, and interactive voice routing.
The ultimate checklist to optimise your Zendesk
A community written overview of the best tips to clean up and configure your Zendesk. It includes gems like "Activate the 'Include attachments in emails' setting" and "Auto-close Solved tickets".
⚠️ Major Changes
I don't know a lot of customers who used the old NPS add-on, but if you do, it's going away this spring. If you look for an alternative, you can try out Sweethawk's Survey app or Surveypal. (Links are not sponsored).
Zendesk had a rough roadmap with social messaging and Whatsapp. We've gone from Social Messaging to Messaging, their custom on-premise flow to Smooch. I hope this marks the end of mandatory migrations. I've seen some customers migrate 3-4 times already now.
🎥 Videos
And finally...
A customer asked me why he was missing tickets. Turns out, there's no guarantee every ticket ID will exist.
