Happy New Year and welcome to 2024 🎆🎇!

I'm starting the year fresh with a new roundup of the last releases of 2023, clearing the slate for a new year of exciting Zendesk announcements and product updates!

2023 clearly was the year of Zendesk AI with major improvements in the Zendesk Bot and Agent Workspace enabling automation, insights, and better self-service across the board.

Last year was also the year of the new Agent Home and Omnichannel Routing, enabling a brand new way to interact with your assigned tickets.

Custom Objects and Layout Builder offered ways to customise Zendesk to fit your business needs, and the focus on privacy and security resulted in more granular admin permissions and a brand new automated ticket deletion feature and the new Privacy and Security Add-On.

So, what will 2024 bring? I'd love to see some kind of co-pilot capability for agents, offering agents a similar self-service experience as end-users get, surfacing internal processes, information, and context to agents. From a developer standpoint, I hope they bring more API endpoints to Zendesk for managing Answers, Bots, and Explore dashboards via API, enabling bulk actions on Custom Objects and a more granular permission approach for API tokens, with options for read-only, or scoped to a specific set of objects or actions.

But the year has only just started, and Zendesk Relate is still 4 months away, so let's dive into last year's final announcements and get ready for 2024!

🎉 New Releases

🤖 AI Powered Conversational Experiences

You can now mention colleagues in messaging conversations. They'll be added as followers on the ticket and updates will appear in the Agent Home, as well as via notifications in the Agent Workspace.

👨🏻‍💻 Agent Workspace

The new Agent Home is now available for all Zendesk customers. It replaces the old dashboard view with a more actionable landing page for your agents. It shows agents all tickets assigned to them, including active conversations, gives quick links to followed or cc'd tickets, and provides a list of updates on tickets they worked on, or are mentioned in.

If you use Omnichannel Routing, or are an agent that used to work from a My Tickets view, I highly recommend setting Agent Home as your, well, Home Page, from now on!

🔎 Help Center and Self Service

It's now possible to pin both internal articles from your Help Center and external articles indexed via Federated Search in the Knowledge Panel right next to tickets. Useful to point other agents to resources needed to resolve a specific ticket.

And if you use Content Blocks, they now support tables.

Redesigning the editor experience.

In a series of articles, Zendesk announced a redesign of the article editor experience.

In a first phase, the editor will move publishing actions to the footer of the editor, similar to how Ticket Status currently works. This new footer will allow you to publish, draft, set review status, and preview the article.

This removes all publishing options from the sidebar, making the sidebar focused on organising your article in sections, setting permissions, and adding labels or promoted statuses. The sidebar is now only needed if you want to edit these settings and can be collapsed if you only want to focus on the content.

Later, the sidebar will be updated by moving all these options into different sections, making it more convenient and faster to update a specific setting of an article. And later in 2024, the articles themselves will also be expanded with additional HTML elements:

abbr, address, cite, code, dd, del, dfn, div, dl, dt, em, figcaption, figure, hr, iframe, ins, kbd, pre, samp, small, source, span, sub, sup, track, var, video

🧱 Open and Flexible Platform

Notion for Zendesk

I'm a big Slite fan myself, but for those of you who use Notion, there's a neat new integration available on the Marketplace.

🔐 Security and Privacy

Announced in October and finally available are the advanced data retention policies which allow admins who purchased the Advanced Security Add-On to set up complex deletion policies for specific ticket types to comply with local privacy regulations, or to lower their Zendesk storage limits.

💡Insights 

Hybrid approach to Customer Support

Ultimate invited me to speak at their January 10^th event about customer care, automation, and self-service. If you're interested, you can RSVP via this link.

🎥 Videos

Interesting end-of-year wrap-up interview with Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier.

AI is a marathon, not a sprint.

You can watch it below on YouTube, or listen to the Podcast.

⚠ Major Changes

Over a year ago, Zendesk released the new Webhooks, which will replace the old URL Target functionality. They include more connection and security options, provide a better admin experience, and offer insight into their executions via a dashboard right within the Admin Panel.

Now, Zendesk has announced the deprecation of these old URL Targets by October 28^th, 2024, so take a look at your old Targets and move them over to Webhooks before it's too late!

📝 Articles this month

This month was a short month due to the Holidays:

• Preview of the new Generative AI for Voice
• Dynamic Conversation Experiences in the Zendesk Bot
• End of Year

And Finally...

If you use liquid markup in your triggers and macros, you can use this bit of code to format your dates to a European show DD-MM-YY format. 

{{ ticket.ticket_field_YourDateFieldID | date: "%e/%m/%Y" }}.

Or, if you work in Europe but want to convert the format to match your American customers;

{{ ticket.ticket_field_YourDateFieldID | date: "%m-%e-%Y" }}.