Welcome to fall. The season where trees drop their leaves, Apple releases a new iPhone, and Zendesk teases a new Zendesk AI drop for later this week.

I'm really curious about what they are going to announce. Will we finally see some Generative AI features in the Zendesk Bot? Or will it be expanding on what they already have with more industries, better intent analysis and the general availability of their agent comment expand/shift tone feature?

I’ll post a full recap of the event later this week, so go subscribe if you haven’t yet.

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🎉 New Releases

🤖 AI Powered Conversational Experiences

Zendesk Messaging got a few nice new releases this month.

First one is a feature that many people requested: Messaging First Time Reply and Next Reply SLA metrics are now finally available.

Understanding the crucial role that timely responses play in superb customer service, we've introduced First Reply Time and Next Reply Time SLAs for messaging to help ensure your customers are receiving the prompt attention they deserve.

Secondly, we finally got an ETA for making Messaging authentication data visible in the Agent Workspace.

Hi everyone,
Posting an update on surfacing email address, provided in authentication API, on Agent Workspace. We are targeting Nov to support this enhancement. With this change, external Id, email or a combination of both can be used to uniquely identify your users.
I will provide more updates closer to the rollout date.
- Prakruti
View the comment

Zendesk AI also got a new model for the Insurance industry, and the existing retail, software and finance models got updated.
And social interactions over messaging or tickets (e.g. a Facebook post or Twitter mention) will now also see intents, sentiment and language predictions in the Intelligence Panel.

So all in all, not the biggest releases this month, but we got to remove some stuff from the wishlist, which is always nice!

🔎 Help Center and Self Service

Only one update this month for the Help Center.

Zendesk moved the attachments to the new Media Gallery, where they now live alongside your images in one central place.

You can access the media gallery from the Attachments section in article settings. From there, you can view or delete media attached to the article, or click Manage attachments to open the media gallery, where you can view, upload, attach or replace media.

🧱 Open and Flexible Platform

The new Custom Objects

Zendesk is pleased to announce a new and improved, no-code-required custom objects experience.

One small sentence that opens up a WORLD of possibilities in Zendesk. I'm still working on a full overview of this new release, so stay tuned!

New View limits!

A huge win for some, or a potential for even more cluttered interfaces. But however you see it, this new release allows you to add 30 shared and 10 personal views to your agents' workspace, compared to the old limit of 12 views.

🔐 Trust and security

Admin Insights

Admins can now see agent created Macro's in the Admin Center. This follows last months release of them being made available via API. This change is available in Admin Center on the Macros page, where a new item, “Individual Agents” appears in the availability drop-down.

Similarly admins can now see all dashboards in Explore. Previously dashboards created by other users would not be visible to admins unless explicitly shared with them.

All theses small changes back to back makes me think someone at Zendesk is going through every API/feature and checking permission and visibility levels. 😅

Deploying triggers from sandbox and production

Zendesk is delighted to announce the general availability of deploying trigger configuration changes from a premium sandbox directly to your production instance. As a bonus, we're announcing a closed beta for deploying automations, too.

I think this counts as another finally?

Redaction in Child Tickets

It's now possible to redact attachments and comments in child tickets.

Important: Redaction is still not propagated through each instance of the side conversation, so agents need to redact in both places, the parent and the child ticket, if they want the information removed from both.

⚒️ EAPs

Auto-accept for messaging and live chat

Auto-accept functionality automatically assigns messaging and live chat conversations and end-user queries to specified agents in the Agent Workspace. With this feature, agent capacity utilization will always be at maximum.

⚠ Major Changes

Update trigger logic

With the release of Custom Objects v2 Zendesk also reworked the structure of their trigger conditions.

For conditions, the options are now organized in three groups: Object, Lookup relationships, and Ticket details.

All ticket fields are available under Object > Ticket.
Under Lookup relationships you'll find Organization, Requester, and any custom lookup relationship fields you've added to tickets.
Under Ticket details, you'll find Current user, Received from, and Sent to.

Trigger actions are grouped by Object, Lookup relationships, and Other.

The Object and Lookup relationships headings function the same as they do for conditions.
Under Other, you'll find Notify by, which contains all of the notification actions.

Error : Image cannot be pasted due to authentication requirements

Inline images in comments are not possible anymore if you have setup authenticated attachments.

💡Insights

Alex Heath (The Verge): It’s overwhelming. I find this with the current chatbots. I feel like it can do so much that I’m not actually sure what to ask it.
Mark Zuckerberg: [...] let’s say you’re a small business and you want to have an AI that can help you interface with customers to do sales and support. You want to be pretty confident that your AI isn’t going to be promoting your competitor’s products, right? So you want it to be yours.

🎥 Videos

Pretty cool overview of Omnichannel Routing by Roca.work.

📝 Articles this month

And finally...

A little bit of self promotion.

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Zendesk Roundup for September 2023

Thomas Verschoren