Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Enterprise |
| Access | Admin |
Practice conversations for training agents, and the important part is where they land: the app generates realistic training tickets into agents' standard ticket queues, carrying the tag training-simulator. They are real tickets, not a separate sandbox, so plan for them the way you would plan for work.
Set it up
- Install the app. It creates two custom objects, two custom ticket fields and two bot users on your account.
- Check that the agents taking part have the standard role, or a custom role that includes custom object permissions. Light agents and contributors cannot be given training tickets at all, so decide early who is in.
- Build a template: choose either Zendesk-provided intents or related tickets from your own account, selected with standard search syntax.
- Set the tone, the conversation goals and an introductory message, and attach up to three documentation links and three reference documents.
- Assign it. Each agent assignment holds a maximum of ten tickets.
One thing stops the build outright: under Additional refinement the form shows three fields, products, policies and behavioural rules. All three have to stay filled in, and deleting one gives an error and no refinement.
Build from your own tickets
The related-tickets option references what customers wrote, which is why it beats an invented scenario. Invented ones are tidier than reality, and they train people for a situation that does not occur.
The awkward cases are the ones worth building: an angry customer with a legitimate complaint, a question nobody can answer, a request you have to refuse, something that needs escalating.
Following progress, and the line not to cross
Progress shows as colour-coded ticket status, filtered by In Progress, Paused, Cancelled or Completed. If you use Zendesk QA, training tickets can be scored there manually or automatically.
That scoring is exactly where judgement is needed. The value of a rehearsal is in the conversation afterwards, not in the number. Scored and recorded against people, practice stops being practice, and somebody who cannot get it wrong safely learns nothing. Use the scores to find what to talk about, not to rank anybody.
Use it beyond onboarding
Before a product launch, or after a process change. Existing agents rehearsing an unfamiliar situation is as useful as new agents rehearsing a familiar one, and the template you built once is reusable.
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