Zendesk Sunshine Platform UX and Customer Context

The impact

Reduced agent handle time. Increased resolution accuracy. Higher CSAT for teams using contextual views. Became a core part of Zendesk's agent workspace strategy.

I led product for Zendesk's customer context and interaction history feature set on the Sunshine platform, the tools that gave support agents instant visibility into prior touchpoints, order status, and customer sentiment before they said a word. Handle time fell and CSAT rose for one specific reason: agents stopped spending the first ninety seconds of every conversation reconstructing what they should have been handed up front.

The temptation was to show everything

Support agents at most companies work with incomplete information. They juggle tabs, skim ticket histories, and ask customers to repeat themselves while the customer is already annoyed. The problem is not effort, it is that the right context is not surfaced at the right moment. Sunshine was built to change that, and this feature set was the core of it.

The obvious build is a panel that shows all of it: every field, every prior ticket, every transaction. That build fails twice, once by burying the signal that matters under the ninety that do not, and once by degrading performance in a workspace where speed is itself the UX. So the design problem was subtraction, not addition.

Ridealongs decide, opinions don't

I ran agent ridealongs and data analysis to find which context fields actually changed what an agent did next, then built the panel around those and left the rest out. Recent conversations, order status, sentiment indicators earned their place because agents demonstrably behaved differently when they had them, not because a stakeholder wanted them on screen. That is the leverage move on a platform team: let observed behavior, not the loudest request, decide what ships.

The technical constraint was real. Pulling from multiple CRM and custom data sources risked performance degradation in an environment where every added millisecond is a UX regression. I benchmarked performance with engineering throughout and exposed admin customization so each company could tailor the panel to its own context rather than inherit a one-size-fits-all view.

What this built

• An agent experience where context arrives before the conversation does. Agents knew what was happening before the first message, which changed both the quality and the speed of every interaction.
• A real-time context panel that became part of Zendesk's core workspace. The feature set folded into the agent workspace strategy and shaped how Zendesk approached CX tooling.
• A customizable foundation for enterprise CX. Admin controls and data-source flexibility made the tool usable across diverse company contexts, supporting Zendesk's broader platform ambitions.