The confetti has settled. Now, let’s see your favorite Relate 2026 moments! 📸
Zendesk Relate 2026: Community highlights & recap
In a blink of an eye, Zendesk Relate 2026 has passed us by! ✨ We wanted to let everyone settle back into their time zones before breaking down all our favorite moments, learnings, and experiences. Sometimes you don't realize how much impact past events have had on your daily life until you reflect on them. 🙌
Step inside our Community and Academy booth!
The multiplier method quiz 🦄
Our booth this year was a dedicated oasis to unplug, meet peers, and discover your personal CX style. You probably heard people walking around the venue shouting, "I'm a Thinker!" or "I officially got the Unicorn!" That’s because of our Multiplier Method Quiz! This wasn’t a corporate test; it was a fun, non-salesy way to look at how you naturally tackle challenges, process information, and share value with your team. Check out the personalities we discovered across the community floor:
The ultimate chameleon. You fluidly adapt your approach based on what the situation calls for, balancing big strategy with daily execution to keep work moving forward.
The team spark plug. You thrive in high-energy, real-time collaboration, getting ideas off the ground quickly and keeping momentum moving.
The hands-on maker. You learn by doing, testing, and diving straight into workflows, using human-centered stories to bring ideas to life.
The workplace glue. You instantly notice alignment gaps between teams, bridging ideas and workflows so progress never stalls.
The empathetic anchor. You bring a calming, listening presence to group settings, leading with deep empathy to make sure spaces feel completely inclusive and heard.
The mapmaker. You process information by exploring different angles, connecting scattered signals into a clear direction.
The master planner. You approach problems with a beautifully practical eye, relying on structured plans, defined roles, and proven context to ensure quality follow-through.
ZENDESK ACADEMY
Remember how we talked about using these Relate insights to bring real value back to your daily work? Well, the ultimate place to do that is the completely reimagined Zendesk Academy over at academy.zendesk.com! 🚀
We’ve launched a gorgeous fresh site packed with over 20 brand-new learning experiences, regular course updates, and 10+ hours of cutting-edge, AI-focused content designed to strengthen your CX expertise.
🏅 Earn Your Limited-Edition Relate Badge! Who doesn't love showing off a major win? Complete any course on the Academy site by June 19th to automatically unlock your exclusive Relate Badge and show the community how you're transforming customer service.
Learn more about Academy🌟 Mainstage moments: vulnerability, boundaries, & big tech
This year's keynotes went way beyond standard business advice, diving straight into what it means to show up authentically.
🐐 Vulnerability & power with Simone Biles
We had la chance to witness a breathtakingly honest conversation with Simone Biles about overcoming immense pressure, redefining true strength, and navigating life with ADHD. Simone opened up about the vital necessity of setting personal boundaries and the profound power of saying "no" when your well-being demands it. Her insights on mental health awareness left the entire room inspired to lead with more empathy and courage.
🎤 Humor & Storytelling with Ali Wong
The brilliant Ali Wong took us on a hilarious, witty journey through the art of connection. In a world full of digital distance, Ali showed us how raw vulnerability, storytelling, and humor break down walls and build genuine trust. Whether you're on a comedy stage, in a boardroom, or interacting in a community hub, staying relatable is our greatest superpower.
🤖 The Autonomous Service Workforce Vision
On the tech side, we looked at how the Zendesk Resolution Platform is bringing AI agents, human copilots, and connected workflows into one self-improving loop:
- Specialized AI Agents & Builder: Create and deploy self-improving custom agents using simple natural language.
- Proactive Copilots: Agent, Admin, and Knowledge Copilots are now live to actively suggest workflow fixes (saving admins tons of time!).
- Connected AI Systems: Seamless data ingestion from systems like Notion, SharePoint, and Google Drive.
- Unified IT & Contact Centers: A sleek, modern ITSM experience paired with an all-in-one calling console.
📺 Want to watch the keynotes or catch the live feature walkthroughs?
Relate On-Demand🏆 Community Moments and Awards
Celebrating the incredible leaders who keep this ecosystem thriving.
We can't write a wrap-up post without giving a massive shoutout to our Community Happy Hour! 🍹 Getting to hang out, toast to our shared journeys, and unleash our competitive sides over 90s trivia was easily a top highlight.
We also hosted our Community VIP Breakfast to shine a bright light on the incredible leaders who keep this ecosystem thriving. Please give a massive round of applause to our official Relate 2026 Community Award Winners:
User Group Leader of the year: Eric Nelson
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Consistently receiving top ratings, strong engagement, and high attendance across our User Groups program. His leadership helps create welcoming, valuable experiences for the community.
Community MVP of the year: Brandon Tidd
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Honoring the way he supports others through expert guidance, User Group leadership, and meaningful advocacy. He helps make the community stronger by sharing knowledge and building connections between the product and its users.
Community Innovator of the year: Tiffany Bellah
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For her thoughtful approach to community building and her ability to spot opportunities for growth. She brings fresh ideas to the community, creates effective solutions, and inspires new leaders to get involved. Her work has helped strengthen the community and support lasting collaboration.
Make sure to drop by their profiles, join their local user group chapters, and say a huge congrats! 🥳
🧠 The Community Resolution Roundtables
Relate is an incredible space to connect with peers and get your hands and brains on new product and CX trends. That’s why, this year, we delivered our Community Resolution Roundtables! These sessions were designed to move past passive presentations and open up real, unscripted conversations, perspectives, and experiences with peers and leaders around specific topics.
This year, we had group leaders and community members facilitating these tables, and the energy was absolutely electric! ✨ It was so refreshing to see that we aren’t dealing with these challenges alone and to hear fresh, real-world perspectives from folks in the exact same trenches. We are still hard at work packaging up the deeper findings and peer recommendations so we can share them with the whole community soon, but here is a sneak peek at the vital discussions we opened up:
Interactive Dropdown Experience (Click the arrow on your widget to expand a roundtable topic!)
Why we talked about it:
As organizations scale and multiple teams begin using Zendesk simultaneously, change management and account optimization become an ongoing art form.
The Discussion:
Administrators huddled to trade secrets on the exact tools that make their lives easier. The big focus was on how to proactively monitor instances to identify when a workflow change is truly needed, alongside sharing strategies on how to track optimization results using a mix of quantitative metrics and qualitative team feedback.
Why we talked about it:
AI can only ever be as smart as the documentation feeding it. As AI becomes our primary channel for instant answer delivery, our core content strategies have to evolve fast.
The Discussion:
This table tackled the messy realities of content stewardship and managing multiple repositories. Attendees compared notes on how they are structuring articles today, how they keep content continuously up to date, and the specific hurdles they’ve faced while refining legacy help centers so AI agents can read them flawlessly.
Why we talked about it:
Truly understanding your customer experience means looking past simple volume metrics and identifying the exact dashboards that spark internal action.
The Discussion:
This group got highly tactical about what they report on both inside and outside of Zendesk. Leaders shared the specific listening posts and survey questions that generate their most actionable insights, comparing targets and mapping out how they systematically track what they learn about their users.
Why we talked about it:
The age of AI has fundamentally shifted what your frontline support team needs to find success. Equipping agents with the right workspace tools requires a completely fresh playbook.
The Discussion:
Teams opened up about how the day-to-day needs of their agents have altered. The table debated which new features feel like genuine lifesavers for the front line and which ones aren't bringing as much value, sharing real-world strategies for smoothing out agent enablement.
Why we talked about it:
Moving past the marketing hype to evaluate whether a new AI feature is genuinely useful for your specific operation requires peer validation and clear boundaries.
The Discussion:
CX leaders brainstormed their pre-experimentation checklists. They mapped out exactly how they decide which use cases are the safest candidates for AI agents, and debated how measuring success needs to look completely different when evaluating customer-facing autonomous AI versus internal agent-assist AI.
Why we talked about it:
True resolution often means connecting your support ecosystem to the other essential tools your business can't live without.
The Discussion:
This was a brilliant sandbox session for our builders! Attendees showed off the coolest things they’ve constructed using App Builder, troubleshooted technical gaps where they hit walls and needed peer advice, and highlighted the core integrations that keep their operations running.
Why we talked about it:
Exceptional support shouldn't stop at your external customers—internal IT and HR service experiences deserve that same fast, seamless time-to-value.
The Discussion:
Attendees using Zendesk for internal employee support shared their massive organizational unlocks and major learning curves. The group zeroed in on where employees get stuck most often, what stopped them from adopting internal AI faster, and built a collective "wishlist" of what they hope to automate next.
Why we talked about it:
When AI becomes an active teammate to your frontline staff, the entire landscape of service leadership—from hiring and coaching to setting team boundaries—shifts.
The Discussion:
Leaders had an honest, insightful talk about how AI is altering their top priorities. They exchanged change-management strategies for guiding support staff through the cultural impact of this new world of service jobs, sharing firsthand accounts of how their teams are reacting and adapting.
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