This article is a high-level walkthrough of the steps administrators need to take to get started using Zendesk Chat. The steps below can be used for setting up your free Zendesk Chat trial or a new permanent account. If you have not yet created a Zendesk Chat account, see Signing up for a Zendesk Chat account.
Getting started with Zendesk Chat requires establishing your team of agents, configuring the features you want to use, customizing how the chat window appears so it looks good on your website, and then adding chat to your website once you are ready.
This article includes the following sections:
Related articles:
Creating your team
Before you can support your customers, you need to add people to your account for them to connect with. These are your chat agents.
The number and types of agents you need is up to you. The following tasks will guide you through creating your team, and configuring your agents to best serve your customers.
- Create your agents. Create an account for each person who will be acting as a chat agent. Each agent must be assigned a role, among other things, so make sure you understand how our default roles work.
- Create departments: You may want to organize your agents into departments, based on location or area of responsibility, for example. You can then route chats to agents in specific departments.
- Add agent skills. For a more granular approach to chat routing, you can create specific skills and assign them to agents. Then, you can use visitor tags and to direct chats to agents with the skills to help those visitors – we'll discuss this in the workflows section below.
Setting up your workflows
Once your team of agents is created and configured, you can design their workflows – how they connect with chat requests, and how they interact with customers through those chats.
Workflows are defined by the elements in the tasks discussed in this section.
- Create triggers. Triggers are groups of conditions (or events) that, when met, cause certain actions to occur. Conditions can include events such as keywords used in chat requests, time of day, the URL where the chat is initiated, and the like. Actions triggered by these conditions can include adding a tag to a chat, or sending an automatic message to the visitor, for example.
- Set up shortcuts. Shortcuts let your agents insert common phrases into their chat, using a couple of keystrokes. For example, if you have a standard greeting all agents need to use at the end of a chat, agents can select the end-of-chat shortcut from a list to automatically add it to the conversation, rather than typing it in by hand.
- Choose routing options. There are two main routing types: Broadcast, which notifies all agents of all incoming chats; and Assigned, which directs chats to a single available agent, and give you more options for defining which agents are assigned certain chats.
- Configure visitor profile settings. Have your customers share information you'll need to keep track of them.
Adding chat to your website or Help Center
When you're ready you can add chat to your website or Help Center for your customers. To do this, you'll need to take these steps, which we'll walk you through in the next article.
- Configure Chat. This includes customizing how chat is displayed, creating any customer-facing forms you need, and establishing security and evaluation rules.
- Deploy Chat. This includes enabling chat, and adding it to your website code or Help Center.
5 Comments
Hi Madhan, think you might have the wrong website. We sell subscription based Chat software. If you are having trouble with your account, please email chat@zendesk.com.
I have been trying for 5 days after paying and then I cancelled and then you took my money but I still had 21 days left of the what I had paid for and not I cannot log in - your support really sucks.
Why don't you use the chat option for communicating with clients if its so good ??
Hi Heather,
Sorry that you are having trouble with your account. I see that you have an open ticket already for the issue, I have asked the support team to get back to you to resolve the issue.
The chat option for support is available if you are logged into the product. You should hear back from the support team soon on your existing ticket.
-Ramin
Hello there!
Hoping you can help: We are ready to start building out our Chat platform. but need to work out the details first. I see that I don't have access to the platform unless I enable it (which I don't want to do since we have a support widget available on our Help Center).
What do you recommend is the best way to customize the platform without our customers seeing a chat option on our Helpdesk?
Thank you,
Hello Jennifer Dragan,
Your account manager will be in touch with you anytime soon to discuss your Enterprise Sandbox, which is a testing environment, and help out as well with your chat project.
In this article, you'll find the instructions on how to activate the Sandbox in your instance: Testing changes in your sandbox (Enterprise)
Also, since you're under the Enterprise plan you've also got Multibrand as an option, you could add a brand for testing purposes, and experiment on a branded widget, but leave chats disabled for the main widget. Here's a resource for getting the widget set up for multiple brands Multibranding Zendesk Chat (Enterprise)
Let me know if you have any questions! :)
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