Receiving and sending messages in the Zendesk Agent Workspace

Note: You must have the Zendesk Agent Workspace and Social messaging or Zendesk messaging enabled to use this feature. It requires the Zendesk Support Suite or an account with Support and Chat.

This article describes messaging features that you can use in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. When enabled by an administrator, messages sent to your company’s social messaging channels or Zendesk messaging channels become tickets in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. You can send and receive messages in the Zendesk Agent Workspace as part of the main conversation flow.

Messages described in this article include:

• Social messages: These are messages sent from customers using a social message application such as Facebook or WhatsApp. Social messages are persistent, but may have timeout rules for agent replies, depending on the social messaging type.
• Zendesk messages: These are messages sent by customers from web pages that include the Zendesk Web SDK. Zendesk messages are persistent. Agents and customers can reply or restart the conversation at any time. For more information, see About Zendesk messaging.

For a complete list of messaging channels supported by the Zendesk Agent Workspace. See About messaging channels for the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

This article contains the following topics:

• Setting your conversation status
• Answering a message
• Composing messages
• Assigning a messaging ticket to another agent or group
• About ticket assignments
• Adding personal views to manage messaging tickets
• Messaging limitations

Related articles

• Documentation resources for the Zendesk Agent Workspace
• About the Zendesk Agent Workspace

Setting your conversation status

You can set your conversation status directly from the ticket interface. This status applies to social messages, Zendesk messages, and live chats.

Status choices are:

• Online: Signifies you're available to answer messages.
• Away: Signifies internally to other agents that you're away from your computer. You can still send and reply to messages when your status is Away.
• Invisible: Lets you log into the Chat dashboard but not be visible online. You can still get incoming message requests and reply to messages if your status is Invisible.

If a Zendesk administrator has enabled chat operating hours on your account, your message status is set automatically.

Answering a message

When a new messaging ticket comes in, you’ll see an active Accept button at the top of the interface. This Accept button works for social messages, Zendesk messages, and live chats. Your Zendesk administrator configures the types of messages you can receive and how these messages are routed to your queue. By default, incoming messages and new comments have sound notifications, but you can configure these based on your own personal preferences.

To answer the message

1. Click Accept to open a message.

   The conversation appears in the ticket with the user’s name and status at the top, along with the channel type.

   

2. To learn more about the user before you reply, click User in the context panel to see the user’s essentials card and interaction history.

   See Viewing customer context for details. If available, the essentials card includes the user’ messaging contact information. For example, a user's WhatsApp phone number and email address.

   

3. Choose how you want to reply.

   You can reply directly on the same channel, or you can pick another channel from the composer. The channel choices for your reply depend on the type of message you received.

   

   Channel choices include:

   • Social messaging channel: For social messages, the same social messaging channel where you received the message. For example, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. You cannot switch between social message channels within the same conversation. Social messages support attachments, emojis, macros and shortcuts.
   • Messaging: The Zendesk messaging channel. You cannot switch between a social messaging channel and a Zendesk messaging channel within the same conversation, but you can switch to other channels.
   • Email: (if the user’s email address is available). Email messages support text formatting, attachments, To and CC fields, and emojis (via Apps).
   • Call: Opens the Talk console so you can call the user.
   • Internal note: Updates the ticket with a private comment that other agents can see, but not the end user. Internal notes support text formatting, attachments, and emojis (via Apps).
4. Compose a reply and click Send.

   For more information on how to compose messages, see Composing messages.

5. You can continue the conversation as needed to complete the request.

   When the user replies to your message, you’ll receive a notification and the ticket tab updates. See Using ticket tabs to manage conversations for details.

   

   You’ll also see a New message indicator in the conversation.

   

   If you don't have the ticket open when the user replies, your notification list is updated. See Using the notifications list to manage conversations for details.

6. Anytime during a conversation, you can also use the Status drop-down menu to set the current state of the ticket.

   

Composing messages

Use the composer to reply to messages in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. Controls in the composer vary depending on what channel you're using to reply. For example, social messaging channels support attachments and emojis, you’ll see these icons at the bottom of the composer window. For more information, see Composing messages in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

When you reply to messages, you can also use Support macros and Chat shortcuts to compose messages.

As you exchange messages, you can see the message status in the composer window. For example, you can see when the message is Sent, when the user has Read your message, or if the message is not delivered.

If there are issues with the message, the message is flagged with a warning icon (). For example, if an unknown user is copied on an email message.

Channels can have an expiration period. For WhatsApp, agents cannot respond more than 24 hours after the last end-user response. For other social messaging channels, the timeout might be 48 hours. Zendesk messages do not have a timeout period.

When the timeout is reached, you can reconnect with the requester on another channel. For example, email or call.

Assigning a messaging ticket to another agent or group

Once you pick up a messaging ticket, the ticket remains assigned to you until you are ready to solve the ticket or hand it off to another agent. You can transfer a messaging ticket to another agent by changing the ticket assignee. Agents will receive a notification when a messaging ticket is assigned to them by another agent.

About ticket assignments

• If a new messaging ticket is created and agents are online, the ticket is routed to online agents with available capacity and the lowest number of active messaging tickets and live chats.
• Once assigned to an agent, a messaging ticket remains assigned to the agent until the agent re-assign the ticket to another agent or group. An administrator can assign the ticket to another agent if the ticket receives a new response from the end-user and the assignee is offline.
• If a new messaging ticket is created and all agents (or the group) is offline, the ticket is added to Unassigned Views.
• When an agent reassigns a message to a different group in the agent workspace, the new group is not notified of the reassignment, but it does appear in the Unassigned tickets view. To help monitor transferred chats and messages, admins can create group-specific unassigned views, as they do for email.

Adding personal views to manage messaging tickets

To help you manage your messaging tickets, you can create a personal view that includes your messaging tickets. When you create the view, add a Channel condition, then choose the messaging channel you want to include. See example below. You can pick a specific messaging channel, or add multiple channels to your view.

In addition to personal views your administrator can create social messaging views for other agents to share. For more information on creating views, see Creating views to manage ticket workflows.

Messaging limitations

For information about social messaging and Zendesk messaging limitations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace, see Limitations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. See also Before you migrate.