Articles in the series
Messaging lets you have rich conversations with your customers that are persistent, with full context and history. When you enable messaging, you can connect it to your website or help center, mobile apps, and third-party channels, making it easy for your customers to self-serve or connect with your agents.
As your support needs grow, you may want to automate some of this communication, such as offering a simple greeting before handing the customer over to an agent, deflecting inquiries using knowledge base articles, or extensive customized conversation flows. Many users find that the right balance for them is somewhere in the middle, between no automation and extensive conversation bot flows.
This article provides an overview of what messaging can do, the channels you can use to deliver messaging to your customers, and guidance on how to get started.
This article includes the following sections:
Understanding messaging
Messaging allows you to support multiple conversational styles, from real-time chat functionality to asynchronous communication with your customers. It's easily scalable and highly customizable.
Messaging provides the following features and benefits:- Multiple channels. You can communicate with users seamlessly across your website, help centers, mobile apps, and social messaging channels. Choose which channels you support so you can connect with and support customers wherever they are.
- Persistent conversations. Agents and end users can interact multiple times over a period of time, across different channels, all within a single conversation. This makes it easier to refer to earlier interactions and avoid asking users to repeat themselves. The increased efficiency benefits agents and end uses alike.
- Ticket creation. Tickets are generated for requests received through messaging channels, enabling agents to follow up on more complex requests through Zendesk Support when needed.
- Integrate with the Zendesk Agent Workspace. Agents can use familiar productivity aids within the Agent Workspace to handle messaging conversations, similar to traditional channels such as email. They can respond to customers at any time and continue where they left off, and the conversation history provides agents with additional context when needed without asking the user to repeat themselves.
- Conversational automations and bots. Automations and bots can enhance your customer experience by automating deflection options and triaging support issues before (or instead of) handing the conversation over to live agents. Customers benefit from the opportunity to self-solve their issues.
- Extensive customization options. Admins can quickly set up messaging channels in Admin Center. Then, depending on how much automation they want to implement in their conversational messaging workflow, they can use the bot builder to create interactive conversation bots to greet customers, offer relevant article suggestions, gather information, and more.
Requirements and limitations
Your account must meet the following requirements to be eligible to turn on messaging.
- You must have one of the following plans:
- Any Zendesk Suite plan
or
- Support + Chat subscriptions with a Team plan or above
Note: Some channels require a Zendesk Suite plan.
- Any Zendesk Suite plan
- The Zendesk Agent workspace must be activated.
- You must have at least one team member assigned to a Chat role. See About Staff roles in Zendesk Admin Center.
- You must deactivate any social messaging integrations you configured previously. See Social and third-party messaging resources.
Additionally, we recommend you have an account with an active, public-facing help center. Having at least 10 published articles that cover common questions allows you to use bots to recommend relevant articles from your help center.
Next steps
Walk through the Messaging deployment guide. The next article in the series is Designing your conversational messaging workflow, which will help ensure you're making informed decisions, are prepared with the necessary information when configuring your messaging workflows, and have clear next steps along the way.
71 comments
Thomas D'Hoe
Hi, is this only available for public helpcenters? Or also for redtricted helpcenters?
1
Jordan Brown
What reporting metrics are available in Explore? Is there a way to see how many people go through the flow?
0
Dave Dyson
Hi @..., your Help Center needs to be public to use Messaging.
1
Dave Dyson
Hi 421710464994, Here's where you can find messaging reports in the Support Dashboard:
Chat reporting
If you're on the Enterprise Suite plan with Explore Enterprise, you'll also have access to live data widgets that include messaging: Live data widgets for Explore dashboards
1
Daniel Merriott
Hi is this possible to enable for a trial account please? I have a Suite trial with a public help centre and agent workspace enabled but I don't see any options to access or configure messenger.
0
Miranda Burford
Hi @...,
You should be able to enable messaging on a Suite trial account. If you haven't already, please try disabling & enabling Agent Workspace to see if that helps (that's worked for others). If not, please let me know and I'll create a ticket so we can investigate your subdomain.
Thanks,
- Miranda.
0
Daniel Merriott
Hi @.... That has indeed helped - thanks very much!
0
Dream
My instance does not have an attach file button at Zendesk Messaging Widget. How could I get that button?
1
Miranda Burford
Hi @...,
Unfortunately, we don't support the ability for end users to upload files/attachments as yet. It's on our roadmap for future consideration and will likely be released sometime around the middle of the year.
Thanks,
- Miranda.
2
Maksym Bukshovan
Hi Team.
We are currently integrating Zendesk Messaging into our app and I have one question.
Is it possible for agent to write first ? What I'm asking. When user enters the app , agent sends him some message even before user enters chat ViewController.
Thank's
0
Cheeny Aban
Hi Maksym,
As of the moment, there is no native way to send proactive messages to the customers once they entered the app or your site. We can only send proactive messages once the customer loaded the widget. But we understand your need for this functionality so we will be marking this comment as Product Feedback.
We truly value customer feedback and your voice and votes in the product feedback topics in the community help influence future Zendesk functionality.
-1
Tomoya Kitayama
Hi,
Can you update the roadmap of this article?
We really want to use this feature, but Q2 is over now.
2
Miranda Burford
Hi @...,
Thank you for alerting us to this! Authentication is now planned to be delivered by the end of Q3 2021. We'll make sure this article gets updated.
Thanks,
- Miranda.
1
CJ Johnson
How do agents pick up Messages? Do they still see the flashing icon that a new "Message" is waiting, like they did for chat?
0
Aimee Spanier
Hi, CJ Johnson. You can find the information about the agent UI for messaging in Agent Workspace for Zendesk messaging.
0
Thomas D'Hoe
Hi CJ Johnson,
Yes they do!
0
Akhila
We are currently integrating Zendesk Messaging into our app, how I add show/hide/activate methods in the web widget in my current page. is there any option for hiding the messaging launcher?
1
Miranda Burford
Hi @...,
You can find the messaging Web SDK APIs here, https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/zendesk-sdks/sdks/web/sdk_api_reference/. Open & Close may work for your use case today. We are planning to introduce a way to hide the messaging launcher later in the year (via a new Admin setting) so you should be able to use that in conjunction with the open & close APIs to meet your needs then.
- Miranda.
1
Tomoya Kitayama
Hi @...
It is possible to set user email to the messenger email input box via API or cookie?
https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/zendesk-sdks/sdks/web/sdk_api_reference/
Our system has user email, and we want to avoid this user process, system set it automatically.
0
Akhila
Hi Miranda,
Thank you very much!. show and hide options are work. is possible to send the customer details dynamically to a ticket in Zendesk messaging like automatically filled the user email /phone in the web page.
0
Shayne Traqueña
Hi Akhila,
It will be possible to use custom launchers with the new Messaging Web Widget but it will be a slightly different implementation to the classic Web Widget and is not live in production yet. As mentioned by my colleague, the messaging launcher will be implemented later in the year.
I hope this helps!
--
Shayne
0
Miranda Burford
Hi @... & @...,
You've both asked the same question here about intelligently pre-filling customer data within messaging. Messaging doesn't support authentication as yet but we have plans to do so later this year. This will include an API that you can use to identify users and pre-fill customer data.
Hope this helps!
- Miranda.
1
Вячеслав Скорбеж
@... Is it possible to make Answer Bot unactive if user's language is not supported? I mean not to ask customer "please try to rephrase"?
1
Giuseppe
Hi Slava,
Looks like this option is not possible natively, but there is a system in place for translation-related workflows in Flow Builder which is the Automatic Translation:
This can be accessed by following the instructions below:
How this'll work is, the Answer Bot messages will be translated automatically based on the user's selected browser language, so this should prevent/lessen language issues when interacting with the Answer Bot.
For more information, see Enabling automatic translation in Flow Builder
0
Miranda Burford
Hi Slava Skorbezh,
As Giuseppe mentioned, this isn't possible today but it is something that is being considered for the product roadmap within 2022.
Thanks,
- Miranda.
1
Blake Eddins
Hi Miranda,
3 months ago you wrote about authentication being delivered by end of Q3. Hoping you have good news on the status of this feature. Thank you!
0
Вячеслав Скорбеж
@... @... Thanks for your answers. As for now, Messaging doesn't support even languages that legacy Zendesk products support. Our clients are chatting with us mostly in Ukrainian, Russian and English. The Ukrainian language is supported by Zendesk Chat, Zendesk Guide and Agent Workspace. But still no support in Messaging. It would be great to use Messaging as a product, of course with limitations for such languages (I mean hard-coded flows including CSAT collection).
2
Miranda Burford
Hi Blake E.,
Nice to hear from you.
Unfortunately, we've had some delays and Authentication for messaging has now been moved to Q4. This is still a priority for us and we are hoping to have it released as quickly as possible. Stay tuned.
- Miranda.
0
bgoossens
Hi, when will the authentication be ready for Messenger? It was promised to be delivered in Q2 (by implementation team). Now its already Q4. Any update?
0
Miranda Burford
Hi @...,
Thanks for your question! Authentication is a top priority for us within messaging but unfortunately, it's been pushed out until later this year (within Q4). Stay tuned!
Thanks,
- Miranda.
1