About messaging

Messaging is a quick and easy way to communicate with your customers, through your Web Widget and mobile SDKs. It expands Answer Bot to encompass customized, automated conversational experiences as well as article recommendations, and upgrades live chat functionality to persistent conversations that allow your agents and customers to view past interactions for greater context.

This article includes the following topics:

• What is messaging?
• Account requirements, recommendations, and limitations

For more information on configuring and using messaging, see the following related articles:

• Enabling messaging
• Working with messaging in your Web Widget
• Working with messaging in your Android and iOS SDKs
• About Answer Bot for messaging
• About Flow Builder
• Using Flow Builder to automate conversations

What is messaging?

Messaging is one of the ways Zendesk lets you communicate with your customers, by helping you to deliver rich, modern, and automated conversation experiences through the Web Widget and mobile SDKs. When you enable messaging, it impacts how your account administrators, agents, and customers interact.

• Admins can use Flow Builder to create automated, interactive conversations with customers. These conversations can include greetings, specific article suggestions, information-gathering fields and questions, and more.
• Agents can respond to their customers at any time and continue where they left off in a previous interaction. Conversation history in the Agent Workspace provides agents with additional context required to respond to customers.
• Customers have the opportunity to self-solve their support issues with targeted article suggestions through the Web Widget and mobile SDKs before connecting with an agent. Conversation history helps them refer to earlier support requests.

Requirements, recommendations, and limitations

If your account meets the requirements for enabling messaging, you'll see an in-product message on your account's Channels page in the Admin Center.

To enable messaging, you must have an account with:

• Zendesk Suite OR Support + Chat (Team plan or higher) with the Agent Workspace enabled. See Enabling and disabling the Zendesk Agent Workspace for instructions on enabling the workspace.
• At least one Chat-enabled agent. See About Staff roles in Zendesk Admin Center for information about agent roles.

Before enabling messaging, we recommend you have an account with:

• An active, public help center, with at least 10 articles that cover commonly-asked questions.
  Note: A public help center is required if you plan to use Answer Bot capabilities that refer to your help center content, such as article suggestion. If you do not want to use that Answer Bot functionality, you can have a restricted help center, or no help center.

Warning: If you are converting Web Widget (Classic) over to the messaging Web Widget, any active live chats will end and any in-progress tickets will remain pending. Before doing so, we recommend that you close out any active live chats, take agents offline, be aware of any pending tickets, and consider making this change in an off-peak period.

The following volume limitations apply to the messaging capability:

• 1,300 online live chat/messaging agents actively serving conversations.
• 4,000 concurrent conversations/with 200,000 total conversations per day.
• 500 configured integrations (web/mobile/social).

The following functionality limitations apply to messaging:

• Private file attachments: Agents and customers can add public attachments of up to 50MB; however, private attachments are not currently supported. See Working with attachments for more information.
• No support for the Data Center Location add-on: Data residency for non-US and EU customers will be available in the future.
• Live chat limitations: Because Agent Workspace must be enabled to use messaging, there are a few changes to live chat functionality to be aware of. See Chat limitations and How messaging impacts live chat settings for more information.
• No user authentication: It is not currently possible for a business to verify the identity of a user. We expect to remove this limitation, and provide user authentication capabilities in the coming months.
• Delay in ending conversations: Conversations that result in a ticket end when the ticket associated with them is closed. The automations responsible for ticket closure run on an hourly basis; therefore, a conversation may remain active for up to an hour after closure.
• Limited conversation history (iOS and Android mobile platforms):The conversation history is limited to the last 100 messages. We expect to remove this limitation, and provide complete conversation history capabilities in the coming months.
• Limited UI customization (iOS and Android mobile platforms): It is possible to modify a small set of UI colors in the Admin Center. There are currently no customization options beyond this. We will be adding additional customization capabilities in the future.
• Limited active conversations (iOS and Android mobile platforms): Agents are limited to one active conversation per mobile device. To access another conversation, they must leave the initial conversation, or end the conversation by closing the associated ticket.
• Conversation observers (iOS and Android mobile platforms): It is not possible to retrieve data on certain aspects of the conversation, such as:
  • The number of unread messages
  • The availability of agents
  • The customer’s position in the queue to speak to an agent.