Zendesk's own messaging functionality allows you to deliver rich, modern, and automated conversation experiences on your website and mobile apps.
This article describes how to migrate your account from Zendesk live chat to messaging.
This article includes the following sections:
- Pre-migration tasks
- Preparing for migration
- Migrating from live chat to messaging
- After the migration
Related articles:
Pre-migration tasks
Before starting the migration process, we recommend you do the following:
- Evaluate your account. Use our checklist to determine whether your account is in good shape for migrating to messaging. See Evaluating your account for migration from live chat to messaging.
- Compare messaging and live chat. Messaging and Zendesk Chat share many of the same capabilities, and messaging offers features that aren’t available in Zendesk Chat. For a complete assessment of feature parity, see Why migrating from live chat to messaging is the right choice.
- Understand how migrating to messaging may impact your workflow. If you set up messaging to adopt the live chat conversational style there are minimal impact to your workflows. If you choose to adopt other conversational styles there is a possibility your workflows could be affected. See About conversational support with messaging.
- Review how messaging impacts your functionality. Activating messaging can impact features across your account, including the Web Widget, mobile SDKs, automated conversations, and Agent Workspace. See Understanding how activating messaging changes your account.
- Learn about automated conversations. When you migrate to messaging, an AI agent can be your first responder for customer requests. See Creating an AI agent for your web and mobile channels.
Preparing for migration
Before migrating, we recommend taking the time to make sure your account meets the requirements for using messaging, take a look at your customer service needs, and prepare your agents for their new work environment.
Checking your account requirements
If your account meets the requirements for using messaging, you'll see an in-product message on your account's Channels page in the Admin Center.
To migrate to messaging, you must have an account with:
- Zendesk Suite OR Support + Chat (Team plan or higher) with the Agent Workspace activated. See Activating and deactivating the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
Before migrating to messaging, we recommend you have an account with:
- An active help center, with at least 10 articles that cover
commonly-asked questions.Note: A help center is required if you plan to reference help center content in AI agent responses.
Preparing your agents for messaging
Share the links below with your agents, to introduce them to messaging and how their workflows may change.
- Agent Workspace for messaging introduces agents to their main screen, where they’ll be interacting with customers in real time, as well as working with Support tickets.
- Managing conversation handoff and handback explains how messaging conversations are passed from your conversation bot to agents, as well as how and when a conversation ends.
- Translating conversations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace explains the automatic translation feature, how it works and how agents can manage it.
Migrating from live chat to messaging
When you’re ready, you can begin the move from live chat to messaging. In this section, we’ll offer a high-level guide to the tasks you may need to perform to migrate to and set up messaging. Use the links below for detailed information and specific instructions.
Note that you can test how your messaging configuration performs before launching it in your production instance.
- Activate messaging at the account level.
- Update your Chat settings to ensure a smooth transition from live chat to messaging
- Make sure your tickets get to your agents:
- Activate messaging on your channels:
After the migration
Messaging is functional as soon as it is enabled, as described in the previous section. After migration, you can refine your messaging setup in the following ways:
- Creating an out-of-office message for messaging
- Designing an AI agent
- Allowing customers to continue their conversation over email
- About the CSAT (customer satisfaction) user experience for email and messaging
- Messaging reporting in Zendesk Agent Workspace
For all the messaging resources, see Messaging resources.
11 comments
Fiona
It's hard to understand the full implications of switching over. If we do so, then decide it's not for us, is it easy to undo everything and go back to the previous Agent Workspace?
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Anne Ronalter
we have an article about this topic here:
How do I turn off messaging and go back to live chat?
1
Fiona
Thanks!
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Jonathan Farache
Anne Ronalter is there a resource that goes over migration between the different API clients?
With live chat we had the zE object to show/hide the chat widget as well as listen/respond to certain events. What's the equivalent in zendesk messaging? What's the best practice for migrating from one to the other?
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Shaun Murray
Hello all!
My company is working on migrating to messaging but I cannot find one answer. When converting from the Web Widget (Classic) to the new Web Widget will we need to change the script on our websites?
Thank you!
0
Viktor Osetrov
The script is the same after migration from the Web Widget (Classic) to the new Web Widget.
Hope it helps,
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Ramona F
Hi! It is not at all clear to me if something needs to be changed in the frontend/website/apps where we display the chat widget for clients or if the changes are made only in the zendesk interface by the Admins. I mean is there any dev work that we should be doing?
0
Christine Diego
The old widget snippet should still work post migration, if you wish to use the new web widget code, you can also do that, you just need to make sure to update the widget code on your website admin panel.
0
Dmytro Nyshchyi
Hello,
My company is working on migrating to messaging but I cannot find one answer. Could it be possible to transfer message history from Live chat to Messaging?
Thank you a lot.
0
Cheeny Aban
As of the moment, there is no option yet to transfer live chat history to messaging. However, the chat history of existing tickets will not be affected when you migrate to messaging. The chat history will still be accessible on those existing tickets.
I hope that helps!
0
Jesse H
Hi
Can someone please update this documentation to state that once the migration is complete, an automatic email is sent out to anyone who is considered an agent?
We weren't expecting this to occur and has confused a lot of our employees. Not everyone is an agent for support and the majority use it to sign in to access articles.
0