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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:

  • Resources for migrating from live chat to messaging
  • About messaging
  • Enabling messaging

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.
See About conversational support with messaging for more information.

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.

Important: If you are converting a 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.
  1. Activate messaging at the account level.
  2. Update your Chat settings to ensure a smooth transition from live chat to messaging
  3. Make sure your tickets get to your agents:
    • Organize agents into groups
    • Configure ticket routing
  4. Activate messaging on your channels:
    • Working with messaging in the Web Widget
    • Working with messaging in your Android and iOS apps

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.

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