This article describes chat features that you can use in the Zendesk Agent Workspace when you have Chat enabled on your account. When you chat, Chat apps and macros are supported. For more information about the workspace, refer to About the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
This article contains the following topics:
- Answering a chat
- Transferring a chat
- Using shortcuts in Chat
- Adding chat attachments
- Rating chats
- Chat limitations
Related articles
Answering a chat
This section describes basics of how to chat with visitors in the agent workspace. Agents can answer chats directly from the workspace, but they cannot start a proactive chat with a visitor. All chats, including unanswered ones, become tickets in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
Incoming chats appear on the top-right corner of the workspace (instead of a pop up tab). The top bar shows an Accept button.
To answer a chat
- Click Serve chat or Accept to open a chat conversation. When you start a
chat with a visitor, the chat conversation appears in the ticket with the visitor name and
status at the top.
- To learn more about the visitor before you chat, click User to see the visitor’s essentials card and interaction history.
- Enter a reply and click Send.
- When you're finished with a chat, click End Chat to end the conversation.
Both end users and agents can end a chat.
Depending on your chat status, you may or may not be able to serve chats in the queue. This setting depends on how your admin has set up chat notification routing for your account or for agents.
For example, an agent who can only manage tickets in their group may receive chat notifications for tickets outside their group, but they won't be able to accept or serve the chat, until it is routed to their group, or until an admin grants the agent permission to manage chats outside their group.
Transferring a chat
This section describes how to transfer chats in the agent workspace. Agents can transfer chats to other agents or to groups (Chat departments) by using the Assignee field in the ticket.
To use chat transfer, Chat departments must be mapped to Support groups and any Chat department that needs to send or receive chat transfers is added to the Chat dashboard.
When you transfer a chat, remember the following:
- When you transfer the chat to another agent, check to see if the agent is online. If the
agent is online, you'll see a green circle and dot around their profile image in the
Assignee menu.
You can also transfer a chat to an agent who is away (shown with an orange circle and dot).
- If you transfer a chat to an offline agent, the chat is ended and the ticket is assigned to the agent's queue. The same is also true for an agent who is invisible or signed out.
- You can transfer the chat to another group. However, transferring multiple chats in bulk is not recommended. See Limitations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace for more information.
- You can transfer the chat to the same group you're in, provided you're not the only agent online in that group.
- Transferred chats are added to the bottom of the chat routing queue.
- When you reassign a live chat to a different group in the agent workspace, the new group is notified of the reassignment. To help monitor transferred chats and messages, admins can create group-specific unassigned views, as they do for email.
- If a chat is currently being served, only the agent chatting with the client can transfer it to another agent.
To transfer a chat
- In a ticket, make sure your ticket fields are saved before transferring the chat.
- Click the Assignee field (near the upper left of the ticket).
A list of groups appears.
- Scroll the list and select a group, or select an agent within a group. You can also
enter a group name or agent name to filter the list.
A message appears asking you to confirm the transfer.
- Click Assign.
Using shortcuts in Chat
With chat shortcuts, you can save typing time by inserting common phrases with just a few keys. For example, you might want to create a shortcut that says, "Hi there, how may I assist you today?"
Once you have created shortcuts for Chat from the Chat dashboard, you can use these shortcuts for serving chats in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
To use shortcuts in Chat
- In a chat, type a slash (/) to view shortcuts. Up to 10 matching shortcut options
appear.
You can enter a few more characters after the slash to narrow the search results. Search via slash (/) includes matches for both shortcut bodies and titles. Title matches are prioritized over body matches in the search results.
Note: Any personal or shared macros also appear in the list. See Applying macros with a keyboard shortcut. - Highlight the shortcut you want to insert either by clicking it, or you can scroll
through the shortcut options by pressing the down arrow and then Enter.
The complete shortcut appears in your conversation. For more information on chat shortcuts, see Chat: Inserting common phrases with shortcuts.
Adding chat attachments
If enabled, agents and visitors can send and receive attachments via Chat. By default, agents and visitors can exchange the following file types: PDF (.pdf), PNG (.png), JPEG (.jpeg), GIF (.gif), and Text (.txt). The file size limit for attachments depends on your plan type. Administrators can manage file sending options from the Chat dashboard.
When file sending is enabled, a paperclip icon appears in Chat conversations in the agent workspace.
To send an attachment
- In a ticket, click the paperclip icon in a Chat conversation and browse to select a
file (or drag a file into the field).
- Click Send.
You can include multiple attachments in a chat. To delete an attachment from the list, click the X icon.
If your administrator has enabled secure attachments, attachments are accessible while a chat is ongoing, but once the chat ends, customers can access the attachments only after they sign in to Zendesk. See Enabling secure chat attachments for more information.
Rating chats
If enabled by a Zendesk administrator, visitors can rate a chat as either Good or Bad during or after any chat session in the agent workspace. Chat ratings give you a better sense of visitor satisfaction. For more information about chat ratings, see Measuring visitor satisfaction with chat rating.
To rate a chat
- Visitors can click the thumbs up or thumbs down icon at any point during the
chat. When they click a rating, a window appears prompting them to leave a comment.
- Agents can also choose to prompt visitors to leave a rating during the conversation by
clicking the rating icon in the bottom of the chat window. The visitor sees a Rate
this chat link in the widget.
Chat limitations
For information about Chat limitations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace, see Limitations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. See also Before you migrate. As product development continues, Zendesk will work to add more features and remove limitations.
65 comments
Concept2
Thanks @.... Are those considered feature requests now, or is there a place I can track status of those requests?
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Lisa Kelly
Hi Sarah Thompson I forwarded your comment to the PM team as an FYI. For trackable feature requests, you can post them on our Community site or contact Zendesk Customer Support.
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Dream
If Live chat for Agent Workspace is not ended, Can I search for text in the ticket?
Example
A customer chatted and called us for cancelling their order (Order No. LR923-43E-3242). But our agent cannot search for an order number)
1
Mike
We were not able to transfer an ongoing chat from one agent to another agent.
Afterwards we found out that we have to activate the group for live chat under chat/agent#departments. From my point of view this little detail was not mentioned in the article above.
4
Lisa Kelly
Michael Rieder. Hi Michael, this article on Serving chats is for agents using Chat in the Zendesk Agent Workspace, not for Admins who are setting up the workspace. To use chat transfer, Chat departments must be mapped to Support groups and any Chat department that needs to send or receive chat transfers is added to the Chat dashboard. See Adding and updating departments: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408894143898#topic_mfr_wyk_4fb
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Tan Jee Han
Hi there,
![](/hc/user_images/y1PmToE3sxcK_EQAwB4tRw.png)
May I know what is the reason for the chat to be disconnected intermittently during certain times despite when the internet connection is stable and available?
Kindly do advise on the potential root causes for this issue to occur? It is very disrupting to know this happening unexpectedly every now and then as we have to constantly monitor the agent's online status to ensure that this doesn't happen and also to ensure that we do not have missed chats or offline messages sent to us.
Thank you
0
Arpan Nagdeve
Jee Han,
Let us know through a support ticket whether your disconnection issue is resolved.
0
Arpan Nagdeve
Kamolchanok Jittrepit until chat ends transcript is not indexed by the search, so it's not possible to search while chat is ongoing
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Hannah Voice
Hi there. This article says "If enabled, agents and visitors can send and receive attachments via Chat." but this article says "Customers cannot currently attach files to messaging conversations." Could you please confirm? Thank you!
1
Arpan Nagdeve
Hi Hannah,
Chat and Messaging conversations are 2 distinct offering and thus attachments works differently. On chat both agents and customers can upload attachments, where as for messaging we only support agents to upload an attachment. Customer support for uploading attachment is part of our roadmap.
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Hannah Voice
Thanks @.... Could you point me to the best resource that outlines the differences between chat and messaging? I've read through these:
But if I'm understanding correctly, messaging replaces chat? If we have messaging enabled and a customer starts a chat, is that actually a message... or is it a chat? You can probably tell I'm a bit confused 😉
0
Jamie Martin
Is there a workaround for a team lead jumping into an active chat? The instructions above indicate that the agent will have to route the chat to the team lead but only if they are "active." Since our leads are included in multiple groups to see tickets, this would route an available chat to the team lead if they went on "active." Am I missing something here or is there another way to enable just our leads to be able to jump into an ongoing chat?
1
Khajik Khajadourian
Will the UI be changed to make it more clear which groups are Chat departments and which are not? We just migrated to the Agent Workspace and our agents are accidentally transferring to groups that are not active chat departments, which is ending the chat and turning it into a ticket.
3
Tejas
Before you migrate is a broken link
0
Lisa Kelly
Thank you, Tejas Patil. The link is fixed!
0
Rina
How can we use shortcuts in the main Zendesk Agent Admin workspace?
0
Lisa Kelly
Hi Rina. It's the "Zendesk Agent Workspace", not the "Admin" workspace. The workspace is designed for agents who manage tickets, not admins. To find the shortcuts you can use in the workspace, click your Profile image and select Keyboard shortcuts.
![](/hc/user_images/EnUuXbSpyYunevwrHMDM_g.png)
1
Rina
My apologies Lisa Kelly - I had meant the shortcuts that you can set up within the Chat interface, and how you can use those whilst in the Agent Workspace to answer messaging tickets/live chats. I have just found them now, but disappointed to hear that you can't use the multi-option shortcuts (where you set predetermined response options for the customer to select from)
1
Lisa Kelly
Hi Rina. My apologies for the misunderstanding! I see you found the answer to your question.
0
Bruno Menezes
Hi,
Does the agent who's transferring the chat need to be in the group they want to transfer the chat to?
Thanks.
0
Dave Dyson
Yes you can.
0
Emiliano Nencioni
We lost desktop sound chat notifications. Going to the Chat dashboard, Settings > Personal > Sounds & Notifications, everything is correctly activated. Still, no sounds. Mobile App sounds are active anyway. Any ideas?
0
Scott Mullikin
I am testing Chat and we are unable to transfer a chat to another Agent. I followed your example above. When attempting to transfer the chat the response we receive is:
"End Chat This will close the current session. Would you still like to end the chat?"
What is causing this? Is there a setting we need to update? Thanks!
0
Mike
Scott Mullikin
If I remember correctly: We had to add the agents to a departments and then enable theese departements for chat.
2
DJ Buenavista Jr.
Thank you for reaching out to Zendesk Support.
In regards to your issue about the chat sound notifications, I would advise checking your browser's permission for the sound settings within the site settings. It could be that you need to allow permission for the Zendesk website to enable sound.
Thank you and please don't hesitate to reach back if you need further help.
Kind regards,
-2
Ben Steele
Is it possible to see how long a customer has been waiting in the queue within the agent workspace?
2
Dane
You will still need to use Monitoring real-time chat metrics to monitor all your incoming chats.
-1
Ben Steele
Dane - Thank you, but this can't be seen within the agent workspace. I was hoping the team could see this either before picking up the chat, or immediately after (e.g. adding an internal note in the ticket).
I will look at using a trigger with tags to provide a range (e.g. 0s - 59s), then update a field in support to avoid the team having to look through the events for this.
0
Nico Bartolomeo
Hey there! When we get chats that were prompted by a trigger we only see the user as 'Visitor' and a string of numbers.
When that happens we ask them for their name and email address, so we can log their support cases against their account. In the old chat views, there were two fields where you could quickly set their name and email address while still in the chat.
That's not an option anymore in the workspace, I take it because the chat is already technically a ticket?
However changing someone from 'Visitor12345' to their name/email is a bit more cumbersome as you need to go to their profile, change the name and add the contact there. Also, it doesn't let you add an email contact to that user if one with that email already exists, so I'm not sure what the correct thing to do is in that case.
Any plans of adding a feature similar to the one that used to be available in the chat view? Or is there already a better way to do this that I'm not aware of?
Let me know if any of that is unclear, and thanks for your help!
0
Mike
Hi Nico Bartolomeo
I would recommend you to set up a pre-chat form to identify the user before the chart starts.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408882974234-Enabling-the-pre-chat-form-on-the-Chat-widget
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