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This article helps you quickly set up messaging in the Web Widget for your website or help center or in your iOS and Android mobile apps. If you want to set up social messaging integrations, see Getting started with social messaging.
This article includes the following topics:
Enabling and configuring a messaging channel
Messaging is automatically on in your account and ready to use whenever you're ready. You don't need to turn on messaging. To start using messaging, you need to create a messaging channel to offer messaging to your customers. You can offer messaging through a Web Widget that you embed in your website or help center or through mobile SDK for your Android or iOS app.
When you're ready to start using messaging, you can configure your messaging channel for your website and help center or moblie app.
Configuring messaging for your website or help center
Your account comes with a default Web Widget, named Zendesk, already created for you. You can use the wizard to configure your basic widget information, install the widget on your website or help center (if you’re ready), and make some basic customizations.
Follow these steps:
- Set up a Web Widget for messaging. Create an embeddable UI with a ready-to-use default messaging experience.
- Configure your basic Web Widget appearance. Design the appearance of the app your customers will be interacting with. Choose window and text colors, logos, and more.
- Customize your default messaging behavior. Craft the language used to greet your customers. You can also create separate experiences based on your business hours, if you've set up a schedule.
- Install the Web Widget on you website or help center. Add the widget to your website or help center.
Configuring messaging for your mobile apps
You can set up a mobile SDK channel to offer messaging in your Android or iOS apps.
Follow these steps:
- Activate messaging on your app.
- Customize the components. Design the appearance of the app your customers will be interacting with. Choose window and text colors, logos, and more.
- Install messaging on your mobile app. You’ll need to get a channel key to share with your developers.
Consider automating your messaging channel with a conversation bot
After you configure your messaging channel, you can use it as-is, without any further configuration.
However, if you want to create a more automated customer experience, you can take messaging to the next level by adding a conversation bot to your messaging channel. This gives you an opportunity to customize the interaction between bot and customer, before handing them off to a live agent. You can configure the bot to greet customers, offer them self-service support options, hand them to an agent, and more.
- Start with the out-of-the box bot, using the standard bot responses
- Customize the bot with answers you design
Routing messaging tickets and notifying agents
When a customer requests assistance from a live agent during a conversation, a ticket is created, and agents are notified that a request has been received.
You can use tickets triggers to route the associated ticket to specific agents or groups, then use the chat routing rules to determine which of those agents or groups are notified that a new conversation is waiting in the queue. You can create views to organize tickets submitted through a messaging channel.
Alternatively, you can route messaging tickets using omnichannel routing, instead of using ticket triggers and chat routing rules.
Giving agents access to messaging and training them
All agent-side messaging activity happens in the Agent Workspace. You need to give agents access to messaging before they can start working on messaging conversations. You'll want to give agents some training so that they understand how to accept and work on messaging conversations.
To give agents access to messaging, see Giving agents access to messaging.
To train agents, use the following resources:
- See messaging in the workspace. Learn how to accept support requests, view tickets, and include attachments.
- Work with messages. See how you respond to messages, reassign tickets, and create new messages.
Next steps
The tasks described in this article are intended to just get you started with messaging. There’s a lot more you can do to customize the entire messaging experience, for your customers and your agents. See our complete list of documentation resources for messaging.
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