Getting started with messaging for web and mobile

This article is a high-level walkthrough of the steps administrators need to take to get started using messaging, Zendesk’s automated conversational bot and support UI.

The steps below can be used to set up messaging in the Web Widget to embed support in your website or help center, and for your iOS and Android mobile apps. It can be used on your free Suite trial account, or a permanent Suite account.

If you are a new Zendesk customer, we recommend setting up Zendesk Support before following the steps outlined below. See Launch guide for Zendesk Support for more information.

Note: If you are currently using live chat functionality through Zendesk Chat, you’ll need to migrate your account from Chat to messaging. For information about migrating your account, see Migrating from live chat to messaging.

The steps in this walkthrough are specific to integrating web and mobile messaging channels. If you are setting up social messaging integrations, see Getting started with social messaging.

This article includes the following topics:

• Enabling and configuring a messaging channel
• Upgrading to an automated bot
• Customizing your bot's behavior
• Training your agents
• Next steps

If you’re not familiar with messaging, we recommend starting with the article About messaging.

Enabling and configuring a messaging channel

Your first tasks are aimed at enabling a messaging channel – a Web Widget or mobile SDK for Android or iOS – and configuring the initial look-and-feel and basic behavior.

For a website or help center:

• Turn on messaging for a Web Widget. Create an embeddable UI with a ready-to-use default messaging experience .
• Configure your basic widget settings. 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. Create separate experiences based on your business hours, and craft the language used to greet your customers.
• Install it. Add the widget to your website or help center.

For mobile apps:

• 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 it. You’ll need to get a channel key to share with your developers. We’ll show you how.

Upgrading to an automated bot

If you want to create a more automated customer experience, you can add a bot to your messaging configuration. This gives you more opportunity to customize the interaction between bot and customer, before handing them off to a live agent. Using Flow Builder, our drag-and-drop conversational flow designer, you can configure the bot to greet customers, offer them self-service support options, hand them to an agent, and more.

• Enable the bot. Opt in to the enhanced automated functionality.
• Learn about the out-of-the-box behavior. A basic, automated bot flow is ready to deploy on your website or help center.
• Understand the bot’s abilities. The messaging bot can do a lot on its own. Find out what enabling a bot means.

Customizing your bot's behavior

If the out-of-the-box action isn’t enough, use Flow Builder to design an original, more detailed flow for your bot.

• Learn about the bot possibilities. There are a number of customizable steps you can include in your bot’s flow, in any combination you choose. Understand what each step can do and how it can be used.
• Create your conversation flows. Design automated conversation paths in Flow Builder – as complex or as simple as you like – for each messaging bot.
• Manage conversation languages. Determine which language you’ll use in a single-language flow, or design multi-lingual flows.

Training your agents

All agent-side messaging activity happens in the Agent Workspace. Whether your agents are new to the Agent Workspace, or familiar with the workspace and need to know the new messaging UI, here’s where they should start.

• 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 above are intended to get messaging up and running for you. 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.