Real-time queue updates in the Chat widget

When starting a live chat, visitors expect a near instant response from an agent. But during peak hours, it’s not always possible to respond instantly. Zendesk Chat notifies visitors of their position in the queue, so they are roughly aware of how long they need to wait before being served. Managing the customer expectation over live chat is important to ensure they remain satisfied with the experience.

Note: The real-time queue reflects the department queue size, plus the account (chats without a department set) queue size

After interviewing various businesses over the last year, it became clear that there were three problems with how we were representing the queue position to the visitor in the widget:

1. The widget queue number did not update in real time as the visitor’s queue position changed
2. The queue position message disappeared on page change/refresh for the visitor
3. The queue position did not reappear if the visitor transferred to another department (that had a queue) during an ongoing conversation

With the new changes rolling out today, we’ve resolved all three of these issues.

What has changed?

The previous queue behaviour looked like this:

With the new real time queue update, the widget behaviour will look like this:

 

Note: The copy of the message and the numbers shown are slightly different in the same scenario. The previous behavior would look at how many visitors are ahead of the visitor, while the new experience looks at the visitor’s current queue position. When it says “Queue Position: 1” it means the visitor will be the next person served

Requirements & Platform Support

All accounts will have the new queue improvements for free today without changing any settings. The old queue behavior will no longer be available.

The new queue behavior will be present in both the desktop and mobile versions of the widget and the Web SDK has been updated with a new event type in version 1.2.0

The new queue behavior will not be supported via the Chat Mobile SDKs (iOS/Android) for the time being.  

Bonus: New trigger condition

As of today, we also added a new trigger condition called "Queue size (Account)" to give you the flexibility on when to send or not send a proactive message based on the overall account queue size.

Feedback

Let us know if you have any questions or feedback on the widget queue changes and we will get back to you as soon as we can.