Side conversations are spaces in a ticket where agents can have a separate conversation with a specific group of people, or discuss a specific area of concern or course of action. Side conversations are stored separately from the main ticket thread and can include users who don't have account access. You can use them to organize information about a ticket. See About side conversations.
Admins can activate and deactivate side conversations. They're deactivated by default. Admins can also configure how side conversations appear in the context panel.
Side conversations are only available in Zendesk Suite. They're not available in Support.
To activate and deactivate side conversations
- In Admin Center, click
Workspaces in the sidebar, then select Agent tools > Side
conversations. - Select Turn on child tickets. This allows agents to create side conversation
child tickets and assign them to a specific agent or group. See Using side conversation child tickets.
There are additional settings you can turn on for child tickets. See Configuring side conversation child ticket settings.
- Select Turn on emails outside the main conversation. This allows agents to send
emails to people not currently participating in the main conversation, and see any replies
in the ticket.
- Select Only show agent email addresses to restrict the list of suggested email addresses to internal users.
For information about using side conversations with email, see Using side conversations in tickets.
- Select Turn on side conversations in Microsoft Teams to make side conversations
available from Microsoft Teams.
- If you have had difficulty connecting side conversations to your Microsoft Teams account, select Allow dynamic subdomain detection. This loosens some requirements that allow Zendesk and Microsoft Teams to communicate smoothly, and can impact the performance of your side conversations.
To use side conversations with Microsoft Teams, you must also have the latest version of Zendesk for Microsoft Teams installed. See using Microsoft Teams in side conversations.
- Select Turn on side conversations in Slack to make side conversations available
from Slack.
To use side conversations with Slack, you must also have the latest version of the Slack for Zendesk Support app. See Using Slack in side conversations.
- Under Context panel, select Turn on the side conversations view if you
want the ticket's thread count to display in the context panel. When this option is turned
on, the number of side conversations displays even when you're not on the side
conversation panel in the Agent Workspace.
- Under Signatures, select Use signatures in side conversations to
automatically add a signature to a side conversation.
- Select the Signature type to add to side conversations. You can choose to add either the commenting agent’s signature, or the brand signature.
- Click Save.
When side conversations are activated, they're available for all agents to use. On Enterprise plans, you can control access to side conversations by creating a custom role.
It's recommended to set up trigger conditions for side conversations to fully integrate them into your workflows and to keep agents on top of the activity within them. See the Ticket trigger conditions and actions reference.