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Messaging vs. live chat: Which is right for you?



Edited Oct 08, 2024


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53 comments

What is the best way to deal with a message request that is not served by an agent during business hours? If an agent does not reply, can you automate this with a trigger?

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Prakruti Hindia

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Thomas,

Messaging, as a channel, is always available to the customers. It is important to set expectations and collect enough information for the agents to resolve the issue. 

For this, we can build out a flow in Flow Builder to collect more information from the end-user such as name, email or nature of the issue. (More information here). I would suggest capturing this information , irrespective of whether agents are online / offline. 

In order to set expectations, we should setup auto-responders. (More information here).

You can create a view for your agents to pick up Messaging tickets created when the agents were offline with this condition - Channel is Messaging and Status is New.

- Prakruti

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Hi,

In this article: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360057096813, it was stated:

>Agents and customers cannot currently attach files to messaging comments.

Can you please clarify on this point since it was explained in the table comparison above.

I'm also confused on why this feature is not enabled by default? Attaching files like screenshots are very important for customer support application, it seems like a big oversight not including this feature. 

Thanks

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Miranda Burford

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi @...,

Agents can now send files & images to the end user.  We'll make sure that the help article you flagged gets updated.  Thanks!

The ability for end users to send files & images to the agent will be coming very soon (within the next couple of months).  Agree that it's a very important feature!

- Miranda.

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Hi, I can't find any documentation about whisper mode beyond the mention in this article?

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I started playing around with Messaging on my zedesk account, but prefer to go back to using Chat. Even after I disable messaging in the admin center, chat is still not working how it used to before I started testing messaging. How can I get back to using chat?

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Miranda Burford

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Samantha Sussman,

Thanks for your message.  Can you please confirm that you have successfully disabled messaging by following the instructions here?  After doing so, please let me know if Chat is still not working as expected and provide details/screenshots of what's happening.  I'd be happy to investigate further.

Thanks,

- Miranda.

 

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Hi Miranda-

Yes I have disabled messaging. I am still not seeing the chat dashboard behave as it used to. For example, I don't see anything on the Visitors page, and there is a message at the top that says "Your account is on the Zendesk Agent Workspace. You can see incoming and currently served chats on this page." However the Zendesk Agent Workspace doesn't show site visitors like the Visitors page used to. I used to use this page to manually send messages to certain site visitors, but I can no longer do that.

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Hiedi Kysther

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Samantha, 

Based on the prompt you are getting in your Chat Dashboard, you are most likely still in Agent Workspace. After disabling Messaging please disable Agent Workspace in your account. Here's how you can disable it:

1. In Admin Center, click the Workspaces icon () in the sidebar, then select Agent workspace > Agent interface.
2. In the Agent workspace section, deselect the Enable the Agent Workspace setting.
3. Save your changes.When the workspace is successfully disabled, a warning message appears


For more detailed steps on how to disable Agent Workspace, you may check it here: Disable Agent Workspace

 I hope this helps! 

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Hello!

Sorry for my confusion, but I see a lot of terms thrown around in various articles and need some clarification.

AFAIK, there is Legacy Chat, Live Chat, Web Widget (Classic), Web Widget, and Messaging. 

From what I can tell, Legacy Chat is basically out of use now.

For the rest of it, it's confusing to know things like:

- what's the real difference between Web Widget (Classic) and Web Widget?

- Does Messaging fully replace Live Chat?

There are a lot of things we like about the Web Widget (Classic) that don't exist in Web Widget, for example, like enabling customers to submit a contact form via the chat window.

We also don't want live chat at all, but want to use the Web Widget to offer articles to users or offer a contact form. So, we should use the Web Widget (classic) and not the new Web Widget, correct?

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Dainne Kiara Lucena-Laxamana

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Timothy!
 
With regards to the difference between Web Widget (Classic) vs. Web Widget, you may be referring to Web Widget (Classic) vs Web Widget Messaging.

Both actually are the same. It's just that the Web Widget Messaging has more features. For example, Web Widget Messaging can use Messaging. It can also be used with Answer Bot with Flow Builder. 

Messaging doesn't replace it. Technically it can upgrade it since you can use Messaging works with multiple channels. In Messaging you can have Chat, Whatsapp & Facebook Messenger. With the Web Widget classic, you can use those features too but it'll be on separate integrations. So you need to set up one channel for Whatsapp, one channel for Facebook & etc. 

If you are considering migrating to the Messaging version of the Web Widget, I would suggest checking out this article which would provide more of a comparison between the two in detail: Messaging vs. live chat: Which is right for you?

Let me know if you have any additional questions.


Thanks,
Dainne Lucena | Customer Advocacy Specialist
 

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Any word if Security-based restrictions for messaging (signed-in vs. anonymous users) was released? Comparison matrix still says Q4 2021.

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Miranda Burford

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Milton L,

Thanks for your question!  Are you referring to JWT authentication within messaging here?  If so, this has now been released.  You can find more information here.

If not, would you mind sharing more information about what security feature you are describing exactly?

Thanks!

- Miranda.

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That's what I was after, thanks Miranda Burford :)

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Hello Everyone,

Does anyone experience that agents receive Social Media messages via Chat Live Box?

Is that normal or not?.. and how we can avoid this issue?

Thank you in advance,

 

 

 

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Hi Lara,
 
Can you provide some more details on what you're talking about? Perhaps a screenshot? Thanks!

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Hello Dave,

Thank you for reaching out.

We have experienced the following issue:

We are receiving social media messages (Like. FB, Instagram, etc) via chat box (screenshot enclosed) mixed with Live chat messages. And the agent is confused

We understand that social media messages should be appeared as an open ticket immediately and not to go through live chat box, right?

Any advice to avoid this from happening?

Thank you,

Lara

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Lara, 
 
Based on the details that you have provided, it seems that you have added Facebook Messenger on the Messaging Channel. If that's the case, the normal behavior for it is it will be treated similar to live Chat. If you prefer FB Messenger channel to just be treated as a non-Live ticket, I suggest you add it in the Facebook Pages Channel instead. 
 

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With Messaging, I can't figure out how to replicate the contextual suggestions that we get automatically with Live Chat.  It doesn't seem like the 'Show Help Center articles' node on the flow builder does anything other than suggest a specific admin selected list of articles.

Have I missed something or is it not supported yet?  If it's not supported, is the feature on the roadmap? 

It's a pretty big deal to be able to deflect with targeted articles based on what the user is doing in our product as the first thing that happens when the widget is opened.

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Alan,
 
When it comes to Flow Builder, your end-users can enter their inquiry on any steps that they are in and the Bot will still provide the article recommendation that is related to their inquiry.
 

Hope this helps!

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Hi Dane,

No, I'm specifically looking for a Node type that I can add to the flow builder that does not require the user to enter anything at all, and instead does contextual and tag awareness like the classic widget.

We spent engineering effort to make the context awareness work very well.  So I consider this a huge gap in the messaging widget, such that I can never replace the classic widget with the messaging widget until this functionality is added.

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Alan,
 
Thank you for the clarification. As it turns out, this isn't supported in Messaging. I understand the importance of this to promote a more user friendly experience.
 
I'd recommend creating a Community post separately for that with your use case to help get more visibility and votes on the idea. Then, others can share their use cases to further drive demand for that feature. 

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Is it possible to have Web Widget (Classic) on a contact us page for out of hours queries but use and the live chat on all other pages?  Or does it have to be one or the other?

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Gabriel

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Lauren!

I hope all is well! Unfortunately, natively that is not possible. If you are using the Classic Widget for the website or Help Centre, the features enabled for one page will be replicated for all the others. 

I hope this answers your question!
 
 

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Is IP address tracking any different using Messaging vs Chat? The switch over to Agent Workspace has reduced our access to customer IPs for fraud purposes.

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Jupete Manitas

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Paul, thanks for writing in! 
 
That is correct that the agent workspace has reduced our access to customer IPs. However, you may check the post from one of our product managers here: No IPs available in Chat. Per Ayush, getting access to the IPs is still on the roadmap but not to develop this year. Per Ayush, "is still on our roadmap, but unfortunately, we've had to push development to early next year." We hope this helps Thank you!

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Hi, it says in the above table that a customers can be banned with Messaging & Sunshine with partner support. Is this explained or expanded upon anywhere?

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Christine

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Daniel,

As outlined in the Limitations in messaging functionality article under General functionality limitations:
 

Banning visitors: Web Widget and messaging functionality cannot be restricted per-customer or by IP address.

However, Sunshine Conversations SDK does provide a workaround.

 
Hope this helps!

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Rudolph

Zendesk Luminary

Hi @...,

Are there plans to introduce the ability to ban a customer in Messaging without having to purchase SunCo? For those of us not on Suite Enterprise, moving to Messaging is already a big purchase. For such a big purchase/move, we'd expect access to some core functionality (ie: banning).

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Christine

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Rudolph,

I found this related feature request and according to one of our Product Managers:
 

Bringing the ability to ban users on Messaging is on our roadmap  and we plan to look into in early next year for development. We will publish in the community once we have more concrete dates.

 
We still can't provide a specific timeline at this time, but updates related to this feature will be posted in the thread.

I highly suggest you upvote the post and leave a comment to share your use case with our Product team, our Product Managers continuously monitor feedback to be considered in the roadmap planning.

Thank you!

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