With Zendesk, you can have conversational experiences with your customers across messaging channels, including web, mobile, or social channels. Our AI agents, the next generation of AI-powered bots, allow you to personalise and automate these conversations improving your ability to scale, driving agent efficiency and leading to improved customer experiences.
Anyone currently using live chat should read through this document. Find out whether you are using live chat or messaging.
This article includes the following topics:
Why move to messaging?
Messaging brings many new capabilities that live chat does not offer, including:
- No more repeating. By providing support wherever your customers are (omnichannel) and with conversation persistence, the customer never has to repeat themselves to a new agent or when they contact you through a different channel.
- Increased team productivity. The new unified Agent Workspace gives agents the context they need to respond to customers across any channel without having to log in or monitor separate web, mobile, and social channel conversations. A consistent user experience and simplified controls allow agents to be more productive by reducing context switching while still meeting the needs of all customers.
- 24/7 support with built-in automation. With AI agents, you can establish different protocols for when your agents are offline while still providing excellent service to your customers. Configure AI agents to respond to common questions based on your help center content, or capture user information and create a ticket to respond to when agents return.
- Scale up your service. With all of these capabilities, your business will be able to scale up the amount of support it can offer your customers. Automation, off-hours support, and improved agent experiences all enable you to receive, address, and resolve more issues than ever before -- without straining your existing resources.
Conversation persistence
Live chat only offers the ability to have session-based conversations, meaning they happen once, in real-time. A customer initiates a chat with your agent, receives assistance, and ends the chat, and that the conversation history is not saved. It's a single, stand-alone conversation that you cannot return to in the event your customer closes their app or browser, or if the agent ends the session.
Messaging, on the other hand, allows for added flexibility, offering the ability to have both session-based conversations as well as ongoing, persistent chats. This conversation history is always available, meaning agents (and customers) can get context of past questions and actions taken. Customers therefore won’t need repeat or re-identify themselves, and agents won’t waste time collecting the same information or suggesting the same solutions that did not work previously.Automation with AI agents
Messaging also offers AI agents, which brings new automation capabilities to your web, mobile, and social channels.
With AI agents, you can:
- Bring self-service to the forefront of the customer experience with generative replies powered by the latest AI technology.
- Give customers options to clarify their issues and guide them to answers to common questions that harness your knowledge base.
- Collect information in case an issue needs to be handed off to an agent.
- Offer schedule-based flows with different behavior inside and outside business hours.
- Data dip from other systems to provide contextual responses.
- Configure once, deploy anywhere, including messaging channels such as the Web Widget and mobile SDKs, and social channels like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, WeChat, LINE, and X (formerly Twitter) DM.
Omnichannel management
You can set up and manage all of your messaging channels – your primary social channels as well as your web and mobile channels– in one place, so you don’t have to sign in to every separate system to make changes. With this centralized management capability, you can ensure consistency of experience for your customers, as well as save time and effort.
Omnichannel management allows you to:
- Direct new and open tickets from multiple channels to agents by routing tickets fromemail (including web form, side conversations, and API), calls, and messaging channels to a single agent interface.
- Set a single unified agent status for all channels, and assign important tickets to the agents who are most available to work on them.
- Manage the number of tickets assigned to agents at one time by creating capacity rules that balance agent workload.
Extended capabilities with Sunshine Conversations
If you want a more customized experience than messaging offers out of the box, you can consider adding on Sunshine Conversations capabilities to your messaging solution. Sunshine Conversations is the underlying platform that messaging is built upon, and this additional access can be leveraged to customize your messaging experience at every level. However, be aware that access to some of these advanced features may mean additional usage costs as well as require some coding to get things exactly the way you want it.
Capabilities comparison matrix
The table below lists the capabilities available for messaging, and how they compare to those available with Zendesk Chat.
| Capability | Messaging | Live chat |
|---|---|---|
| Web Widget for websites | Yes | Yes |
| Session-based conversations (real-time) | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent conversations | Yes | No |
| Autoreplies with articles | Yes | Yes |
| Autoreplies based on intelligent triage | Yes | No |
| AI agents | Yes | No |
| Agent Workspace | Yes | Yes |
| End conversation by agent | Yes | No |
| Action buttons (rich content) | Yes | No |
| Android and iOS SDKs for mobile apps | Yes | Yes |
| Historical reporting | Yes | Yes |
| Real-time reporting | Yes | No |
| Social messaging channels, including Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct, X (formerly Twitter), etc. | Yes | No |
| Security-based restrictions (signed-in vs. anonymous users, for example) | Yes | Custom (available with minor custom development) |
| Basic widget configuration options (colors, logos, widget placement) | Yes | Yes |
| Advanced widget configuration options | No | No |
| Remove the Zendesk logo from the Web Widget | Yes | No |
| Omnichannel management | Yes | Yes |
| Skills-based routing | Yes | Yes |
| Third-party integrations | Yes (through Zendesk Marketplace) | Yes |
| Banning visitors | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-user chat | Yes | Yes |
| Proactive messages (client side, e.g. website) | Yes | Yes |
| Pages viewed | Yes | Yes |
| Conversion tracking | No | Yes |
| Visitor metadata (OS, device, platform) | Yes | Yes |
| Real-time APIs | Yes (Event Bridge only) | Yes |
* Chat API is in maintenance mode and available only for existing Chat customers. Customers with requirements including social channels or persistent, ongoing conversations should use messaging.
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