Summary: ◀▼
Side conversations let you handle a specific part of a ticket with the right people, keep updates separate from the main request, and organize questions, replies, and decisions more clearly. You can use email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or child tickets, and notifications come from the ticket’s support address. Admins can also set triggers to track updates.
Side conversations are spaces in a ticket where agents can have a side conversation with a specific group of people, or discuss a specific area of concern or course of action. You can use them to organize information about a ticket.
Related articles:
Advantages of using side conversations
Problems often consist of multiple parts, and solving them often consists of conversations with different people. It gets confusing for everyone involved when all of the questions and answers are mixed together in one place without any kind of organization.
For example, let’s say you need to discuss something with your Legal team, but don’t need or want other people involved.
- Find, organize, and manage information about a specific part of an issue
- Have a conversation with the right people
- Find specific questions, answers, and replies. Ensure conversations happen outside of the main conversation with the requester
- Have multiple standalone conversations that are separate from each other
- Get outside help without pulling others into the main ticket directly
Considerations when using side conversations
Consider the following before adding side conversations to your workflow:
- It is recommended that the ticket assignee create side conversations in their tickets.
- It is recommended that an admin creates triggers to notify the ticket assignee of updates to side conversations, including when it is created, closed, replied to, and reopened. See Side conversation conditions and actions reference.
- When a non-assignee agent replies to a side conversation, the parent ticket's assignee is automatically added to the email notification list. Manually removing the assignee from the To: field prevents this.
- When an end user replies to a side conversation, the parent ticket's assignee will not automatically receive an email notification, unless a trigger is created to do so.
- The parent ticket's assignee will always appear as a recipient of all email replies – even if they were manually removed from the To: field and did not actually receive the email reply.
About side conversation channels
When you create a side conversation, you can choose to have the side conversation in one of these channels:
- Email: Creates an email-based side conversation (see Creating side conversations).
- Microsoft Teams (if enabled): Creates a Microsoft Teams-based side conversations (see Using Microsoft Teams in side conversations).
- Slack (if enabled): Creates a Slack-based side conversation (see Using Slack in side conversations).
-
Ticket (if enabled): Creates a side conversation child ticket
(see Using side conversation child
tickets).Note: Side conversation child tickets can be routed by omnichannel routing. See About omnichannel routing with unified agent status.
Side conversations are created from the context panel and can be printed from all channels.
About support addresses used to send side conversations
Side conversation notifications are sent from the support address associated with the ticket that the side conversation is on (for example, support@yoursubdomain.zendesk.com). If you have multiple brands and support addresses, side conversation notifications come from each of your support addresses (for example, support@brand.zendesk.com).
If you have internal email routing rules (for example, in Microsoft Exchange), we recommend that you include references to each of your unique support addresses. Otherwise, email notification for side conversations will not be routed correctly. Check your allowlists and blocklists.