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
Recommendations about side conversations
- The assignee should create and manage side conversations in the tickets they're responsible for. This allows administrators to create triggers based on the assignee role, and enables easier handoff between agents.
- Set up triggers to take advantage of the side conversation event conditions to fully integrate them into your workflows and to keep agents on top of the activity within them. See Setting up trigger conditions for side conversations.
- Create trigger conditions for side conversations to make sure that assignees know when a side conversation is created, closed, replied to, and reopened. Without them, the agent assigned to the ticket (ideally, this person is also the creator of the side conversation) may have a hard time knowing what’s going on with a particular issue.
- Remember that the creator of the side conversation doesn't automatically receive email replies to side conversations. That’s not the default behavior. Also sending side conversations to your own support address is not supported and will result in those side conversations ending up in the Suspended tickets view.
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.
In the Agent Workspace, side conversations are created from the context panel. In the standard agent interface, side conversations are created from Side conversations at the top of the ticket conversation pane.
| Agent Workspace | Standard agent interface |
 |
 |
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).
Optionally, you can use the Select an Address app to control the email address that side conversation notifications are sent from. For example, the app allows you to change the default support address associated with a ticket.
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.
102 Comments
I cast my vote for ability to use brand common signature
Hello @conza
I think this is a misunderstanding.
The mail will usually only contain the last of your messages.
Also, side conversation mails have no context, i. e. no content from the original ticket.
That is intended if somewhat hindering. It would be nice to have an option to include some parts of the ticket. However, you can do that with a macro.
Yours truly - Peter
This should be integrated with Microsoft Teams
I really like the side-conversations abilities, but Michael C. mentioned earlier above, I find it strange why I can't export a conversation to PDF. It would be nice to have this admin controlled or role-based access control managed more generally for people who feel that would too easily allow information to leak out. But the use case for me is about sharing snippets of conversations with people I don't want in the private ticket history generally, but may need something better than copying and pasting out (and dealing with the weird formatting that goes with that) for specific portions or specific side conversations if in whole. I'm hoping this areas gets improved to make them more functional over time. But I like the concept so far.
@..., thanks for the clarification !
Actually it would have been interesting for us if a reply to a side conversation could become a public reply: in some cases, we are relying on the public reply of people we add to tickets as CCs and we'd like to send them a reminder if they delay replying. So I thought we could use the side conversation for the reminder, and it would have been convenient if they could just reply to that email to make a public reply, but I suppose this is not the purpose of this feature.
@... that's essentially what I meant – anyone who is assigned to the parent ticket will also be added as a follower on any child tickets to ensure they can interact with it even if they don't belong to the group it's in. Sorry if that was unclear. But, good to hear that approach would be your preference.
Ian Marston at this time there's no way to show side conversation content directly in a view. However, you could do some clever trigger/macro things to make it possible to tag a ticket when a side conversation has unread messages from someone who is not the assignee of the ticket. Something along the lines of two triggers like:
The above trigger will add an "unread-side-conversation" tag when a side conversation receives a reply from anyone besides the ticket assignee.
Then, the following trigger will remove that tag when the assignee closes or replies to a side conversation:
Then you can set up a view that filters down to tickets assigned to the current user that have the "unread-side-conversation" tag.
The downsides to this approach:
Hopefully this gives you some ideas for now. We have some thinking going into a much more robust approach for the future.
Hi,
Is that possible to create email-based side conversations and add agents + end user as recipients?
Or there's a clear border like:
- email side conversation: ONLY end user
- ticket side conversation (child ticket): ONLY agents
Because we had such a ticket and the email sent to all recipients (including agents) once the side conversation created, however, only end user was shown in "To:" of the delivered email and agents even though received the email, they couldn't see their name in "to:" section and were filtered. So once the end user replied, agents didn't receive any email and basically removed from the email loop and rest of the communications in side conversation.
BR
Ethan
Hi - Is there any way to add a footer to all side conversation emails? I just received one accidentally (they should have created a side conversation ticket) and it was very hard to track down which ticket it originated from. I'd like a simple "re: Ticket ID XXXX" or something similar in the body. Thanks!
Jason Fouchier and Toby, we are also struggling with bouncebacks with Side Conversations as well as for regular email notifications from the ticket itself. We have no way of knowing whether the email was received; for instance, if an agent creates a requester profile on a ticket, there's a chance the new email will be mistyped. In Outlook, that agent would receive immediate feedback of the bounceback. However, in Zendesk, that email with the mistyped email would not be sent, and other agents might potentially add the same mistyped emali on other tickets (speaking unfortunately from experience).
"That is intended if somewhat hindering. It would be nice to have an option to include some parts of the ticket."
Isn't this already possible today? I mean, you can select what comments you wish to include from original ticket when starting a side conversation:
With that function you can select which public and internal comments you include in the side conversation.
Here you go! Mobile App Side Conversations
As of the moment, we don't have a placeholder that will show email content from a Side Conversation. I can imagine, it would be incredibly helpful to have a placeholder to display past side conversations to notify the assignee.
I would recommend you to leave Feedback in our Community. Our Teams are frequently looking through the posts in order to get ideas on future additions to the Software. The more a votes a post gets, the higher the chance that the feature will be added in the future.
Kai B hmm, we'll take a look. Would you essentially want the previously involved agents to not be part of the email at all, or are you thinking something more along the lines of BCCing them so they still get an email (only on that message since they wouldn't be in subsequent email replies)?
Jamie Noell we have a couple ideas on this... one would be to synchronize the requester of the child ticket with the assignee of the parent, which would let the current assignee participate, but not the previous agent(s).
Or, we could add any agent that has ever been the assignee of the parent as followers of the children so any of them would be able to participate in the future. Which approach do you think would be preferable to you?
Hi,
Is there a way to set the priority of a side conversation when creating one?
We often have an Urgent ticket which might need another team but when we create a side conversation for them it defaults to Priority Normal by one of our triggers. We then have to do into the side conversation child ticket to manually upgrade it to Urgent. This is quite annoying and a bit of an annoyance for agents.
Thank you
Hello,
In email side conversation, would it be possible to have an automatic link to the ticket in the signature of the email?
Slack side conversations include a link to the case and the case number, wondering if that is possible for email side conversations.
Additionally, would it be possible to use placeholders (ex: {{ticket.id}}) in email side conversations? or that's only possible with macros?
Hello,
We'd like to put in a feature request to have Side Conversations enabled on the Mobile Application. We have many agents that are using the mobile application to maintain their tickets.
Please let me know if there is another chat for this request and we'll add to it.
Thanks
I agree with Maik that there should be a way to designate the comments as internal (aka private). Here are a couple of reasons why.
Hi there ! I'm not sure to understand when a reply to a side conversation becomes public or not.
When an agent send a side conversation via email, all of the recipients on the side conversation receive an email notification with your message. So everytime a email based side conversation is created ? And what happens if you choose "Ticket" rather than "Email" ?
Hi Anne,
Thanks for the speedy reply.
Pretty confident we already have a button to include the form detail when creating a side conversation.
I think my request is probably more of a feature request to be able to set priority when creating in the little box that appears when you click the + button. Would make life easier.
All the best
Hi all,
Apologies if this has been asked/answered already.
I am looking to implement side conversations with our team. I have just created a trigger to notify the assignee by email when a side conversation is replied to, in addition to reopening the ticket. However, we have two questions:
Thanks,
Frank
Is there a way to enhance the side conversations - email capability to maintain the formatting when copying/pasting from Excel or a similar spreadsheet software? Currently, when I copy/paste from an Excel spreadsheet the formatting is lost and it severely limits the usefulness.
Hi
Is there a placeholder we can use to display past side conversations?
We are implementing triggers to notify the assignee via email when side conversation is replied to but there is no means to add the conversation history on the email.
Alan Peterson I think what Jimmy Rufo is getting at is that if the content doesn't accurately paste into the side conversations composer, but it does work acceptably in the ticket comment composer, you could paste it into an internal note and then use the comment insertion functionality in side conversations to include it in the side convo. The comment insertion includes and exact copy of the HTML of the comment, so it should look the same. That said, I realize this is a workaround. We are working on bringing the side convos composer to be closer to the ticket comment composer.
We have a lot of times the problem, that agents sends a side conversion to a support address which results in a suspended ticket. So WHY IS THERE NO WARNING to prevent this? Why it is possible to choose a support address for the side conversion??
On side-conversation emails, how can i set it up on views, so that you can see at a glance which tickets have had a reply to the email but it hasn't been viewed since ticket last opened?
A bit like an email client which shows new responses received in bold until the email has been opened - except in the view
Hi there, I am looking into upgrading my plan to use the side conversations feature, but first want to make sure it does allow the people involved in the side conversation to see updated replies from the ticket sender. From reading through the help articles and many user comments, I see that when you start a side conversation you have the option to include comments from the ticket, but I just want to make sure that you can continue to add comments as new ones are sent in by the customer who started the ticket without having to copy and paste.
Thank you!
Jimmy Rufo - I honestly don't know because that's not our use-case. Our use-case is pretty simple - I usually send an external email on a tkt via the 'Side Conversations' and with that in mind, I don't want to pull internal comments into the external email.
Hi @...
Why is the default behavior for side conversations that the assignee on the ticket doesn’t receive emails? What is the thinking behind that?
Brian Kneebone do you mean something along the lines of a printable view (which could be saved as a PDF is desired)? Sounds like you're referring to individual messages within a side convo, would you want to be able to "print" any message as well as the entire thread?
Justine M Have you tried macros? There are macro actions to initiate side conversations that could can set up with boilerplate text and dynamic placeholders. We'd have to look into why text expander wouldn't be working though.
Please sign in to leave a comment.