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About side conversations



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Amy Malka

Zendesk Documentation Team

Edited Jan 27, 2025


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126

126 comments

Hi @...

Have a look here:
https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/support/ticket_comments#make-comment-private

It is possible to make a comment private after saving it both using the API (see above) and in the UI, in the events (Ereignisse) view, where you see something akin to this:

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Looks like this can be done by setting a ticket's priority when reply from side-ticket is received. 

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Hi, 

I have been facing issues with Side conversations.

The behaviour is very erratic. A lot of times, these side conversations are not delivered. I have checked all the settings and confirmed with the team about any allowlist/blocklist or rules set that might cause this. But there isn't any.

Side conversations to other teams are not delivered which is why the team has to reach out to them using emails and other channels. I am sure you understand that this dilutes the very purpose of Side Conversations.

Can you help me understand:

  • If this is expected behaviour? If yes, can you share an ETA by when it will be resolved
  • If no, If there is anything else that needs to be checked in order to get this working?
  • If there is anything in your product pipeline that confirms a Delivered or a Read status on the sent Side conversations?

Thanks.

 

 

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Hi Shweta,

Because your issue may require some deeper troubleshooting, I think the best thing for you to do is contact out support team via chat from within your agent/admin interface (Option 1 here): Contacting Zendesk Customer Support

Hopefully they'll be able to help you figure out what's going on here.

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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 

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We've had a recent issue where slack channels are not showing up when an agent clicks into side conversations. Previously, all the channels would show in a drop down but now agents have to manually type the channel to even see it. Was there a recent update that could have caused this?

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Cheeny Aban

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Charlie,

This seems to be related to Migrating the legacy Slack for Zendesk integration to the new Slack integration. Further, I saw that one of our Customer Support is already helping you regarding this incident

 

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In the situation that all my colleagues have access to zendesk (as light agents) why should I use side conversations instead of internal notes?

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Hi @...

Short answer: You shouldn't, IF your colleagues get notified properly.
Big difference is that the Side Conversation arrives as a TO not a CC mail.

Depending on your organizational rules, this may make a difference in the way it is handled by the receivers.

We use Side Conversations to incorporate third parties or seemingly unrelated internal entities in tickets, or when we know that the light agents will just discard all of their hundreds of CC notifications instead of scrutinizing them. 

Hope this clarifies things.

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Thanks. By setting triggers where condition comment = private I should be able to set some proper notifications. 

If i assign a ticket directly to an agent and subsequently I make a internal note, then it arrives also as a TO mail (due to trigger set). Or will it arrive as a CC when I allocate it to a group of agents?

 

 

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You cannot assign a ticket to a light agent, thus, you have no means to send a TO notification to a light agent.

I guess that's a matter whether you use CCs & Followers or not. With us, (no CC's & Followers), Light Agents can only get a CC notification, except if you send them a Side Conversation.

 

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That's correct, thanks. This makes side conversations a better solution.

What is also possible is to assign the ticket to a group of light agents. You can make groups of light agents as long as there is one real agent part of the group. 

 

 

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Clever! TAT for this tip.

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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

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Hi Adam -
 
Here you go! Mobile App Side Conversations

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Hi Zendesk.

We have an issue since last week.

Before, in a side conversations when we use to select a comment to include it in a side conversation the text was keeping his look whether it was HTML or Markdown.

Now, the comments transferred are get their look with all the markdown or HTML stuff (stars **, tags <a> ,(( )) etc..) mostly a lot of stars like and no line break at all: 

*FaceBook**** | ****Blog**** | ****Catalogue** 

 

Can you do something?

This doesn't happen when we use "transfer by email".

 

Best regards,

Raphaël

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Hello Raphaël,
 
A patch has been deployed on Monday to correct this issue.
 
I'm sorry for any inconvenience caused by this issue.

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Kai B

Zendesk Luminary

We have numerous users working in groups who work shifts so may need to reply to side conversations on each other's behalf, however, when we reply to a side conversation using a different agent it adds in the original agent

e.g. Agent A starts a side conversation to a supplier and the email is sent from our platform email address. The reply comes in when Agent A is offline due to their day off so Agent B picks it up to respond.

When they click into the side conversation box to reply, Agent A's account email address is added as a recipient (agenta@companyname.com) and is then sent to the supplier in the "to" field of the email, meaning that they now have the personal email address of that agent moving forwards. I can see how this can be useful in some circumstances, but for us, we don't want to publish the personal email address. Is there a way that we can stop this from happening? 

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We have the same concern as Kai.

In addition, for a Side Conversation child ticket, we have a similar situation.  Agent A creates the Side Conv child ticket.  While Agent A is off work (shift-wise or vacation-wise), Agent B wants to follow-up on the ticket / be able to respond to the assignee on the child ticket.  However, only Agent A as the requester on the child ticket can update the parent ticket Side Conv that created the ticket.

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Toby Sterrett

Zendesk Product Manager

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?

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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? 

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Toby Sterrett

Zendesk Product Manager

Carl Hajal currently that's only possible with macros, though we are going to do some investigation into supporting placeholders in general in the general text itself. Out of curiosity, why would you rather do this manually than with a macro? Thanks!

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Kai B

Zendesk Luminary

@...

I think out of those options B (BCCing them instead of adding them as a CC) would be fine for us - the agent who is offline doesn't always need to see the response as long as it's being picked up by someone else, but they may wish to be kept informed.

Our key concern is that we don't end up publishing the work email address of that agent to the recipient of the side conversation as a CC because it runs the risk of people trying to contact that agent directly, which takes it out of Zendesk and could cause issues.

I appreciate that agents can remove this manually, but it's making sure they remember to do it and it's also a reduction to efficiency. 

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Toby Sterrett

Zendesk Product Manager

Kai B thanks for the feedback!

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@..., thank you for the suggestions - I am not sure these will work, but I am hoping you can prove me wrong. :)  My comments are in italics.

1) 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)

Our child tickets are typically created for a different team, so Group A assignee creates child ticket for Group B.  We would have to ask Group B assignee through a different system outside of Zendesk or through a new Side conversation email on the parent ticket to the Group B assignee on the child ticket.  However, we are trying to keep our team working within Zendesk.  It seems a bit counter-intuitive to ask Group B in a separate system, like Outlook or Teams, to please change the requester especially if the requester is just out for the day.  

2) 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

The issue is not the original assignee.  Our challenge is that Group A assignee is out of office, so another Group A colleague needs to follow-up on the child ticket.  However, no one else in Group A can add a reply to the child ticket.  Yes, we could ask for the Group B assignee on the child ticket to add the Group A back-up colleague to the ticket, but again, it seems like we are having to go outside of Zendesk to make this ask.

Preference: it would be preferable that if the assignee on the parent ticket changes, that assignee can write replies on Side Conv child tickets (via the parent ticket) created by the previous assignee in that group.  

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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

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Toby Sterrett

Zendesk Product Manager

@... 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.

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Toby Sterrett

Zendesk Product Manager

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:

  • If there are multiple side conversations in the ticket this loses accuracy
  • The agent needs to either reply or close the side conversation to remove the tag, since there's no "side conversation is viewed" event.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas for now. We have some thinking going into a much more robust approach for the future.

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Hello, some of our agents have a problem. If they open a new side conversion window and write a lot of text - if they then switch to another Zendesk tab to check something without submit the new side conversion, the complete draft is lost. 

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Jupete Manitas

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Maik, thanks for writing in. May we know if the agent has tried clicking the plus + sign again after visiting other tabs and selecting the side convo channel where they write their draft (Ticket or Email) if the draft is still there? We did a test on our test account and the draft message are still there after visiting other tabs. 

 

Thank you!

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