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 the Ticket: Side conversation conditions and actions in the Ticket trigger conditions and actions reference.
- 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.
Sde conversations are created from the context panel.
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.
126 comments
HenaMathew
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.
0
Gabriel Manlapig
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.
1
Glen Schneider
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
2
Anne Ronalter
thank you for your Feedback on this.
At the moment, it is unfortunately not possible to take over the priority into a child ticket.
In the article Using side conversation child tickets it is stated, that no ticket data will be inherited from the Parent ticket to Side conversation tickets and that also includes the ticket's priority.
As a workaround, what you could do, would be Using macros to start side conversations that set ticket fields using a particular macro, however, this will still have to be done manually.
For now, there is no option to transfer data from Parent to Child tickets from side conversations.
This feature will soon be available on an EAP, you can sign up here for it.
Best regards,
0
Glen Schneider
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
0
Stephen
Hi Anne Ronalter,
Thank you for sharing this link to the beta. As Glen mentioned there is a feature whereby you can set certain fields to be passed to the Child Ticket:
However, I would love to know if this Beta is more robust and would allow settings things like:
The use case is effectively that for some escalations from our L1 team, there may be a dedicated Ticket Form they need to fill in for the other team. Being able to treat a child ticket logged via a Side Conversation as a ticket form to be completed, would improve the experience.
0
JJ Breen
Jason Fouchier Jamie Noell @...,
I had an agent reach out to one of our partners today via a side conversation and then a second time and then call them to no avail.
I send a direct email from my email client to the partner and found via auto-reply that he is out of the office until next week.
I checked our suspended tickets and saw no indication that a reply was quarantined or suspended.
Did anyone ever find a resolution to bounce-back emails not propagating into Side Conversations and/or Suspended tickets?
0
Julio H
Side Conversations created via email, when they receive a bounced email, the email will arrive to the suspended view.
End user can set up send the OOO, only to contact emails, or similar settings, if this is the case, the Side Conversation might not receive the bounced email to appear in the suspended view.
Side conversation sent:
OOO set up:
OOO arrived to the suspended view:
I hope this help!
0
Frank Ledwidge
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
0
Dylan Banker
This should be integrated with Microsoft Teams
1
Ian Marston
Dylan Banker Zendesk are developing side conversations integration into Teams, it is currently in the EAP, so you may want to contact Zendesk to take part. Hope that helps!
0
Colleen Hall
Thank you, Ian Marston!
Yes, Microsoft Teams in side conversations is currently part of an early access program (EAP). Dylan Banker you can lean more about signing up for the EAP here and using MS Teams for side conversations here.
0
Permanently deleted user
can we change the email name / would it be better if we could change the sender's email address, when we use side conversation via email?
0
Christine Diego
Hi @...,
Side conversation notifications are sent from the support address associated with the ticket that the side conversation is on. That being said, if you change the associated email address using Select an address, you can change side conversation sender address.
0
Bruno Cruz
Hi everyone!
Any plans of integrating Google Chat (Workspaces) as a side conversation channel?
0
Support Team
It seems that the side conversations often end up in my colleagues spam folder. How can we avoid that? These are colleagues using the same e-mail domain, but they are not necessarely agents.
0
Cheeny Aban
Since you are under the same organization, I would suggest that you consult your system admin or the people who manage your organization email to verify why the emails are going to the spam folder of your colleagues. They can inspect incoming emails and review the possible causes.
0
Andres
We're using side convos to coordinate with third-parties. I've managed to set up a trigger to let us know when a side-conversation is created and when it is replied to, but I can't find a way to include the actual update, what the reply actually was. We need to click on the ticket to open in Zendesk then open side convos - which aren't available on the mobile app.
Is there a way to include the actual side-convo update in the email trigger - or any other way I can see what the side-convo update was on a mobile device?
0
Dane
Would you mind posting your use case to our Feedback on Support topic? This is to help get more visibility and votes on the idea. Then, others can share their use cases to further drive demand for that feature. Thanks!
0
Andres
Hmm ok that's a shame - put int the suggestion https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/6653763636762-Ability-to-include-side-convo-in-ticket-update
0
Whitney S.
benefit to using side conversation over internal notes?
0
Andres
Side convos can include external email addresses
2
Peter Hochstrasser
Hey @Whitney S.
Side conversations can include literally anybody - your internal experts as well as involved 3rd parties. On their part, no license is required.
0
Corrina Allen
I was just wondering if we use side conversations, does the request (client) see what we are writing? Or get notified everytime we make a side comment.
This sounds like a great feature to keep the conversations we have about a ticket in slack post to the zendesk ticket.
I want to be 100% sure before proceeding that our clientele doesn't see our internal conversations.
0
Kai
No, clients cannot see side conversations in Zendesk, nor are they notified about them. Side conversations are private communication channels used by agents to collaborate internally without involving the client.
0
Melissa B
We use side conversations to escalate tickets to various slack channels, all groups that do not operate in Zendesk regularly. I'd like to report on how many times we do so, AND to what channel. I can see a trigger option to add a tag to a ticket when a new slack side conversation is created/updated/etc, but not to which channel. Is there another way to do this that I'm not thinking of?
0
Cristian
Thank you for the question. In this case, you may be able to create macros that create side conversations, along with adding a tag to the parent ticket.
This way, you should be able to have one macro for each Slack channel, with a tag specific for it. Then, you can make the difference between the channels, as each macro opens a Slack side conversation for a specific channel.
I hope this helps.
1
Michael Miller
We need to be able to change how the side conversation presents itself in Slack. We want some custom fields to show up in the main message without needing to click on it.
0
ZdS
I made 2 side conversations (email) on 2 different tickets.
However, both side conversations have the same subject.
This causes 2 tickets with 2 side conversations to join the same email to the recipient.
Is there a way to keep the emails separate? because the tickets are different
0
Michelle Nebel
I am a part of an organization that has several support email address that handle tickets for their corresponding teams. Why am I unable to start side conversations with another/different support address? The different teams/addresses need to often consult with each other on tickets. What is the best way to do this if I am unable to start a sider conversation with a support address?
1