Articles in the series
Messaging lets you have rich conversations with your customers that are persistent, with full context and history. When you enable messaging, you can connect it to your website or help center, mobile apps, and third-party channels, making it easy for your customers to self-serve or connect with your agents.
As your support needs grow, you may want to automate some of this communication, such as offering a simple greeting before handing the customer over to an agent, deflecting inquiries using knowledge base articles, or extensive customized conversation flows. Many users find that the right balance for them is somewhere in the middle, between no automation and extensive conversation bot flows.
This article provides an overview of what messaging can do, the channels you can use to deliver messaging to your customers, and guidance on how to get started.
This article includes the following sections:
Understanding messaging
Messaging allows you to support multiple conversational styles, from real-time chat functionality to asynchronous communication with your customers. It's easily scalable and highly customizable.
Messaging provides the following features and benefits:- Multiple channels. You can communicate with users seamlessly across your website, help centers, mobile apps, and social messaging channels. Choose which channels you support so you can connect with and support customers wherever they are.
- Persistent conversations. Agents and end users can interact multiple times over a period of time, across different channels, all within a single conversation. This makes it easier to refer to earlier interactions and avoid asking users to repeat themselves. The increased efficiency benefits agents and end uses alike.
- Ticket creation. Tickets are generated for requests received through messaging channels, enabling agents to follow up on more complex requests through Zendesk Support when needed.
- Integrate with the Zendesk Agent Workspace. Agents can use familiar productivity aids within the Agent Workspace to handle messaging conversations, similar to traditional channels such as email. They can respond to customers at any time and continue where they left off, and the conversation history provides agents with additional context when needed without asking the user to repeat themselves.
- Conversational automations and bots. Automations and bots can enhance your customer experience by automating deflection options and triaging support issues before (or instead of) handing the conversation over to live agents. Customers benefit from the opportunity to self-solve their issues.
- Extensive customization options. Admins can quickly set up messaging channels in Admin Center. Then, depending on how much automation they want to implement in their conversational messaging workflow, they can use the bot builder to create interactive conversation bots to greet customers, offer relevant article suggestions, gather information, and more.
Requirements and limitations
Your account must meet the following requirements to be eligible to turn on messaging.
- You must have one of the following plans:
- Any Zendesk Suite plan
or
- Support + Chat subscriptions with a Team plan or above
Note: Some channels require a Zendesk Suite plan.
- Any Zendesk Suite plan
- The Zendesk Agent workspace must be activated.
- You must have at least one team member assigned to a Chat role. See About Staff roles in Zendesk Admin Center.
- You must deactivate any social messaging integrations you configured previously. See Social and third-party messaging resources.
Additionally, we recommend you have an account with an active, public-facing help center. Having at least 10 published articles that cover common questions allows you to use bots to recommend relevant articles from your help center.
Next steps
Walk through the Messaging deployment guide. The next article in the series is Designing your conversational messaging workflow, which will help ensure you're making informed decisions, are prepared with the necessary information when configuring your messaging workflows, and have clear next steps along the way.
71 comments
Miranda Burford
Thanks @.... That's useful feedback. We've made a note of that on our side for future consideration.
- Miranda.
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Daniël Nieuwendijk
Rich is good, but how about fun? Can you add buttons for customers to add emojis and gifs to the conversation? Really, emoji is such a standard tool for conveying meaning and intent, that I think it really needs to be supported better.
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Miranda Burford
Thanks for the suggestion, Daniël Nieuwendijk. It's currently possible for end users to use the system keyboard shortcuts and enter emojis into the conversation but agree that an emoji selector would make this more seamless. We'll log this feedback for future consideration.
Thanks,
- Miranda.
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Bruno Cabral
On Zendesk product update page, user authentication on messaging is said to be completed and there's a link to this article
(https://www.zendesk.com.br/whats-new/)
But it seems that this article and the one about messaging limitations (https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408822351642) are not updated yet
Can you confirm that? Can you provide more info on how that will work?
Cheers
Bruno
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Miranda Burford
Hi Bruno Cabral,
Authentication within messaging is yet to be completed. We are currently working on it and expect it to be released to customers early 2022. Apologies for the misunderstanding. What's new showed a sneak peak of what's to come!
I agree that our documentation isn't as clear as it could be. I'll chat to the team and see if we can publish a useful guide of what to expect for Authentication within messaging. Thanks for your feedback!
- Miranda.
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Austin Kang
Hi our company is using zendesk api. Is it possible to clear chat history manually? We need to show clean empty screen whenever different user logs into the app. Currently, past conversation remains regardless of different users logging in and logging out.
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Miranda Burford
Hi 강동영,
Unfortunately, we don't currently have an API available to do this within messaging but we do have a 'Forget History' setting available within your Web Widget Admin settings. Screenshot below. This will remove the conversation history and start fresh every time.
I will log your API feature request for future consideration. Hope this helps!
- Miranda.
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Yin Golden
所以消息传递是代替了原来的chat功能是吗?
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Arianne Batiles
Yin Golden 你好, 是的。你可以在消息传递随时与您的客户聊天同时透过机器人提供更好的帮助。
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Xin Bao
Hi Miranda Burford
If I understand it correctly, currently messaging does not support authentication, so we cannot automatically let our authenticated user (in our product) auth in to messaging, instead they will have to manually enter their email. Is this true?
I noticed that when I try to raise a chat ticket from Zendesk "get help", I didn't have to enter my email manually, how did we achieve that?
Thanks!
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Miranda Burford
Hi Xin,
That's correct. Authentication isn't currently supported within messaging but you can read more about our upcoming plans here, https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4412967699098.
Hope this helps!
- Miranda.
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Kellen Cox
Good day,
Is there anyway for us to control how many customers can message us through the widget at one time? We don't want customers to have a long queue wait and would rather redirect them to fill out a form if our agents are all occupied with a longer wait. Also, is there no way to include other custom fields besides Email and Name when requesting customer info through Messaging form?
1
立松貴央 TakaoTatematsu
Miranda Burford
I could not see this page.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4412967699098
Where can I find out about Messaging's upcoming plan information?
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Dave Dyson
As of January 2022, end user authentication has been available for all Zendesk customers who have messaging enabled. Detailed support documentation is listed below:
1
Freyja
Hello! We want to activate Messaging to implement Flow builder in our actual widget. We don't want to activate Chat Live (not necessary at the moment). Can we activate messaging without the Chat? Thanks!
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Arianne Batiles
Hi Freyja,
Yes, messaging is a different experience from live chat. When you activate messaging, agents s can continue their conversations with customers asynchronously without the need to be online.
To better understand how the messaging feature works in comparison with chat, you may check this article: Messaging vs Live Chat: Which is right for you?
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Rebeca
Hi I've been looking into enabling messaging for our team.
Is there a way to avoid messaging going live for end users before we are ready to set live? unintentionally we set the messaging live and received messages from customers when we were not ready and I would like to avoid this.
Also, how do you manage to authenticate users?
Thanks in advance
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Dane
You can enable messaging without enabling it for the widget. Just make sure that no brands are selected on the Manage Settings for Messaging.
For the authentication, please follow the steps in Authenticating end users in messaging for the Web Widget and mobile SDK.
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Damara Allen
Is it possible to have two instances of messaging on a website? We have customers and freelancers and we would like to have one bot for customers and one for freelancers. If this is possible, can you direct me to a resource for how we'd set this up?
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Joyce
It is not possible to have two instances of messaging widgets on a website. However, when building your bot builder, you can present options and build your customer and freelancer bot flow from there.
You can visit this article for more information about understanding the answer flow step types.
Hope this helps!
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Helen Wright
Hi
![](/hc/user_images/kAgBjZsd_GdM9_MBHZdEOQ.png)
When messaging was turned on, our tickets have no contact details.
How can we recover these details so that we can respond.
We have turned the function off until you can offer a solution.
Thanks
Helen
1
Borja Cuadrado
We are planning to migrate from chat to messaging several of our client's instances, but we have a main blocker, metadata use with the new messaging widget.
Some months ago we got this message from product manager: Both the Ticket Field metadata and tags will be natively available within messaging and will not require an API, which is the case with Chat right now.
Could you tell us when is it going to be available?
0
Chen Ming Coudamy
With Messaging, can we use our own web widget instead?
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Greg Barra
Hello, our team just enabled Messaging and updated the snippet to improve the experience within our product. However, when this change was made, it seemed to break the web form used through the 'Submit a Request' button. When attempting to submit a request through the web form, it doesn't redirect the user to another page. Instead, we only observed a brief flicker and remained on the same page. No ticket was submitted.
Would these two things be related? Has anyone experienced this with a web form?
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Mike DR
0
Testing
Hi! There is a way to know when messaging/live chat is offline using developer API?
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Paolo
You can utilize the Agent Status Counts to determine if live chat is offline. This will return the number of agents that are currently online, away, or invisible. If there are no online agents, it means that the whole chat account is offline. For messaging, I'm afraid that there is no API endpoint for it yet.
I hope this helps!
Best,
Paolo | Technical Support Engineer | Zendesk
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Testing
Thanks for answering Paolo. I need to hide the bubble chat when chat is offline. I scheduled a business hours and I get the offline message when is outside hours but can I hide the bubble instead send a offline message?
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Testing
We use web widget classic but Zendesk sent a mail about update to Zendesk Agent Workspace and now live chat is messaging. We used this code in js to hide the bubble chat but in messaging we dont have departments
let status = departments.getDepartment(CSDepartment)["status"];
if (status === 'online') {
$zopim.livechat.button.show();
}else{
$zopim.livechat.button.hide();
}
Is there a way to do this with groups or messaging chat to hide the bubble chat when is offline?
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Paolo
For Messaging widget, you may use the following codes in this document: Core messaging Web Widget API. If the Content.data.agents_online = 0 > This means, no agent is online to take the Chat, then set your Widget to set your widget to Close. Your code in response to the agent online count to 0, run the following function >
zE('messenger', 'close');
If you have any clarifications or further questions regarding this, I highly recommend reaching out to our Support Team for us to better assist you. More information here: Contacting Zendesk Customer Support.
Best,
Paolo | Technical Support Engineer | Zendesk
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