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.
In this article, we’ll provide 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:
What is messaging?
Messaging is, at its core, a conversational platform, much like Zendesk’s legacy live chat. However, it upgrades live chat functionality in a number of ways, including:
- Persistent conversations, so both agents and customers can view past interactions for greater insight into their ongoing support relationships.
- Multiple channel availability, you can include it wherever your customers want to engage with your support services.
- Ticket creation, which lets agents follow up on more complex support requests through Zendesk Support.
- Automated conversation bots, created with Flow Builder, our drag-and-drop designer, can include article suggestions and customized conversational text.
- Integration in the Agent Workspace, so your agents can manage support requests coming in from all of those channels from a single, unified interface.
You can deploy messaging across three channel groups -- website, mobile apps, and social channels -- each with multiple delivery channels and configuration options. Pick and choose any combination of channels to best reach your customers:
- Website channels (Web Widget) can embed messaging in your own website or Zendesk Guide help center.
- Mobile apps (iOS, Android, and Unity SDKs) deliver messaging capabilities via your customers’ mobile devices.
- Third-party channels (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, LINE, and more) let you connect with and support customers wherever they are.
Messaging impacts everyone who works on (or with) your Zendesk:
- Admins can quickly set up messaging in the Admin Center, and can use Flow Builder to create automated, interactive conversation bots. These bots can greet customers, offer specific article suggestions, gather information, ask questions, and more.
- Agents can respond to their customers at any time and continue where they left off in a previous interaction. Conversation history in the Agent Workspace provides agents with additional context required to respond to customers.
- Customers have the opportunity to self-solve their support issues with targeted article suggestions before connecting with an agent. Conversation history helps them refer to earlier support requests, and give feedback to agents with customer satisfaction surveys.
Requirements, recommendations, and limitations
To enable messaging, you must have an account with:
- Zendesk Suite OR Support + Chat (Team plan or higher). Note that some social channels are only available with Zendesk Suite.
- Agent Workspace enabled. See Activating and deactivating the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
- At least one Chat-enabled agent. See About Staff roles in Zendesk Admin Center.
Before enabling messaging, we recommend you have an account with:
- An active, public help center, with at least 10 articles that cover commonly-asked questions.
Note: A public help center is required if you plan to use Answer Bot capabilities that refer to your help center content, such as article suggestion. If you do not want to use that Answer Bot functionality, you can have a restricted help center, or no help center.
Messaging is a constantly-growing feature, and there are some limitations to the currently-available functionality. See Limitations in messaging functionality for more information.
Get started with messaging
When you’re ready, use the following articles to learn more about messaging and how to get it up and running on your account.
- Welcome to messaging
- Getting started with messaging for web and mobile
- Getting started with social messaging
If you have been using live chat and want to transition to messaging, start with Resources for migrating from live chat to messaging.
48 Comments
Hi, is this only available for public helpcenters? Or also for redtricted helpcenters?
What reporting metrics are available in Explore? Is there a way to see how many people go through the flow?
Hi @..., your Help Center needs to be public to use Messaging.
Hi 421710464994, Here's where you can find messaging reports in the Support Dashboard:
Chat reporting
If you're on the Enterprise Suite plan with Explore Enterprise, you'll also have access to live data widgets that include messaging: Live data widgets for Explore dashboards
Hi is this possible to enable for a trial account please? I have a Suite trial with a public help centre and agent workspace enabled but I don't see any options to access or configure messenger.
Hi @...,
You should be able to enable messaging on a Suite trial account. If you haven't already, please try disabling & enabling Agent Workspace to see if that helps (that's worked for others). If not, please let me know and I'll create a ticket so we can investigate your subdomain.
Thanks,
- Miranda.
Hi @.... That has indeed helped - thanks very much!
My instance does not have an attach file button at Zendesk Messaging Widget. How could I get that button?
Hi @...,
Unfortunately, we don't support the ability for end users to upload files/attachments as yet. It's on our roadmap for future consideration and will likely be released sometime around the middle of the year.
Thanks,
- Miranda.
Hi Team.
We are currently integrating Zendesk Messaging into our app and I have one question.
Is it possible for agent to write first ? What I'm asking. When user enters the app , agent sends him some message even before user enters chat ViewController.
Thank's
Hi Maksym,
As of the moment, there is no native way to send proactive messages to the customers once they entered the app or your site. We can only send proactive messages once the customer loaded the widget. But we understand your need for this functionality so we will be marking this comment as Product Feedback.
We truly value customer feedback and your voice and votes in the product feedback topics in the community help influence future Zendesk functionality.
Hi,
Can you update the roadmap of this article?
We really want to use this feature, but Q2 is over now.
Hi @...,
Thank you for alerting us to this! Authentication is now planned to be delivered by the end of Q3 2021. We'll make sure this article gets updated.
Thanks,
- Miranda.
How do agents pick up Messages? Do they still see the flashing icon that a new "Message" is waiting, like they did for chat?
Hi, CJ Johnson. You can find the information about the agent UI for messaging in Agent Workspace for Zendesk messaging.
Hi CJ Johnson,
Yes they do!
We are currently integrating Zendesk Messaging into our app, how I add show/hide/activate methods in the web widget in my current page. is there any option for hiding the messaging launcher?
Hi @...,
You can find the messaging Web SDK APIs here, https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/zendesk-sdks/sdks/web/sdk_api_reference/. Open & Close may work for your use case today. We are planning to introduce a way to hide the messaging launcher later in the year (via a new Admin setting) so you should be able to use that in conjunction with the open & close APIs to meet your needs then.
- Miranda.
Hi @...
It is possible to set user email to the messenger email input box via API or cookie?
https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/zendesk-sdks/sdks/web/sdk_api_reference/
Our system has user email, and we want to avoid this user process, system set it automatically.
Hi Miranda,
Thank you very much!. show and hide options are work. is possible to send the customer details dynamically to a ticket in Zendesk messaging like automatically filled the user email /phone in the web page.
Hi Akhila,
It will be possible to use custom launchers with the new Messaging Web Widget but it will be a slightly different implementation to the classic Web Widget and is not live in production yet. As mentioned by my colleague, the messaging launcher will be implemented later in the year.
I hope this helps!
--
Shayne
Hi @... & @...,
You've both asked the same question here about intelligently pre-filling customer data within messaging. Messaging doesn't support authentication as yet but we have plans to do so later this year. This will include an API that you can use to identify users and pre-fill customer data.
Hope this helps!
- Miranda.
@... Is it possible to make Answer Bot unactive if user's language is not supported? I mean not to ask customer "please try to rephrase"?
Hi Slava,
Looks like this option is not possible natively, but there is a system in place for translation-related workflows in Flow Builder which is the Automatic Translation:
This can be accessed by following the instructions below:
How this'll work is, the Answer Bot messages will be translated automatically based on the user's selected browser language, so this should prevent/lessen language issues when interacting with the Answer Bot.
For more information, see Enabling automatic translation in Flow Builder
Hi Slava Skorbezh,
As Giuseppe mentioned, this isn't possible today but it is something that is being considered for the product roadmap within 2022.
Thanks,
- Miranda.
Hi Miranda,
3 months ago you wrote about authentication being delivered by end of Q3. Hoping you have good news on the status of this feature. Thank you!
@... @... Thanks for your answers. As for now, Messaging doesn't support even languages that legacy Zendesk products support. Our clients are chatting with us mostly in Ukrainian, Russian and English. The Ukrainian language is supported by Zendesk Chat, Zendesk Guide and Agent Workspace. But still no support in Messaging. It would be great to use Messaging as a product, of course with limitations for such languages (I mean hard-coded flows including CSAT collection).
Hi Blake E.,
Nice to hear from you.
Unfortunately, we've had some delays and Authentication for messaging has now been moved to Q4. This is still a priority for us and we are hoping to have it released as quickly as possible. Stay tuned.
- Miranda.
Hi, when will the authentication be ready for Messenger? It was promised to be delivered in Q2 (by implementation team). Now its already Q4. Any update?
Hi @...,
Thanks for your question! Authentication is a top priority for us within messaging but unfortunately, it's been pushed out until later this year (within Q4). Stay tuned!
Thanks,
- Miranda.
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