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 social 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, customized conversation flows, 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.
- Social channels (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, LINE, and more) lets 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 conversations with customers. These conversations can include greetings, specific article suggestions, information-gathering fields and 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)
- 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 .
42 Comments
Thanks @.... That's useful feedback. We've made a note of that on our side for future consideration.
- Miranda.
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 intention, that I think it really needs to be supported better.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
所以消息传递是代替了原来的chat功能是吗？
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。
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!
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.
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?
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