Announcing improved messaging backend for new messaging customers

Rollout start	Rollout end
August 23, 2023	September 30, 2023

What is changing and why ?

Zendesk is focused on improving the agent workspace and enhancing the experience for both customers and agents. We're introducing messaging backend changes to strengthen the messaging product's core elements and enable a seamless omnichannel environment. Initially, these changes will be available to new messaging customers, with plans to extend to all messaging customers within the next two quarters. Stay tuned for more information.

Customer Segments 

Changes will first be made available to new messaging customers. In Q4 we'll start rolling out to existing messaging customers. We'll post announcement once we rollout the changes to new segment of the customers. By H1 2024 we are planning to move all the messaging customers to new messaging backend. 

This effort has three main goals:

1. Scalability: Unlocking higher magnitudes of system scale over Zendesk’s current system limits.
2. Performance: Achieving dramatic improvements in system performance.
3. Modern standards: Implementing best-in-class software practices to simplify development and deliver the best quality products to our customers.

Key customer capabilities 

• Scaling - supporting more agents and conversations 
  • Concurrent agents - we can now support up to 10,000 concurrent agents serving messaging conversations which is a 5x increase from current limits.
  • Concurrent conversations - we can now support up to 12,000 concurrent messaging conversations, an almost 3x increase from current limits. 
• Performance - with backend improvements we are making our foundational components faster. 
  • Time spent in ticket creation and making tickets available to routing systems - we expect a 60% reduction in the time it takes to create a ticket and then making it available to the routing system. 
  • Message brokering - we expect to see a reduction of up to 40% in time taken by the system to deliver messages between agents and end users. 
• Unified admin experience - with the backend changes we are also moving some of the key messaging settings to the Zendesk Admin Center. 
  • Messaging triggers - messaging triggers can now be configured from Admin Center under Objects and rules > Business Rules > Messaging triggers. For more information, see About messaging triggers in Admin center.

• Ticket transcript visibility settings -  transcript visibility settings can now be configured from Admin Center under Objects and rules > Tickets > Settings. For more information, see Managing messaging transcript visibility.

Key changes to be aware of

Rollout segment - messaging backend changes are only applicable to new messaging customers who’ll sign-up on Zendesk after the rollout. 

Opting out of messaging - with the messaging backend changes, customers will no longer be able to opt out from the messaging product on a self-serve basis. For opting out of messaging you can fill out this form. 

Messaging conversations continuity - for customers who decide to opt out of the messaging product and are interested in using Zendesk Chat:

• All messaging tickets (including social messaging) created when a customer was on messaging will lose ticket continuity. 
  • Any further engagement on the same conversation will lead to a new ticket (this time powered by the Chat backend). 
• Customers are as such advised to close all messaging tickets before choosing to opt out of messaging.

No support for mobile app 

Support mobile apps will initially not be compatible with messaging tickets and agents will be displayed a banner when they try to open messaging tickets “Sorry, messaging tickets are not supported in the mobile app at present”. This will be a short-term limitation that will be resolved before the end of October 2023.