Please Fix the Workflow for Turning on Chat for Agents
These are the steps I have to take every time I need to add an agent to Chat.
1. Go to agent profile.
2. Add them to the group/chat department you want them to be in.
3. Under "Role" click "Open in Admin Center".
4. In the new tab, check the Chat box, and hit save.
5. Open "Customize Agent in Chat". This will open yet another new tab. If you do this too soon after hitting save (like maybe less than 10 seconds), it will open a weird broken blank profile page. If this happens, sigh loudly, and try the link again.
6. Change the name for the agent to their alias, since chat will default to displaying their full name.
7. Change the number of chats allowed since there's no way to change to the default to anything but 3.
8. Hit save.
8. Close the two tabs opened by this process.
10. Close the prompt that you may have unsaved data on the chat window one, that happens no matter what if you try to close a chat platform window.
Now repeat this, 100+ times, on a tight deadline because agents literally cannot do their job until you are done doing this. This is brutal.
Please, do something about this absolutely ludicrous workflow. Three profile pages, on three separate domains, just to set up a single user on chat. None of it exposed to the API. I spend more time onboarding chat than I do on any other part of onboarding, including all third party products, due to the lack of any accessibility to automating this. I should not spend hours each year on this rote task.
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Thanks for this feedback, CJ -- I wonder if at that scale it might be better to build a script using the Chat API's Create Agent endpoint? Obviously that does take some setup, but it could make things easier in the long run.
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@... At the top of that page it states:
"If you created your Zendesk Chat account in Zendesk Support, access to the Chat Accounts and Agents APIs is restricted to GET requests. You can still use the other Chat APIs normally."
Support has confirmed that we cannot create chat agents using that endpoint. -
Hi CJ,
Sorry for the run around.
You can use the user api if you are on agent workspace/have undergone department to group migration to create agents.
Cheers,
Mei-E
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Mei-E Loh
I don't see anything on that page that would allow me to toggle on the chat license for the agents. Can you explain how I could do this with this endpoint? -
Hi CJ,
You can use the custom_role_id field which is editable on api and assign the agent that role through the api
Cheer,
Mei-E
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Mei-E Loh Could you explain how? The chat role is not a custom role. It is a completely separate role from the Support custom role. You cannot toggle chat via changing custom roles, either.
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This is a huge problem that we are also facing. How is there not even an API to support this? This makes scaling very difficult using Zendesk.
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