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Side Conversation Limitations



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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

Posted Oct 10, 2023

Overview of your product feature request or feedback and note who in your org is affected by this issue [ex. agents, admins, customers, etc.].

  • Side Conversations are a fundamental function among our teams. We all use Side Conversations to communicate to third parties (email) and among teams (child tickets) every day and almost on every ticket (we get 9000+tickets a day)
  • Unfortunately, there are more limitations we are experiencing by continuing to use Side Conversations which: slows down our team (time equals money), causes lost communication (possible legal complications), frustration, lost visibility, reduced faith in processes, reduced reliability, and not a good user experience

Integral core functions that are missing:

  1. Change in Assignee/Updater: If you are not part of the child ticket (didn't initiate it) and you do not have access to the group it was started with, you CANNOT continue the conversation. Someone needs to add you to the Child ticket as a CC/Follower (easier said than done as you cannot see the ticket ID that you need to be added to) - FIXED
  2. Visibility: If you are not part of the Child ticket, you cannot see the Status of the child ticket, the Group it is assigned to, or the Ticket ID that is created. Which means that you can't tell when you don't have access to the child ticket vs. when the Child ticket is Closed
  3. Private Group Child ticket: There was recently a launch for Private groups which restricts access to Private Groups even if you submitted the request. This also applies to Child tickets. Which means even the requester CANNOT update their own Child ticket that they created
  4. Parent ticket follow-up: When a child ticket closes, you cannot update the Child ticket anymore (this is new functionality) to help ensure conversations were not lost as there were no follow ups being created for child tickets. However, this does not apply when the PARENT ticket closes. As such, a child ticket can respond to the parent ticket, but it does not provide any update on the parent ticket. And there is no indication on the child ticket that the conversation is closed (you can click on link but only if you have access to ticket). And there is no follow up ticket created for the parent ticket either

     

Feature requests:

These suggestions are to just bring Side Conversations up to par with regular ticket interactions.

  1. Grids/tables: Ability to use grids/tables within Side Conversations. We have macros that use templates to be filled in for teams, but it cannot be copied, pasted or added via macro.
  2. Text editing capabilities: Additional text editing capabilities (colors, formatting, etc.). Same as the current ticket text editor
  3. Print/export Side Conversations: Ability to print/export Side Conversations. Right now, there are no solutions for being able to export a Side Conversation and our teams need to sometimes be able to include a conversation in another ticket as an attachment.
  4. Amount of Child tickets: There is a limit of 50 child tickets in one ticket. This prevents the use of certain workflows (communication to agents, bulk notifications, etc.)
  5. Signature formatting/Simplified threading: There can be a rather lengthy thread and repeat signatures/previous replies all extend the conversation. Tickets can have a minimize option so it would be nice to include that for Side Conversations to make them easier to read.
  6. Internal notes: Side Conversations can get long so you end up needing to read the entire conversation over again (imagine having 5 SC to read and the ticket exchanging assignees).
  7. Conversation order: With layout builder we can change the order of the ticket but it does not reflect on Side Conversation

What problem do you see this solving?

Core functionality: Right now, it is the expectation that when you talk with other teams, they always get your messages, and that assignee can handle a ticket to 100% of their ability without loss of access. This is not the case so when it happens, it causes backlogs, support tickets, investigations, informing, training, meetings, new workflows, etc. Side Conversations should make our lives easier and not harder.

New features: These would bring Side Conversations back up to being on par with ticket functionality (they aren't new features but new to Side Conversations).

Goal: A seamless conversation among groups where access and functionality are not lost

When was the last time you were affected by this lack of functionality, or specific tool? What happened? How often does this problem occur and how does this impact your business?

I get questions daily about side Conversations and the missing functionality or the behavior limitation.

Impact:

  1. Change in Assignee/Updater: I currently have 5 tickets about that as the original assignee went on vacation and handed over tickets to other team members. They are unable to update the Child tickets that were started by the original Assignee. I had to create an article, create a reminder communication among the team (not the first time), provide training, add the new assignees as followers, inform managers, etc.- FIXED
  2. Visibility: I get at least one ticket a day asking why they can't update a Child ticket, only to find out the ticket is Closed (even if it wasn't, they couldn't update it due to the access limitation).
  3. Private Group Child ticket: We got about 12 tickets when this first rolled out due to the limitation that even requesters could not update their Child tickets for a private group (we only have 3 private groups but are wanting to add more). This resulted in an escalation, a Zendesk ticket for investigation, a review of Private groups and Roles.
  4. Parent ticket follow-up: There is a ticket for this a week regarding why a response from a child ticket did not inform the assignee of the parent ticket. A ZD ticket was created for investigation, a review of workflows.

Are you currently using a workaround to solve this problem? 

Core Features:

  1. Change in Assignee/Updater: You have to submit a ticket to IT and then they will add the new Assignee to the Child ticket as a CC/follower to allow them access (this has to be done every time the Assignee changes).
  2. Visibility: We had to create a webhook that will add the ticket ID and group it is assigned to as a public comment, so it shows on the Parent ticket for visibility. We are going to need to create another for when status changed to Closed.
  3. Private Group Child ticket: We had to request to be excluded from this feature update as you cannot reverse a Group from being a Private group and we did not want to grant all ticket access or group access.
  4. Parent ticket follow-up: we are looking into a workflow that will close the child ticket when the parent ticket closes.

Feature requests:

  1. Grids/tables: The team applies a macro to an internal note with the template, the agent fills in the details and then submits the comment. Then they use another macro to start the Child ticket and they chose the function of copy comments from the parent ticket so it can be included (better hope there are no typos).
  2. Text editing capabilities: None
  3. Print/export Side Conversations: None - we can use API, but this is not widely known or used as it is not typical Agent functionality, only admins.
  4. Amount of Child tickets: A new ticket needs to be created to complete the tasks.
  5. Signature formatting/Simplified threading: None
  6. Internal note: To summarize a side conversation, you can add an internal note within the parent ticket but it gets very messy very fast if you have more than one ongoing SC.
  7. Conversation order: None

What would be your ideal solution to this problem? How would it work or function? 

Core Features:

  1. Change in Assignee/Updater: If you have access to the parent ticket, you should be able to access and edit the Child ticket.
  2. Visibility: No matter the access of the Agent, they should be able to tell who the Child ticket was created for (Group), the Ticket ID, and the status of the Child ticket
  3. Private Group Child ticket: It should not matter if it be a Private or a Public Child ticket, it should still be able to be updated if you are accessing it from within a parent ticket.
  4. Parent ticket follow-up: Either the parent ticket needs a follow up ticket created for when an update is made from child ticket, or the child ticket needs to close so it can't be edited (it would then mirror the functionality of when a child ticket closes).

Feature requests:

  1. Grids/tables: A grid/table can be pasted/created/edited within a new side conversation (any type of Side Conversation)
  2. Text editing capabilities: Text editor toolbar that is present in tickets is visible and usable within Side Conversations
  3. Print/export Side Conversations: You can choose to export or print the entire Side Conversation (any type of Side Conversation) 
  4. Amount of Child tickets: The removal of the limit for how many Side Conversations can be created.
  5. Signature formatting/Simplified threading: Just like in current ticket functionality, Agent signatures are added on the backend (tickets add them via triggers), there is simplified threading to reduce the amount of duplicate text shown.
  6. Internal note: It functions same as in tickets so you can add an internal note within any of the Side Conversations started (a summary, next steps, etc) so that it is easy for the next Agent to pick up (or help refresh yourself on what to do next).
  7. Conversation order: Have layout builder impact comment order in Side Conversations to keep the behavior universal

Related feedback posts (thank you everyone!)

Ability to update child ticket if you have access to parent ticket

Tables/Grids

Print Side Conversations

Exporting Side Conversations

Side Conversation 50 limit

Side Conversation signature formatting


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25 comments

Official

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Toby Sterrett

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi Sydney, thanks for the great, comprehensive feedback! Much of the feedback regarding child tickets is currently being worked on by the team. 

Re: your feature requests:

Grids/tables: A grid/table can be pasted/created/edited within a new side conversation (any type of Side Conversation)

We will be investigating support for displaying tables within the editor to support pasting and inclusion from e.g. macros. We are not planning the table creation aspect at this time, but we'll evaluate it along with the basic display support.

Text editing capabilities: Text editor toolbar that is present in tickets is visible and usable within Side Conversations

Is this referring to a bug in the display of the toolbar, or that you are looking for the same toolbar as the main ticket editor?

As an aside, we are not able to use the same ticket editor within side conversations due to some issues that tie it to the ticket. We are continuously evaluating changes that could be made to it to support better portability, but it's not something we have direct control over.

Print/export Side Conversations: You can choose to export or print the entire Side Conversation (any type of Side Conversation) 

We've done some exploration here to limited success. We'll be looking into what it would take to get side conversations included in the main ticket print. However, this looks like you're looking to print/export individual side conversations as well?

Amount of Child tickets: The removal of the limit for how many Side Conversations can be created.

Please contact us with a ticket so we can work with you on adjusting this limit. I'd love to get an idea for the use case that requires more than 50 tickets.

Signature formatting/Simplified threading: Just like in current ticket functionality, Agent signatures are added on the backend (tickets add them via triggers), there is simplified threading to reduce the amount of duplicate text shown.

Is this referring to the collapsing of signatures and quoted content? If so, if you create a ticket with some specific examples of side conversations that aren't collapsing correctly (and appearing to have duplicate text) we can add it to our test suite to determine why it isn't being collapsed correctly.

Internal note: It functions same as in tickets so you can add an internal note within any of the Side Conversations started (a summary, next steps, etc) so that it is easy for the next Agent to pick up (or help refresh yourself on what to do next).

Is this specifically referring to email side conversations? Or supporting internal notes in child ticket side conversations?

If you open the SC and close the ticket, it is preserved onto the next ticket and if there are no SC, it is wasted space and so many clicks to go back to what you want. You can set a layout but if there is already a layout set, it limits what you can do

This is the way the context panel works, not a side conversation specific behavior. I can pass the feedback along to the context panel folks though.

The Send and the Submit button are so close to each other that Agents are clicking on the wrong one and not noticing. especially if you have to scroll further down to hit the right submit button (it would be nice that if you didn't actually make a TICKET UPDATE, the submit button is greyed out)

We're aware of and working on a way to address this issue.

Steven Aranaga

The ability to see child conversations as such would be great in ticket views.  There is nothing that indicates that a ticket is a child of another.  This would be super helpful in exporting data to show the relationship that some tickets have to others.

Child tickets have a channel type of "side conversation" so you could potentially filter on that, or show the channel column.

Thanks again!

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@... Some great feedback here. :)

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Thanks for the post.
I have similar feedback from different users.
Somemore:
-when using side conversation to create child tickets via Macro, we can't assign to specific agent. Only group can be selected. 
-child ticket mark done does not sync up with child ticket status.

Thank you

5


Great rundown! I just want to add one additional consideration here - audit. We need to be able to audit our tickets. Frequently we'll have a refund request submitted, which needs to be approved via side conversation. For audit purposes, we need to export the ticket and related communications. This would simplify that process.

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Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

Hey Sydney, thank you for taking the time to provide us with your feedback and for consolidating feedback from other users as well. This has been logged for our PM team to review and we will continue to monitor for more feedback. Since there is quite a bit of information in this post, I want to manage expectations that we may not be able to provide comprehensive updates in bulk. Thank you for your understanding. 

For others who may be interested in these feature requests, please continue to add you support by upvoting this post and/or adding your use case to the the comments below. Thank you again!

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The ability to see child conversations as such would be great in ticket views.  There is nothing that indicates that a ticket is a child of another.  This would be super helpful in exporting data to show the relationship that some tickets have to others.

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Jamie Noell

Zendesk Luminary

Wholeheartedly agree with all of Sydney's points.  Our team is to the point of not wanting to use Side conversations primarily due to lack of visibility of the Side Conversation child ticket and lack of printing, which is unfortunate as we would have to return to something like the Linked Ticket add-on app.

There are so many great aspects to Side Conversations, and I hope Zendesk will continue to invest in this feature set.

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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

+2 more items:

Side Conversations moved to the Context panel

1. If you open the SC and close the ticket, it is preserved onto the next ticket and if there are no SC, it is wasted space and so many clicks to go back to what you want. You can set a layout but if there is already a layout set, it limits what you can do

2. The Send and the Submit button are so close to each other that Agents are clicking on the wrong one and not noticing. especially if you have to scroll further down to hit the right submit button (it would be nice that if you didn't actually make a TICKET UPDATE, the submit button is greyed out)

 

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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

@... 

  • We are looking for the same ticket editing toolbar that is present in macros and Ticket. Where you can set colors of text, underline, etc. Reason being is that we have macros that have tables with colored text but then when it is applied to Side Conversations, it stops working. The design is to make it easier to fill in and is a template they are familiar with
  • Yes we need to be able to print Side Conversations, all or certain ones on the ticket. We have conversations that need to be escalated at times and due to PII restrictions, we need to limit which ones get printed or we may need to print all on the ticket (there can be quite a few on a ticket). We need it simple for our agents working tickets. So if there was an option to do checkboxes on which conversations to print
  • We don't have any workflows in place but it is something we have thought of before. For example, sending a bulk conversation to many users at a time.
  • We would like internal notes for all kinds of Side Conversations (email, ticket, teams, etc). It is all tied to the parent ticket but having internal notes always showing on the parent ticket does not help what internal note is for which side conversation. It would be beneficial if you could leave notes within Side conversations so that you know what each is about, next steps, etc.
  • Yes thank you for looking into issue with the send button. I ran into this earlier where I wrote a large SC so it pushed the send button down behind the Submit button. So out of habit and clicked what I thought was send but it was the submit button. And so it went WEEKS without me noticing that I didn't actually send it. We have gotten many complaints regarding this
  • Yes I am aware of the channel is side conversation but we would like to know which one is a parent side conversation vrs a child. 
  • There is one more feedback item that I forgot to include and that was to have a conversation marker as to how many SC are on the ticket. Right now, you can only tell if there is a side conversation if it is unread. But as soon as it is read, you can't see how many there are or if there are any. Right now we have to check the Side Conversation button on EACH ticket just to see if there are any. This is adding clicks, getting forgotten, etc.

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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

@... 

Additional feedback:

- when you get a reply to a SC, the ticket reopens and there is a little indicator within the ticket stating there is a reply to a SC. However if you are already working on the ticket and submit it, you may miss the SC update entirely and not notice. Is there a way to have a view of unread SC? Or a way to see all SC you have open on tickets? The only way that I can find to know if a ticket has a SC, is to actually go into the ticket and OPEN SIDE CONVERSATIONS - as there isn't even an indicator as to how many SC may be open on a ticket

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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

+feedback:

  1. Reply threading order: We recently updated our ticket Layout to reverse the order of ticket comments. This does not apply to Side Conversations so our team is working off of 2 ticket comment layouts
  2. Side Conversation Signatures: Currently SC uses the signature box on profiles but it does not respect HTML. You have to use markup which means no colors or images. Ticket signatures can use different fields and format so we have inconsistency between email SC and ticket conversations.
  3. Number of Side Conversations on a ticket: When you go into a ticket with SC, you cannot see there are SCs on the ticket unless you manually expand the SC app. You cannot see the number of SC either. The only indicator is when you have an unread message but if no unread message, you have no idea there is a SC on the ticket.
  4. Email SC CSAT: Although we use CSAT on regular ticket interactions, there is no option to include a CSAT for an email SC so we are losing valuable data. Especially if the parent ticket is only for internal notes and SC email is where the real communication continues

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Hello,


Is there any update available regarding Private Groups & Child Tickets? We recently activated this feature, and it came to our attention that Zendesk's documentation did not specify that users in Private Groups would be unable to view Child Tickets. The issue occurs when the Agent is the Requester on the Child Ticket, as requesters should have the ability to manage their own tickets, regardless of whether the assigned group is private or not. Can you confirm if this understanding is accurate and if there is a fix in the works for this?

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Jacob the Moderator

Zendesk LuminaryCommunity Moderator

Hi Hannah Lucid 

 

That sounds like a role permissions thing. I'm not following the exact scenario as you describe it, but you may get around the issue (if appropriate) by modifying the permissions in the relevant agent role.

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Jacob the Moderator - Hello, long time no talk!

The groups we have as private have confidential information we don't want other support teams to have access too, however, our Agents will sometimes be a requester. I'm finding that Requesters who are also Agents are unable to view tickets assigned to these private groups, even though they are the requester. This applied to Child Tickets as well; the parent ticket lives with a non-private group but the child ticket is assigned to a private group. The IT agent is unable to access this child ticket even when they are the requester. 

Help would be greatly appreciated. 

 

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Jacob the Moderator

Zendesk LuminaryCommunity Moderator

Hi Hannah Lucid  😁

Have you checked if these tickets show up for the requesters in their My Requests page in Guide?

 

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Jacob the Moderator  - Great minds!

I did find this work around yesterday which will serve most of our Agents when they need to submit a ticket to the private groups, but the child tickets still boggle me. 

Why would Agents be able to access the ticket from Guide but not from Support when they are the requester?

I also found that if you add the Requesting Agent as a Follower on the ticket they can access that ticket in Support UI which just seems silly to me. 

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Jacob the Moderator

Zendesk LuminaryCommunity Moderator

Hannah Lucid 

The Guide portal access to tickets is meant for a Requester/CC use case, it makes sense to me that they would be able to see the ticket from that context - being the requester would reveal public comments only, so any private notes or private fields would remain hidden. Adding the agent as a follower creates an exception to this it seems.

 

If you're on an Enterprise plan, you should be able to further configure the Support ticket UI for the agent as requester context:

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408822560410-Changing-the-default-privacy-of-ticket-comments#topic_km4_33s_dzb

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We are also facing issues with the inability to add comments to side conversations opened to a private group (that the requester does not have access to). 
The requester is… well… the requester, so why wouldn't they be able to add to the side conversation that they themselves created towards the private group? 

If the child ticket was created via a form or email, instead of as a side conversation, the requester would have no issues adding comments/replies to the ticket conversation. 

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Christian Degn Andreasen  - I had entered a Zendesk ticket and a Zendesk support agent provided me the following information on how to open up side conversation - child tickets assigned to private groups to the requester of a ticket who is an agent:

Hope this helps!

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Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

Hey! We know that this has been a popular thread and wanted to share that we have a new EAP for Side Conversations looking at making some enhancements within this area of the product. Note, not all of the feature requests suggested here will be addressed but we want to make sure those following this request had an opportunity to share their feedback within this EAP.  Here is the link to the EAP page with more information on how to sign up. Thank you!

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Heather Rommel

Zendesk LuminaryThe Product Manager Whisperer - 2021Community Moderator

Hi team,

One thing that is missing from this AWESOME feature request list is the ability to determine what should happen if someone replies to a SC on a closed ticket. Currently when we new reply, say a month later, long after the ticket has been closed, a follow up ticket is created.

We do not think new tickets should be automatically created, as this can create clutter and we would like to (as admins) decide what happens next…

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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

+1 feedback

When you create a Side Conversation Email, you can type any email. However there is no change or indication that the email address may be a secondary address. Which means that if we get reports that they didn't get a message, we check the SC to see it goes to one address but then check their profile (quite a few clicks to get there) to find out the address is secondary and that they should actually check their PRIMARY address

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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

+3 feedback items

  1. when you have a Side Conversation with a few replies, the replies automatically get minimized and the only way to find them is by searching for the ‘more messages’ link. When clicked, it reloads the Side Conversation with the messages. There should be an option to always show the messages (when Troubleshooting or reading back over the messages, you have to expand first)

2. For some reason, replies to a Side Conversation includes the previous messages in a single message which makes the message so lengthy when it is a side panel App now and scrolling becomes a chore to find only the replies and not the previous messages

3. If you resize the side Conversation to see all the messages, when you exit the ticket, the expanded Side Conversation carries onto the next ticket which just adds more time. It would be better if there was an option to pop out the messages to make it easier to read without impacting future tickets

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Hi there,

 

Is there any development on looking into an option to include side conversation content in the main ticket? 

 

Suggestion 1: Maybe an option that same way that the side conversation can “pick” comments from the ticket, the main ticket that has side conversation can have an option to “pick” comments from side conversation to include in the main ticket thread as part of agent answer? If multiple side conversation, you can maybe pick which one before being taken to the “insert comment” pop-up.

 

Suggestion 2: If possible, also consider activate “View original email” for received email replies within the Side conversation via email conversation, so agents can at least download and attach any important side conversation replies in the main thread if needed. 

 

Suggestion 3: Maybe consider adding an option to convert an email side conversation to a ticket, as it does happen that the side conversation “gets it's own life” in terms of parallel work that's better managed in a ticket format. Not sure what the agents should do when that happens!

 

Just throwing some ideas.

 

In a b2b context with scenarios where many stakeholders are involved in main and side conversations about a task, it's a big worry for our agents that if they have an important side conversation via email, that the conversation is “locked” within the side conversation bar. You have no chance of referencing to it to external parties that are outside of the side conversation. 

 

I've tested adding the agent email to CC, so in that sense you can get a copy via email, but there is no chance to get it in as a ticket. All attempts to reply and forward land within the side conversation. Basically as a workaround, an agent should put themselves on CC, download the email in e.g. outloook, go back to ticket, and attach the mail? Cringe.

 

Happy to get any best practice/advice here in this connection!

 

PS: Child ticket is less critical, as you can at least print it. But the print has internal ticket info, which is not optimal to share externally. Referring back to suggestion 1, as it seems the most intuitive. 

 

 

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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

+1 added in Conversation order as Layout builder comment order currently does not impact the SC experience so if newest are at top in the ticket, the newest are still at the bottom in SC

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