Side conversations are spaces in a ticket where agents can have a side conversation with a specific group of people, or discuss a specific area of concern or course of action. You can use them to organize information about a ticket.
Related articles:
Advantages of using side conversations
Problems often consist of multiple parts, and solving them often consists of conversations with different people. It gets confusing for everyone involved when all of the questions and answers are mixed together in one place without any kind of organization.
For example, let’s say you need to discuss something with your Legal team, but don’t need or want other people involved.
- Find, organize, and manage information about a specific part of an issue
- Have a conversation with the right people
- Find specific questions, answers, and replies. Ensure conversations happen outside of the main conversation with the requester
- Have multiple standalone conversations that are separate from each other
- Get outside help without pulling others into the main ticket directly
Recommendations about side conversations
- The assignee should create and manage side conversations in the tickets they're responsible for. This allows administrators to create triggers based on the assignee role, and enables easier handoff between agents.
- Set up triggers to take advantage of the side conversation event conditions to fully integrate them into your workflows and to keep agents on top of the activity within them. SeeSetting up trigger conditions for side conversations.
- Create trigger conditions for side conversations to make sure that assignees know when a side conversation is created, closed, replied to, and reopened. Without them, the agent assigned to the ticket (ideally, this person is also the creator of the side conversation) may have a hard time knowing what’s going on with a particular issue.
- Remember that the creator of the side conversation doesn't automatically receive email replies to side conversations. That’s not the default behavior. Also sending side conversations to your own support address is not supported and will result in those side conversations ending up in the Suspended tickets view.
About side conversation channels
When you create a side conversation, you can choose to have the side conversation in one of these channels:
- Email: Creates an email-based side conversation (seeCreating side conversations).
- Microsoft Teams(if enabled): Creates a Microsoft Teams-based side conversations (seeUsing Microsoft Teams in side conversations).
- Slack(if enabled): Creates a Slack-based side conversation (seeUsing Slack in side conversations).
- Ticket(if enabled): Creates a side conversation child ticket (seeUsing side conversation child tickets).Note:Side conversation child tickets can be routed by omnichannel routing. SeeAbout omnichannel routing with unified agent status.
In theAgent Workspace, side conversations are created from thecontext panel. In the standard agent interface, side conversations are created fromSide conversationsat the top of the ticket conversation pane.
| Agent Workspace | Standard agent interface |
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关于支持地址用于发送端双tions
Side conversation notifications are sent from thesupport addressassociated with the ticket that the side conversation is on (for example, support@yoursubdomain.zendesk.com). If you havemultiple brands and support addresses, side conversation notifications come from each of your support addresses (for example, support@brand.zendesk.com).
Optionally, you can use theSelect an Addressapp to control the email address that side conversation notifications are sent from. For example, the app allows you to change the default support address associated with a ticket.
If you have internal email routing rules (for example, in Microsoft Exchange), we recommend that you include references to each of your unique support addresses. Otherwise, email notification for side conversations will not be routed correctly. Check your allowlists and blocklists.
102 Comments
Hi@...
Have a look here:
https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/support/ticket_comments#make-comment-private
It is possible to make a comment private after saving it both using the API (see above) and in the UI, in the events (Ereignisse) view, where you see something akin to this:
Looks like this can be done by setting a ticket's priority when reply from side-ticket is received.
Hi,
我一直面临issues with Side conversations.
The behaviour is very erratic. A lot of times, these side conversations are not delivered. I have checked all the settings and confirmed with the team about any allowlist/blocklist or rules set that might cause this. But there isn't any.
Side conversations to other teams are not delivered which is why the team has to reach out to them using emails and other channels. I am sure you understand that this dilutes the very purpose of Side Conversations.
Can you help me understand:
Thanks.
Hi Shweta,
Because your issue may require some deeper troubleshooting, I think the best thing for you to do is contact out support team via chat from within your agent/admin interface (Option 1 here):Contacting Zendesk Customer Support
Hopefully they'll be able to help you figure out what's going on here.
Hi,
Is that possible to create email-based side conversations and add agents + end user as recipients?
Or there's a clear border like:
- email side conversation: ONLY end user
- ticket side conversation (child ticket): ONLY agents
Because we had such a ticket and the email sent to all recipients (including agents) once the side conversation created, however, only end user was shown in "To:" of the delivered email and agents even though received the email, they couldn't see their name in "to:" section and were filtered. So once the end user replied, agents didn't receive any email and basically removed from the email loop and rest of the communications in side conversation.
BR
Ethan
We've had a recent issue where slack channels are not showing up when an agent clicks into side conversations. Previously, all the channels would show in a drop down but now agents have to manually type the channel to even see it. Was there a recent update that could have caused this?
Hi Charlie,
This seems to be related toMigrating the legacy Slack for Zendesk integration to the new Slack integration. Further, I saw that one of our Customer Support is already helping you regarding this incident
In the situation that all my colleagues have access to zendesk (as light agents) why should I use side conversations instead of internal notes?
Hi@...
Short answer: You shouldn't, IF your colleagues get notified properly.
Big difference is that the Side Conversation arrives as a TO not a CC mail.
Depending on your organizational rules, this may make a difference in the way it is handled by the receivers.
We use Side Conversations to incorporate third parties or seemingly unrelated internal entities in tickets, or when we know that the light agents will just discard all of their hundreds of CC notifications instead of scrutinizing them.
Hope this clarifies things.
Thanks. By setting triggers where condition comment = private I should be able to set some proper notifications.
If i assign a ticket directly to an agent and subsequently I make a internal note, then it arrives also as a TO mail (due to trigger set). Or will it arrive as a CC when I allocate it to a group of agents?
You cannot assign a ticket to a light agent, thus, you have no means to send a TO notification to a light agent.
I guess that's a matter whether you use CCs & Followers or not. With us, (no CC's & Followers), Light Agents can only get a CC notification, except if you send them a Side Conversation.
That's correct, thanks. This makes side conversations a better solution.
What is also possible is to assign the ticket to a group of light agents. You can make groups of light agents as long as there is one real agent part of the group.
Clever! TAT for this tip.
Hello,
We'd like to put in a feature request to have Side Conversations enabled on the Mobile Application. We have many agents that are using the mobile application to maintain their tickets.
Please let me know if there is another chat for this request and we'll add to it.
Thanks
在这里你去!Mobile App Side Conversations
Hi Zendesk.
We have an issue since last week.
Before, in a side conversations when we use to select a comment to include it in a side conversation the text was keeping his look whether it was HTML or Markdown.
Now, the comments transferred are get their look with all the markdown or HTML stuff (stars **, tags ,(( )) etc..) mostly a lot of stars like and no line break at all:
*FaceBook**** | ****Blog**** | ****Catalogue**
Can you do something?
This doesn't happen when we use "transfer by email".
Best regards,
Raphaël
A patch has been deployed on Monday to correct this issue.
I'm sorry for any inconvenience caused by this issue.
We have numerous users working in groups who work shifts so may need to reply to side conversations on each other's behalf, however, when we reply to a side conversation using a different agent it adds in the original agent
e.g. Agent A starts a side conversation to a supplier and the email is sent from our platform email address. The reply comes in when Agent A is offline due to their day off so Agent B picks it up to respond.
When they click into the side conversation box to reply, Agent A's account email address is added as a recipient (agenta@companyname.com) and is then sent to the supplier in the "to" field of the email, meaning that they now have the personal email address of that agent moving forwards. I can see how this can be useful in some circumstances, but for us, we don't want to publish the personal email address. Is there a way that we can stop this from happening?
We have the same concern as Kai.
In addition, for a Side Conversation child ticket, we have a similar situation. Agent A creates the Side Conv child ticket. While Agent A is off work (shift-wise or vacation-wise), Agent B wants to follow-up on the ticket / be able to respond to the assignee on the child ticket. However, only Agent A as the requester on the child ticket can update the parent ticket Side Conv that created the ticket.
Kai Bhmm, we'll take a look. Would you essentially want the previously involved agents to not be part of the email at all, or are you thinking something more along the lines of BCCing them so they still get an email (only on that message since they wouldn't be in subsequent email replies)?
Jamie Noellwe have a couple ideas on this... one would be to synchronize the requester of the child ticket with the assignee of the parent, which would let the current assignee participate, but not the previous agent(s).
Or, we could add any agent that has ever been the assignee of the parent as followers of the children so any of them would be able to participate in the future. Which approach do you think would be preferable to you?
Hello,
In email side conversation, would it be possible to have an automatic link to the ticket in the signature of the email?
Slack side conversations include a link to the case and the case number, wondering if that is possible for email side conversations.
另外,有没有可能use placeholders (ex: {{ticket.id}}) in email side conversations? or that's only possible with macros?
Carl Hajalcurrently that's only possible with macros, though we are going to do some investigation into supporting placeholders in general in the general text itself. Out of curiosity, why would you rather do this manually than with a macro? Thanks!
Toby Sterrett
I think out of those options B (BCCing them instead of adding them as a CC) would be fine for us - the agent who is offline doesn't always need to see the response as long as it's being picked up by someone else, but they may wish to be kept informed.
Our key concern is that we don't end up publishing the work email address of that agent to the recipient of the side conversation as a CC because it runs the risk of people trying to contact that agent directly, which takes it out of Zendesk and could cause issues.
I appreciate that agents can remove this manually, but it's making sure they remember to do it and it's also a reduction to efficiency.
Kai Bthanks for the feedback!
Toby Sterrett, thank you for the suggestions - I am not sure these will work, but I am hoping you can prove me wrong. :) My comments are in italics.
1) synchronize the requester of the child ticket with the assignee of the parent, which would let the current assignee participate, but not the previous agent(s)
Our child tickets are typically created for a different team, so Group A assignee creates child ticket for Group B. We would have to ask Group B assignee through a different system outside of Zendesk or through a new Side conversation email on the parent ticket to the Group B assignee on the child ticket. However, we are trying to keep our team working within Zendesk. It seems a bit counter-intuitive to ask Group B in a separate system, like Outlook or Teams, to please change the requester especially if the requester is just out for the day.
2) we could add any agent that has ever been the assignee of the parent as followers of the children so any of them would be able to participate in the future
The issue is not the original assignee. Our challenge is that Group A assignee is out of office, so another Group A colleague needs to follow-up on the child ticket. However, no one else in Group A can add a reply to the child ticket. Yes, we could ask for the Group B assignee on the child ticket to add the Group A back-up colleague to the ticket, but again, it seems like we are having to go outside of Zendesk to make this ask.
Preference: it would be preferable that if the assignee on the parent ticket changes, that assignee can write replies on Side Conv child tickets (via the parent ticket) created by the previous assignee in that group.
On side-conversation emails, how can i set it up on views, so that you can see at a glance which tickets have had a reply to the email but it hasn't been viewed since ticket last opened?
A bit like an email client which shows new responses received in bold until the email has been opened - except in the view
@...that's essentially what I meant – anyone who isassigned to the parent ticketwill also be added as a follower on any child tickets to ensure they can interact with it even if they don't belong to the group it's in. Sorry if that was unclear. But, good to hear that approach would be your preference.
Ian Marstonat this time there's no way to show side conversation content directly in a view. However, you could do some clever trigger/macro things to make it possible to tag a ticket when a side conversation has unread messages from someone who is not the assignee of the ticket. Something along the lines of two triggers like:
The above trigger will add an "unread-side-conversation" tag when a side conversation receives a reply from anyone besides the ticket assignee.
Then, the following trigger willremovethat tag when the assignee closes or replies to a side conversation:
Then you can set up a view that filters down to tickets assigned to the current user that have the "unread-side-conversation" tag.
The downsides to this approach:
Hopefully this gives you some ideas for now. We have some thinking going into a much more robust approach for the future.
Hello, some of our agents have a problem. If they open a new side conversion window and write a lot of text - if they then switch to another Zendesk tab to check something without submit the new side conversion, the complete draft is lost.
Hi Maik, thanks for writing in. May we know if the agent has tried clicking the plus + sign again after visiting other tabs and selecting the side convo channel where they write their draft (Ticket or Email) if the draft is still there? We did a test on our test account and the draft message are still there after visiting other tabs.
Thank you!
Pleasesign into leave a comment.