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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 third-party channels, making it easy for your customers to self- serve or connect with your agents.
Messaging and conversation bots are easily scalable to meet your business needs. You can create a conversation bot that performs basic actions, like greeting the customer before passing them to a live agent. You can design a more complex bot that automates more of the conversation, asks the customer questions to help clearly define their support issue, routes conversations to the right agent, collects useful data from customers, and present options to help them self-solve their problems. Or you can choose a configuration somewhere in between.
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 allows you to support multiple conversational styles, from live, real-time chat functionality to asynchronous communication with your customers.
Some of the benefits of messaging are:
- Multiple channel availability. You can initiate and conduct conversations across a range of channels, such as web, mobile, and social messaging.
- Persistent conversations.Both agents and customers can have multiple interactions over a period of time in a single conversation, and can refer to earlier interactions for better context.
- Portable communication. Customers can start a conversation from home in Web Widget, then continue it on WhatsApp in line at the grocery store, for example.
- Conversational bots. Bots can automate deflection options and triage support issues before (or instead of) handing the conversation over to a live agent.
- Ticket creation, which lets agents follow up on more complex support requests through Zendesk Support.
- Integration in the Agent Workspace. As with traditional channels like email, web form, and API, messaging conversations are handled by agents in Agent Workspace, and can use familiar productivity aids to assist them.
You can deploy messaging across websites, mobile apps, and social channels. Pick and choose any combination of channels to best reach your customers:
- Website channels(Web Widget) can embed messaging in your own website or Guide help center.
- Mobile apps(iOS, Android, and Unity SDKs) deliver messaging capabilities via your customers’ mobile devices.
- Third-party channels(Facebook信使, WhatsApp, LINE, and more) let you connect with and support customers wherever they are.
Messaging benefits everyone who works on (or with) your Zendesk:
- Adminscan quickly set up messaging in the Admin Center, and can usebot builder来create automated, interactive conversation bots. These bots can greet customers, offer specific article suggestions, gather information, ask questions, and more.
- Agentscan respond to their customers at any time and continue where they left off in a previous interaction. Conversation history in theAgent Workspaceprovides agents with additional context required to respond to customers.
- Customershave 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.
Account requirements and recommendations
To enable messaging, youmusthave an account with:
- Zendesk Suite OR Support + Chat (Team plan or higher). Some social channels are only available with Zendesk Suite.
- Agent Workspace enabled. SeeActivating and deactivating the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
- At least one Chat-enabled agent. SeeAbout Staff roles in Zendesk Admin Center.
Before enabling messaging, werecommendyou have an account with:
- An active, public help center, with at least 10 articles that cover commonly-asked questions.Note:A public help center isrequiredif you plan to suggest articles from your help center in a conversation bot or autoreply. If you do not plan to use that 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. SeeLimitations in messaging functionalityfor more information.
Next steps
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 withResources for migrating from live chat to messaging.
52岁的评论
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 addemojis and gifs来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
(//www.ying8.net.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
HiBruno 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.
Hi강동영,
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。
HiMiranda 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?
谢谢!
HiXin,
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?
Miranda Burford
I could not see this page.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4412967699098
Where can I find out about Messaging's upcoming plan information?
As ofJanuary 2022, end user authentication has been available for all Zendesk customers who have messaging enabled. Detailed support documentation is listed below:
Hello! We want to activate Messaging to implement Flow builder in our actual widget. We don't want to activate Chat Live (not necessary at the moment). Can we activate messaging without the Chat? Thanks!
HiFreyja,
Yes, messaging is a different experience from live chat. When you activate messaging, agents s can continue their conversations with customers asynchronously without the need to be online.
To better understand how the messaging feature works in comparison with chat, you may check this article:Messaging vs Live Chat: Which is right for you?
Hi I've been looking into enabling messaging for our team.
是否有办法避免消息会活在end users before we are ready to set live? unintentionally we set the messaging live and received messages from customers when we were not ready and I would like to avoid this.
Also, how do you manage to authenticate users?
Thanks in advance
You can enable messaging without enabling it for the widget. Just make sure that no brands are selected on the Manage Settings for Messaging.
For the authentication, please follow the steps inAuthenticating end users in messaging for the Web Widget and mobile SDK.
Is it possible to have two instances of messaging on a website? We have customers and freelancers and we would like to have one bot for customers and one for freelancers. If this is possible, can you direct me to a resource for how we'd set this up?
It is not possible to have two instances of messaging widgets on a website. However, when building your bot builder, you can present options and build your customer and freelancer bot flow from there.
You can visit this article for more information aboutunderstanding the answer flow step types.
Hope this helps!
Hi
When messaging was turned on, our tickets have no contact details.
How can we recover these details so that we can respond.
We have turned the function off until you can offer a solution.
Thanks
Helen
We are planning to migrate from chat to messaging several of our client's instances, but we have a main blocker, metadata use with the new messaging widget.
Some months ago we got this message from product manager: Both the Ticket Field metadata and tags will be natively available within messaging and will not require an API, which is the case with Chat right now.
Could you tell us when is it going to be available?
Pleasesign in来leave a comment.