An expert guide to Zendesk Conversation Flows in 2025

Trying to keep up with customer support queries when you’re growing can feel like you’re constantly one step behind. As the tickets pile up, you know you need automation to handle the routine stuff so your team can focus on the tricky problems.

If your team is already using Zendesk, it's only natural to look at their built-in solution: Zendesk Conversation Flows. It's a capable tool, for sure. But "capable" often comes with a side of complexity, a tricky setup process, and pricing that isn't always straightforward.

This guide will walk you through what Zendesk Conversation Flows actually are, how they work, their biggest drawbacks, and how they compare to newer, more flexible AI solutions you can get running in minutes.

What are Zendesk Conversation Flows?

So, what are we talking about here? Zendesk Conversation Flows are essentially the brains behind Zendesk's AI agents and chatbots. You use a visual "dialogue builder" to create a set of instructions, guiding customers through a conversation step-by-step. It's like building a decision tree for your bot to follow.

The whole point is to automate customer chats. This could be as simple as a bot that says hello and asks for the customer's name and issue, or something more involved, like a flow that walks someone through a return process.

These flows are pieced together from a few main parts:

• Intents: What the customer is trying to do (e.g., "check my order status").

• Replies: The pre-written responses you connect to an intent.

• Dialogue Builder: The drag-and-drop screen where you connect all the message blocks.

• Triggers: The rules that kick off a flow when something specific happens.

• Blocks: The individual steps in a flow, like the bot sending a message, waiting for a reply, or handing the chat over to a human.

Basically, you’re designing a messaging workflow from the ground up, trying to predict every possible twist and turn a conversation could take.

Setting up and managing Zendesk Conversation Flows

To get a conversation flow working, you’ll need to spend some time in the Zendesk Admin Center getting comfortable with the dialogue builder. And while it’s a visual tool, there’s a real learning curve and it helps to have some technical chops.

The dialogue builder

This is where you'll build your flows, as Zendesk explains in its own help docs. The idea is to add different "blocks" (like "send message" or "ask for information") and link them together to create conversational paths. Once you’re done, you publish it. If you mess something up, you have to go digging through the version history to undo your changes, which is just another thing to manage.

Connecting to triggers and automations

Your flows don't just work by themselves. You have to connect them to Zendesk triggers to get them to fire. For instance, you could set up a trigger to start a flow whenever a customer opens a new chat on your website.

This is where it can get a bit technical. If you want to enable more advanced bot behaviors, you might find yourself needing to manually edit the trigger's JSON code. It’s a small thing, but it shows how quickly a "no-code" tool can start feeling like it needs a developer.

The complexity problem

A simple flow for "check my order status" can quickly balloon into a massive web of dozens of blocks and conditions. What if the user isn't logged in? What if they type in the wrong order number? What if the order is split into multiple shipments? Each of these scenarios needs its own branch in your flow. Before you know it, your nice, clean flowchart is a tangled mess that’s a pain to update.

This manual, block-by-block approach is pretty different from how tools like eesel AI work. Instead of building rigid flows for every possibility, you just let the AI learn from your past tickets and knowledge base articles. It can then handle conversations on its own without you needing to map everything out.

Key features and limitations of Zendesk Conversation Flows

Zendesk's flows can do a lot, but it’s good to be aware of both their strengths and weaknesses.

Guided, structured conversations

If you have a process that needs to happen in a specific order, flows are perfect. Think about things like processing a product return, booking a demo, or walking a customer through a simple troubleshooting process. You can make sure the bot collects all the right info in the right sequence.

But the logic is completely rigid. If a customer types, "Hi, I want to return order #12345 from the UK," the bot might still ask, "What is your order number?" and then "What is your country?" It's just following the script you wrote and can't really adapt to the information the customer already gave it.

Basic API integrations

You can connect your flows to other systems to pull or push data. For example, your bot could look up an order status in your Shopify store and share it with the customer.

The catch? As folks at InternalNote have pointed out, setting this up isn't a simple one-click affair. It usually requires a developer to get the API actions configured and talking to your other systems. It's a nice feature, but not exactly user-friendly for non-technical teams.

Email and messaging channel support

You can use conversation flows on your website chat, social media channels, and even over email, which is great for consistency.

However, the features aren't the same everywhere. Zendesk's own documentation mentions that email flows can only handle one intent per conversation. This is a pretty big drawback. It means the bot struggles with complex email threads where a customer might be asking multiple questions at once.

Broader platform limitations

• Siloed Knowledge: The Zendesk AI primarily learns from your Zendesk Help Center. Getting it to learn from other places your team keeps information, like Confluence, Google Docs, or even your past ticket history, isn't a smooth process.

• No Real-World Testing: While Zendesk gives you a sandbox to play in, it doesn't have a great way to simulate how your flows will perform in the real world. You can't just test your new flow against thousands of your past tickets to see how many issues it would have actually solved.

This is a pretty big gap. In contrast, platforms like eesel AI have a simulation mode that gives you a precise forecast of your resolution rate. Plus, eesel pulls in knowledge from everywhere, from Google Docs to past tickets, so the AI has the full picture it needs to be genuinely helpful.

Zendesk Conversation Flows pricing

Zendesk Conversation Flows aren't something you can buy on their own. They're bundled into the Zendesk Suite plans, which include a bunch of AI features. The pricing is per agent, per month, which can add up quickly as your team gets bigger.

Here’s a quick look at the plans that include conversation flows (based on annual billing):

Plan	Price (Billed Annually)	Key AI & Flow Features Included
Suite Team	$55 per agent/month	AI agents (Essential), Generative replies, 1 help center, Messaging with live chat.
Suite Professional	$115 per agent/month	All of Team, plus up to 5 help centers, skills-based routing, CSAT surveys.
Suite Enterprise	$169 per agent/month	All of Professional, plus up to 300 help centers, custom agent roles, sandbox environment.

Watch out for hidden costs

The price on the tin isn't always the full story. The most advanced AI features, like "Advanced AI agents" and the "Copilot" for your human agents, often cost extra as add-ons.

On top of that, Zendesk limits the number of "automated resolutions" each plan gets. If you have a busy month and go over your allowance, you'll start paying extra fees for each additional resolution.

This per-agent, usage-capped model can make your costs unpredictable. In contrast, eesel AI's pricing is a flat monthly fee for a large number of AI interactions, with no surprise charges. You get access to all its main tools, from the AI Agent to the Copilot, on every plan.

A simpler, more powerful way to automate Zendesk support

If the complexity, limitations, and pricing of Zendesk's native tool feel like a headache, there's another way. eesel AI is an AI platform built to plug right into your existing tools like Zendesk, so you don't have to change how you work.

Go live in minutes, not months

You can forget about weeks of setup. With eesel AI, a one-click integration connects to your Zendesk account instantly. The whole platform is self-serve, so you can sign up, set up your AI, and get started without ever having to talk to a salesperson.

Bring all your knowledge together

Don't limit your AI to just your help center. eesel AI connects to all your knowledge sources without any fuss. It learns from your Zendesk Help Center, past ticket conversations, and macros, and it also plugs into Confluence, Google Docs, Slack, and over 100 other tools to build a single source of truth.

You're in control

eesel AI gives you fine-grained control to decide which kinds of tickets you want to automate. You can start with simple, common questions and let everything else go straight to your team. With a simple prompt editor and custom AI Actions, you can set your AI's tone of voice and connect it to other systems to do things like look up order details, all without needing a developer.

Test with confidence

This is where eesel AI really shines. Its simulation mode lets you test your AI setup on thousands of your past tickets. You get a clear forecast of its resolution rate and an estimate of how much you'll save before you turn it on for a single customer. You can see exactly how it would have answered real customer questions, letting you tweak its behavior and roll out automation feeling completely confident.

Moving beyond rigid Zendesk Conversation Flows

Zendesk Conversation Flows give you a native way to automate support, but it comes with a steep learning curve, inflexible logic, and a pricing model that can punish you for growing. For teams that need to move fast, it can be a frustrating path.

Modern AI support isn't about building fragile, step-by-step decision trees. It's about giving an AI access to all of your company's knowledge so it can have helpful, natural conversations. It's about using a system that learns and adapts, not one you have to constantly fix by hand.

If you’re looking for a solution that makes your life easier, not more complicated, it might be time to look beyond the built-in tools.

Ready to see how easy Zendesk automation can be? Try eesel AI for free and set up your first AI agent in just a few minutes.