Working together is super important for great customer support. Sometimes your team needs to ask an expert inside the company, loop in a partner outside, or just chat about a tricky problem without making the main customer ticket messy. Having the right tools for this is key. That’s exactly what Zendesk side conversations are for. They give you a dedicated spot right inside a ticket to have those focused chats.
But what are Zendesk side conversations, really? When should you actually use them? And how can you make sure they help you get things done instead of just adding more hassle? This post will walk you through the practical ways you can use side conversations in Zendesk, share some tips to make them work better, and touch on how AI can give your team’s collaboration and efficiency an extra boost.
What are Zendesk side conversations?
Think of a Zendesk side conversation as a separate, focused chat thread tied directly to your main support ticket. It’s kind of like having a private little room attached to a customer case. Instead of using internal notes that can get buried in the main ticket history, or jumping over to other apps, side conversations keep all those related discussions neat and easy to find right there with the customer’s issue.
This feature lets agents bring in specific people or teams, whether they’re down the hall or outside your company, to get the info or help needed to close out the main ticket. You’ll find them available in Zendesk Suite plans.
Why use Zendesk side conversations?
Using side conversations offers some nice perks for support teams dealing with complex issues and needing to work together smoothly. They help keep the main ticket thread clean and focused on what you’re saying to the customer, preventing internal chats from confusing the customer or cluttering up the agent’s view.
Here are a few main reasons why they’re helpful:
- Keeps things organized: Side conversations give you a clear way to talk about specific parts of a ticket. This makes it way easier later on to track down a particular question, answer, or decision you made.
- Chat with just the right people: You can invite only the folks who need to be in a side conversation. This makes sure experts or specific teams are consulted without pulling in people who don’t need to be there.
- Separates internal talk: Your internal chats or consultations happen privately. The customer only sees the messages meant for them.
- Have multiple chats at once: One ticket might need input from different teams, like engineering and legal. Side conversations let you have these discussions happening at the same time without getting them mixed up.
- Get help from outside: It’s simple to bring in external contacts, like vendors or partners, to chat about a ticket issue via email. You don’t have to give them full access to your Zendesk.
Ultimately, side conversations make talking internally and externally about a ticket much smoother, which helps you solve things faster and makes agents more efficient. You can dig into more about the advantages in the Zendesk help center.
How Zendesk side conversations work: Channels and process
Zendesk gives you options for how you start and run side conversations, mainly through different channels. The most common ones are email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and creating a child ticket.
To kick off a side conversation from a ticket, you usually open the context panel, click the Side conversations icon, and pick the channel you want.
- Email: This is probably the most used channel. It lets you send a message to agents inside your company, light agents, or outside email addresses. You can add who you want to send it to, a subject, and even include parts of the ticket comments or attachments. You can find out more about creating email side conversations.
- Slack or Microsoft Teams: If you have these set up, you can start a chat in a specific Slack channel or Teams chat that links back to the Zendesk ticket. This is perfect for quick internal questions with teams who live in these apps. You’ll need to turn on and set up these channels first, which Zendesk explains in their guide.
- Ticket (Child Ticket): This creates a new ticket that’s linked to the main one and assigned to a different agent or group. It’s handy for handing off specific tasks related to the main issue. Zendesk’s documentation gives you more details on this channel.
You can see a list of all the side conversations on a ticket in the context panel and open any thread to see the history and reply, just like the Zendesk help center shows you.
Common use cases for side conversations
Knowing when to use a side conversation is the secret sauce to making them work for you. They’re especially useful when the main ticket needs input or action from someone who isn’t directly handling the customer chat.
Here are some common, real-life examples:
- Asking other departments for help: An agent gets a ticket about a software bug. They can start a side conversation with the engineering team using Slack or Teams to get their thoughts or report the issue without leaving the ticket screen.
- Getting a legal or compliance check: A customer’s request brings up a question about company rules or needs a legal thumbs-up. The agent can create an email side conversation with the legal department to get their advice.
- Requesting info from outside vendors: You need details from a third-party service provider to help a customer. An email side conversation lets you talk to them directly from the ticket.
- Handing off specific tasks: A ticket needs a follow-up step that another team should handle, like accounting needing to process a refund. Creating a child ticket side conversation makes sure that task is tracked and given to the right person.
- Talking through tricky solutions internally: Agents might need to brainstorm or discuss how to solve a problem among themselves before replying to a customer, especially for unusual or tough cases. A private side conversation keeps this internal chat separate.
- Getting background from sales or account management: Before replying to a really important customer, an agent might start a side conversation with the sales or account management team to get some history on the customer or their relationship with the company.
These examples show how side conversations help tidy up workflows by bringing the necessary chats and info right into the ticket. You can even add ticket comments to a side conversation to give participants useful background.
Best practices for effective side conversations
To really get the most out of Zendesk side conversations, following a few simple tips can help. These pointers can make things clearer, ensure quicker replies, and keep your support team organized.
- The main agent owns it: The agent assigned to the main ticket should ideally be the one starting and looking after any side conversations needed. This keeps communication and responsibility in one place.
- Use clear subjects: Give your side conversations subjects that make sense right away so everyone knows what you’re talking about.
- Give enough context: When you start a side conversation, quickly explain the main ticket issue and clearly say what you need from the people you’re including. It’s easy to include relevant ticket comments, as shown in the Zendesk guide on creating side conversations.
- Set up triggers: Set up Zendesk triggers to let agents know when something happens (like someone replies) in a side conversation they’re part of. This helps avoid delays in getting back to people. Zendesk actually suggests this in their article about side conversations.
- Be careful who you include: Double-check who you’re adding to the side conversation, especially with email. You want to make sure internal chats don’t accidentally go outside. Remember that BCC recipients can be seen internally, as noted in the Zendesk help documentation.
- Know when not to use them: For really simple internal notes that don’t need a separate thread or outside help, a regular internal comment on the main ticket is probably fine.
Following these tips helps make sure side conversations are a tool that helps you run smoothly, not something that causes confusion.
Limitations of Zendesk side conversations
While Zendesk side conversations are a handy feature for working together, they do have a few things they don’t do perfectly. Knowing these can help you figure out if they’re the best tool for a specific situation or if something else might work better.
Here are some limitations to keep in mind:
- Availability: Side conversations only come with Zendesk Suite plans, not the basic Support plan. This might mean businesses on lower plans can’t use them, as the Zendesk help center mentions.
- Visibility/Tracking: Other agents looking at the ticket might not see the full side discussion unless they actively open it.
- External Team Members: For Slack or Teams side conversations, making sure team members outside of support have the info they need or can easily follow updates can be tough, as a ClearFeed blog post points out.
- Email Thread Navigation: Some people have found it hard to navigate really long email threads within the side conversation window.
- Formatting Options: The options for formatting in the side conversation composer can be limited depending on the channel. For example, you might not be able to add images or tables directly in some cases, according to the Zendesk help center.
- Adding Context: Manually adding a bunch of relevant ticket comments to a side conversation can also feel a bit clunky, as the Zendesk guide explains.
These limitations show areas where you might need extra tools or different ways of working to get truly seamless collaboration and information flowing easily.
Enhancing collaboration with AI
Artificial intelligence is quickly changing customer support, and it’s not just about automating chats with customers. AI can also really help improve how teams work together internally and make agents more efficient. It can work alongside features like side conversations.
AI-powered tools can help agents:
- Improve internal teamwork and agent efficiency.
- Find the right information faster.
- Summarize long ticket histories or internal chats.
- Suggest what to do next or who might be the best expert to ask.
- Handle repetitive info finding, freeing up agent time.
- Quickly pull up helpful articles from your knowledge base or past tickets related to a complex problem.
- Smartly sort and send incoming tickets to the right place, meaning fewer internal questions needed or making sure the correct team is on it from the get-go.
Bringing AI into your support process can make the whole thing, including using tools like side conversations, run more smoothly and be more data-driven.
How eesel AI elevates your Zendesk workflow
While Zendesk side conversations are good for focused chats, making your whole workflow smarter with AI can help with some of their downsides and seriously boost productivity.
Here’s how eesel AI enhances your Zendesk setup:
- Connects smoothly with Zendesk to offer smarter automation and help that works well with the tools you already use.
- Learns from more sources than Zendesk AI, including your past tickets, internal documents (like Google Docs or Confluence), PDFs, and tons more, providing better knowledge understanding for agents.
- AI Assistant/Copilot offers suggestions and finds info based on what the agent is currently working on, saving time they might spend searching or waiting for internal replies.
- AI Agent can automate tasks that might otherwise need a side conversation or manual follow-up via custom API actions (e.g., check order status, process refunds), cutting down on needing to ask other departments for simple requests.
- Smart triage accurately routes and tags tickets based on what the customer wants and how they’re feeling, making sure issues land with the right team from the very beginning.
- Offers detailed customization and testing more than native Zendesk AI does, allowing you to fine-tune how the AI sounds and acts to perfectly match your brand and how you work, and even test responses on past tickets before going live.
- Pay-per-interaction pricing is clearer and can be more cost-effective than Zendesk’s per-agent/per-resolution model, especially as you grow.
By adding eesel AI to your Zendesk workflow, you give your agents better information, automate repetitive stuff, and make the whole support process smoother, including the context and teamwork around tickets that might involve side conversations.
Make your Zendesk workflow smarter with AI
Zendesk side conversations are a strong built-in tool for handling focused chats linked to specific tickets. They’re really important for keeping your main customer conversations clear and for making necessary internal and external teamwork happen. By understanding when and how to use the different channels well, and by following some good practices, support teams can seriously improve how efficiently they work.
While side conversations have a few limits, like tracking and fitting into complex workflows, using AI can help fill those gaps. AI tools give you faster access to information, smarter automation, and better context. This helps your team solve issues quicker and work together more effectively.
Ready to see how AI can make your Zendesk side conversations and overall support work even better? See how eesel AI connects with your existing tools to provide smart automation and help.
Book a demo or start a free trial of eesel AI today and see the difference smarter support can make.
