Zendesk using side conversation child tickets

Let's be honest, solving a customer ticket is rarely a solo mission. More often than not, it’s a team sport, pulling in people from finance, engineering, or logistics. The real trick is keeping all those conversations organized without losing track of things in a mess of forwarded emails and scattered Slack threads.

Zendesk’s solution for this is a feature called side conversation child tickets. It’s a way to create and manage these internal requests right inside the original ticket, which helps keep related tasks from getting lost.

This guide will walk you through exactly how to set this feature up and start using it, step by step. We'll also cover some of the common bumps in the road teams run into and look at a smarter, AI-driven way to collaborate that cuts down on the manual work and gets answers to customers way faster.

What you'll need to get started

Before jumping in, let’s quickly check if you have everything you need. Setting up child tickets isn’t tough, but you do need a few things in place first.

• Your Zendesk Plan: You’ll need to be on a Zendesk Suite Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus plan. If you're using a Zendesk Support plan, you'll also need the Collaboration add-on.

• Admin Permissions: To turn on and tweak the feature for your team, you'll need to have administrator rights in your Zendesk account.

• Defined Groups: It's a good idea to have your internal teams (like 'Finance', 'Engineering-Tier2', or 'Warehouse') already set up as groups in Zendesk. Child tickets get assigned to these groups, so having them ready to go will make the whole process a lot smoother.

How to start using Zendesk side conversation child tickets: A step-by-step guide

The idea behind the feature is simple: when an agent needs a hand from another department, they can create a new, linked ticket (the "child") from within the original ticket (the "parent"). This keeps the request inside Zendesk, making it easy to track and keeping the conversation history all in one place. Here’s how you get it running.

Step 1: Enable side conversation child tickets in your admin settings

First things first, a Zendesk admin has to flip the switch to turn this feature on. It’s off by default, so you won’t even see the option until you activate it.

Head over to the Admin Center, then make your way to Workspaces > Agent tools > Side conversations. On this page, you'll see a bunch of toggles for different side conversation channels like Email and Slack. Look for the one labeled Turn on child tickets and check the box. Make sure to save your changes.

Step 2: Configure how your child tickets will behave

Once it's enabled, you have a few settings to play with to decide how you want your child tickets to work. These give you some control over the workflow and what information gets carried over.

• Comment type: You can choose what happens with replies on the child ticket. 'Public' means comments are public by default, 'Internal' keeps them as private notes, and 'Match ticket privacy' starts them as internal notes but lets an agent make them public if they need to. Most teams doing internal collaboration just stick with 'Internal' to prevent any accidental public replies.

• Copying ticket fields: This one is a real timesaver. You can set up Zendesk to automatically copy fields like 'Tags', 'Followers', and even the whole 'Ticket form' from the parent to the child ticket when it's made. Just keep in mind this is a one-time copy. Any changes made to these fields on the parent ticket later won’t sync over to the child.

Step 3: Create your first side conversation child ticket

Alright, now for the agent workflow. When an agent is working on a ticket and realizes they need to loop in another team, the process is pretty straightforward.

From inside the parent ticket, they'll open the context panel on the right, click the Side conversations icon, and then hit the plus sign (+). A menu will pop up with the channels you’ve turned on. They just need to select Ticket to start creating a child ticket.

A composer window will open. In the 'To' field, the agent can pick the group they need help from (for example, 'Finance'). Then, they can write a clear subject line and a message explaining exactly what they need. Clicking 'Send' creates a brand new, trackable ticket that's now linked back to the original conversation.

Step 4: Manage the conversation and track progress

Once the child ticket is created, the two tickets are officially connected. Any public comments added to the child ticket will automatically show up in the side conversation thread of the parent ticket, which keeps the original agent in the loop.

The status and who the child ticket is assigned to are also visible from the parent ticket, but here’s a small catch: the agent has to actually click into the side conversation to see these details. It’s not something you can see at a glance, which can sometimes slow things down a bit.

Common challenges when using Zendesk side conversation child tickets

While the feature is definitely a step up from forwarding emails all day, many teams find it has some frustrating limits that add friction and extra manual work. It's a useful tool, but it's not without its quirks.

Limited automation and a rigid workflow

One of the biggest complaints is that creating a child ticket is a completely manual task. An agent has to decide to create one and then do it by hand, every single time. You can't, for instance, use a trigger to automatically spin up a child ticket when a ticket with the tag "refund_request" arrives.

On top of that, the data sync between parent and child tickets is only one-way and happens just once at creation. If a team member updates a custom field or changes the priority on the child ticket, that new information doesn't flow back to the parent. This can easily lead to mismatched info and forces agents to manually copy and paste updates to keep everything aligned.

Collaboration barriers with internal teams

Here’s a major headache for a lot of companies: light agents cannot create, send, or be assigned side conversation child tickets.

This is a huge problem because the very people you often need help from, like staff in finance, legal, or warehouse operations, are the ones most likely to have light agent licenses. They don't live and breathe in Zendesk all day, so a full agent seat just doesn't make sense for them. This restriction forces the conversation right back out of Zendesk and into email or Slack, which is the exact thing the feature was supposed to prevent.

Inflexible data sharing and reporting

The feature's stiffness also shows up in how you can assign and manage child tickets. You can only assign them to a group, not a specific person. This can create a bit of "who's on it?" confusion, leading to delays while the group figures out who should handle the request.

You also can't change the ticket form or the requester on the child ticket. This limits how you can use it for more complex, multi-step processes where you might need different forms or stakeholders involved. Finally, trying to get any useful data on your child tickets is a pain. Out of the box, there's no simple way to report on how many child tickets are being created or how long they're taking to resolve. The official workaround involves building a custom trigger to manually add a tag to every child ticket, which you can then use to build reports. It gets the job done, but it feels more like a patch than a built-in feature.

A smarter way to collaborate: Using AI to resolve tickets without escalation

When you look at these limitations, it becomes pretty clear that the goal shouldn't just be creating more tickets for other teams to deal with. The real aim is to solve the original ticket faster by getting the right information or action without the manual back-and-forth. This is where an AI agent can change your approach, acting as a hub for knowledge and action instead of just a message forwarder.

Centralize knowledge, not tickets

Instead of creating a child ticket to ask the finance team about a refund policy, what if your support agent (or an AI agent) could find the answer instantly in the finance team’s own documents?

This is where a platform like eesel AI steps in. It connects to all of your company’s knowledge, not just your help center articles. By integrating with past tickets, Confluence, Google Docs, and dozens of other places, it builds a single source of truth. This lets an AI give instant, accurate answers from across the entire company, often making a child ticket completely unnecessary. You can even give everyone in your organization access to the same centralized knowledge with "AI Internal Chat" in Slack or Teams.

Automate actions, not just conversations

A lot of child tickets aren't just questions; they're requests for someone to do something, process a refund, check on inventory, or update a user's account.

The eesel AI Agent does more than just answer questions. It can be set up with custom actions to handle these tasks on its own. By connecting to your other systems like Shopify or internal databases through an API, the AI can look up order information, process refunds, and update ticket fields automatically. This turns a slow, manual handoff into an instant, automated fix.

Here’s a quick comparison of how the two workflows stack up:

Workflow Step	Zendesk Side Conversation Child Ticket	eesel AI Agent Workflow
1. Initial Request	Customer asks for an order update.	Customer asks for an order update.
2. Agent Action	Agent manually creates a child ticket, assigns it to the 'Logistics' group, and asks for the status.	The eesel AI Agent automatically figures out what the customer needs.
3. Resolution	Logistics team member finds the ticket, looks up the order, and replies. The agent then passes the info to the customer.	eesel AI performs a custom API action to look up the order status in real-time and drafts a reply or sends it automatically.
4. Time to Resolution	Hours or days.	Seconds.

Getting started with an AI-powered workflow in minutes

One of the biggest pains with new tools is the setup time. eesel AI was built to get you up and running quickly.

• One-click helpdesk integration: Connecting eesel AI to Zendesk is a simple, self-serve process that only takes a few clicks. You won't need any complex API work or a developer's help.

• Risk-free simulation: Before you ever let the AI talk to live customers, you can run it in a simulation mode over thousands of your past tickets. This gives you a really accurate forecast of how it will perform and what its resolution rate will be, so you can go live with confidence.

• Gradual rollout: You have full control over what the AI handles. You can start small by automating just one or two simple ticket types and have everything else go straight to human agents. As you get more comfortable, you can gradually let it handle more.

Stop creating tickets, start resolving them

Zendesk's side conversation child tickets are a decent native tool for basic internal tasks. They do keep conversations inside the helpdesk, which is a definite improvement over email. But they come with some serious limitations around automation, flexibility, and collaboration, especially when you need to work with light agents.

This traditional approach of creating more tickets to solve a problem is being replaced by a more efficient, AI-powered way of working. Instead of just passing messages around, modern platforms like eesel AI help teams collaborate better by bringing company-wide knowledge together and automating routine tasks right inside the helpdesk. The result is much faster resolution times, less manual work for your agents, and happier customers.

Ready to see how an AI agent can transform your team's collaboration and improve your Zendesk workflows? Start your free trial of eesel AI today.