A complete guide to Zendesk web chat in 2025

Let’s be real: customers expect instant answers now. Live chat isn’t just a nice-to-have feature anymore; it’s a must-have for any decent customer experience. Zendesk is a huge name in the support world, and millions of businesses rely on its web chat solution.

But does that mean it’s the right fit for you? This guide will give you the full picture of the Zendesk web chat. We’ll cover what it is, how to get it running, its key features (especially the AI stuff), where it falls short, and a full breakdown of the pricing. By the end, you’ll have a clear idea of whether Zendesk’s native chat is the perfect tool for your team or if you might need something extra to really make it work for you.

What is Zendesk web chat?

At its heart, Zendesk Web Chat is a tool that lets you pop a real-time chat window onto your website or mobile app. Think of it as the digital front door connecting your customers directly to your support agents.

It’s not the same tool it was a few years back, though. You might remember its predecessor, Zopim, which was a pretty standard, session-based live chat. Zendesk has since evolved this into what it calls "Messaging." The main difference is that Messaging is asynchronous, meaning conversations don’t just end when you close the window. A customer can start a chat on your site, get a notification on their phone later, and pick up the conversation in WhatsApp without losing any context. It’s all designed to be the first point of contact, plugging right into the main Zendesk Suite with its ticketing system and help center.

Setting up and customizing your Zendesk web chat

Getting the basic Zendesk chat widget on your site is pretty simple. You just flip a switch in your Zendesk Admin Center, copy a little snippet of JavaScript, and paste it into your website’s code. And just like that, you’re ready to chat.

But what if you want it to do more than just the basics? Well, that’s where things get a bit more involved.

For any advanced customization, you’ll need to get your hands dirty with Zendesk’s APIs. The Web Widget Classic APIs let developers tweak the widget’s look and feel, pre-fill customer details, or even make it pop up from a custom button on your page.

For instance, you can change the color and position with a few lines of code:

"`javascript

// Example for basic customization

window.zESettings = {

webWidget: {

color: { theme: ‘#007aff’ },  

position: { horizontal: ‘right’, vertical: ‘bottom’ }  

}

};

"`

And if you want to open it from another element on your page, you can use an API call:

"`javascript

// Example for API control

zE(‘webWidget’, ‘open’);

"`

For complete control, Zendesk also offers a Web SDK that lets you build an entirely custom chat interface from scratch. While this gives you total design freedom, it’s a big project that takes a lot of developer time and resources, which isn’t practical for most teams.

This is where a lot of teams get stuck. If you don’t have developers on standby, you’re pretty much out of luck. The easier route? Instead of wrestling with custom code, you can connect a tool like eesel AI directly into your existing Zendesk setup. It’s a one-click integration that adds a powerful AI layer on top of your helpdesk, no coding required.

Key features and AI capabilities

The current Zendesk chat experience is loaded with features meant to streamline support and help agents get more done.

The omnichannel agent workspace

One of Zendesk’s biggest selling points is its unified agent workspace. It pulls together conversations from every channel, whether it’s web chat, email, social media like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, or phone calls. This gives agents a single screen with the customer’s full history, so they have all the context they need without juggling a dozen different browser tabs.

The unified agent workspace in the Zendesk web chat, showing conversations from multiple channels in one place.

AI-powered tools for agents and customers

Zendesk has gone big on its own AI, offering a couple of key tools to help out support teams:

• Zendesk AI Agents: These are AI bots that can field common customer questions 24/7. You train them on your help center articles, and they can handle simple queries on their own or pass trickier issues to a human agent.

• Copilot for Agents: This AI assistant works alongside your human agents. It can summarize long ticket threads, help draft replies in a specific tone, and generally keep responses consistent across the team.

These are definitely useful features, but they come with a big catch: they are almost exclusively trained on information that lives inside the Zendesk ecosystem. If your company’s actual knowledge base is spread across Confluence pages, Google Docs, and internal wikis, Zendesk’s AI has no idea it exists.

A demonstration of AI-powered tools within the Zendesk web chat, such as an automatically generated ticket summary.

This is a missed opportunity. An AI solution like eesel AI can pull knowledge from all your different sources. It learns from past tickets, your help center, and can connect to external knowledge bases to give answers that are much more accurate than what you’d get from an AI locked into a single platform.

Reporting and analytics

Zendesk gives you built-in dashboards to track all the important chat stats: chat volume, first response time, average resolution time, and customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. This is all good information for managers who need to keep an eye on team performance and find ways to improve their support.

The reporting and analytics dashboard for the Zendesk web chat, displaying key performance metrics.

Limitations of Zendesk web chat

While Zendesk offers a decent starting point, there are a few areas where it can cause some headaches for growing teams.

Developer dependency for customization

We mentioned this earlier, but it’s a big one. Customizing Zendesk beyond the out-of-the-box settings often means you need a developer who understands its specific APIs. This can be slow and expensive, creating a real bottleneck for support teams who just want to get things done. If you have an idea for a new workflow, you might end up in a long line waiting for the engineering team to have time for you.

The risk of launching an untested AI

Rolling out a new AI can feel like a leap of faith. Will it actually answer customer questions correctly? Or will it just annoy them? Zendesk’s setup doesn’t really give you a good way to know the answers before you go live.

Vendor lock-in and scattered knowledge

Zendesk’s AI is built to work with Zendesk’s tools. That’s fine if your entire company operates within Zendesk, but that’s almost never the case. Most companies have important information tucked away in Slack, Notion, Sharepoint, or other wikis. When your AI can’t access that info, you end up with incomplete answers. A tool that isn’t tied to one platform, like eesel AI, can solve this by connecting to over 100 different sources, making sure your AI always has the full story.

Zendesk web chat pricing

You can’t buy Zendesk Web Chat by itself; it’s part of the "Zendesk Suite" plans. This means you’re paying for a whole bundle of tools, which is great if you need them all but can feel expensive if you don’t.

Here’s a look at the plans that include the web chat and AI features.

The fine print matters here. The per-agent pricing means your costs go up with every new team member you hire. Plus, various add-ons for more advanced AI can make your final bill a surprise. This is pretty different from eesel AI’s transparent pricing, which is based on usage, not the number of seats. With no per-resolution fees and flexible monthly plans, your costs are always predictable.

The verdict: Is Zendesk web chat right for you?

So, who is the Zendesk web chat really for? It’s a solid option for teams that are already all-in on the Zendesk ecosystem. If you want a tightly integrated solution and have the developer resources on hand to handle the customization, it can work well.

But it starts to look less appealing for teams that need to move quickly, want an AI that can learn from information outside of Zendesk, or prefer to test their AI thoroughly before it goes live.

For a lot of teams, the best setup is a hybrid one. You can keep the reliable foundation of Zendesk for your helpdesk and ticketing but add a more flexible and powerful AI layer on top to handle the rest.

Make your Zendesk web chat smarter, without the headache

You don’t need to rip out and replace your entire helpdesk. You can just make it better. With eesel AI, you can deploy a smarter AI agent on top of your existing Zendesk setup in minutes, not months.

See how it would perform on your own past tickets and discover the potential for yourself. Try eesel AI for free.