How can I oversee conversations in messaging and live chats?

Question

I work as a manager in my company and I need help understanding how I can oversee live chat or conversations in messaging. Where are the settings that let me see all the incoming visitors and which agents are serving them?

Answer

Most of the tools described in this article require admin access to the different products. If you aren't an admin in the ticketing system, and live chat, see these two articles:

Understanding Zendesk Support user roles

Understanding default roles in Zendesk Chat

Tips: On the Enterprise plan, you can use live dashboards for messaging and chat channels in Explore. If you are interested in omnichannel routing to assign chat and messaging tickets to agents, the feature supports accounts that are using live chat and messaging channels. For more information, see the article: Using omnichannel routing while migrating from chat to messaging.

Note: Before going through the different sections of the article, ensure that you know which plan your account is on and which experience your account uses. For more details, see this article: Am I using live chat or messaging?

Finding website visitors and monitoring agent activity

Live chat in the classic interface

Live chat in the agent workspace

Messaging in the agent workspace

Live chat in the classic interface

If your account uses the live chat in the classic Support interface, all the chat Settings live in the Chat dashboard. To see real-time activity of all the visitors on your website, use the Visitors tab on the sidebar.

To monitor your website visitors

Open the product tray ( ) in the top bar, then select Chat.

On the sidebar menu on the left, select the Visitors icon.

The dashboard adds each visitor to a color-coded category so you can quickly understand what is their status. Visitors can be incoming, assigned, clicked, served, triggered, active, or idle. For more information, see this article: Browsing your site's visitors.

To read the conversation between the agent and the customer, click the request being served.

The Analytics tab in the Chat dashboard gives you a variety of reports to measure live chat metrics such as volumes, satisfaction ratings, and timings, and agent activity metrics such as live chat acceptance, number of serves, response time, log-in times, conversions, and others. For more details on what you can find in this tab, see this article: Analytics 101.

Alternatively, use the Explore live dashboard for Chat to see real-time metrics that pertain to live chat activity, such as active chats, or chats in queue.

Live chat in the agent workspace

The Zendesk Agent Workspace impacts the location of some features on the Chat dashboard. If you have live chat with Agent Workspace enabled, your agents use the ticketing interface to serve chats. However, to monitor your visitor's activity in real-time, use the Visitors tab on the sidebar in the Chat dashboard.

To monitor your website visitors

Open the product tray ( ) in the top bar, then select Chat.

On the sidebar menu on the left, select the Visitors icon.

To read the conversation between the agent and the customer being served, click the request from the Chat dashboard. Zendesk will open the ticket in the Support interface.

The Analytics tab in the Chat dashboard gives you a variety of reports that you can use to measure live chat metrics such as volumes, satisfaction ratings, and timings, and agent activity metrics such as live chat acceptance, serves, response time, log-in times, conversions, and others. For more details on what you can find in this tab, see this article: Analytics 101.

Messaing in the agent workspace

Messaging requires you to enable Agent Workspace. Check your interface if you have enabled Agent Workspace to make sure the following content is applicable.

To monitor incoming requests through messaging, build a view that shows the conversations waiting to be served and the conversations being served.

To create this view

Add a new view.

Enter a Title for the view, for example, Incoming requests.

Under Tickets must meet all of these conditions to appear in the view, add:

Status category | Less than | Solved

Channel | Is | Messaging

If you want to add a time dimension to the view, add a condition such as Hours since created | Less than | 1. This shows you tickets created in the last hour.

Under Formatting options add or remove any of the default columns.

Under Group by, select Status category. Click Ascending in the checkbox.

Click Save.

Go to the Agent Workspace to see your new view. New tickets are unassigned conversations waiting for an agent to serve them. Open tickets are requests currently assigned to an agent.

Note: In accounts with custom ticket statuses deactivated, use the condition Status instead of Status category.

If you have messaging enabled in your account, you can also monitor conversation activity through the Explore live dashboard for messaging.

You can also set up messaging goals to see if your end users arrive on a specific page or URL destination.

Additional resources

Analyzing the different analytical tools empowers you to make decisions over your live chat or messaging implementation. For instance, if you're receiving too many requests, you can consider some mitigation measures such as using a chat trigger to warn your customers about delays. For more information, see these two articles:

Can I turn off Chat if my queue is too busy?

Can I turn off chat when there is no staff here?