How can I oversee conversations in messaging and live chats?

Question

I work as a manager and need help to understand how I can oversee live chat or conversations in messaging. Where are the settings to see all incoming visitors and the agents who serve them?

Answer

Most tools in this article require admin access. If you aren't an admin in the ticketing system and live chat, see

Understanding Zendesk Support user roles

Understanding default roles in Zendesk Chat

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

Note Before you review the article sections, ensure you know your account plan and experience. For more details, see Am I using live chat or messaging?

Finding website visitors and monitoring agent activity

Live chat in the standard agent interface

Live chat in the Agent Workspace

Messaging in the Agent Workspace

Live chat in the standard agent interface

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

To monitor website visitors:

Open the product tray in the top bar, then select Chat

On the sidebar menu, select the Visitors icon

The dashboard adds each visitor to a color-coded category. Visitors can be incoming, assigned, clicked, served, triggered, active, or idle. For more information, see Browsing your site's visitors

To read the conversation between the agent and the customer, click the request

The Analytics tab in the Chat dashboard provides reports to measure live chat metrics such as volumes, satisfaction ratings, and timings. It also shows agent activity metrics such as live chat acceptance, serves, response time, sign-in times, and conversions. For more details, see Analytics 101.

Alternatively, use the Explore live dashboard for Chat to see real-time metrics 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 activate the Agent Workspace, agents use the ticketing interface to serve chats. To monitor visitor activity in real-time, use the Visitors tab on the sidebar in the Chat dashboard.

To monitor website visitors:

Open the product tray in the top bar, then select Chat

On the sidebar menu, select the Visitors icon

To read the conversation between the agent and the customer, click the request from the Chat dashboard. This action opens the ticket in the Support interface.

The Analytics tab in the Chat dashboard provides reports to measure live chat metrics such as volumes, satisfaction ratings, and timings. It also shows agent activity metrics such as live chat acceptance, serves, response time, sign-in times, and conversions. For more details, see Analytics 101.

Messaging in the Agent Workspace

Messaging requires you to activate the Agent Workspace. Check your interface to ensure you activated the Agent Workspace.

To monitor incoming messaging requests, build a view that shows conversations waiting to be served and conversations that agents serve.

To create this view:

Add a new view

Enter a Title for the view, such as Incoming requests

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

Status category | Less than | Solved

Channel | Is | Messaging

To add a time dimension, add a condition such as Hours since created | Less than | 1

Under Formatting options, add or remove columns

Under Group by, select Status category. Select Ascending.

Click Save

Go to the Agent Workspace to see your new view. New tickets are unassigned conversations waiting for an agent. 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 activate messaging, you can also monitor conversation activity through the Explore live dashboard for messaging.

You can use user presence in messaging to identify if end users are still on the website or have abandoned the conversation by closing the website. User presence helps you prioritize conversations where end users wait for a response and increases agent utilization by releasing capacity when sessions are abandoned.

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

Additional resources

Analysis of analytical tools empowers you to make decisions for your live chat or messaging implementation. If you receive too many requests, consider mitigation measures such as a chat trigger to warn customers about delays. For more information, see

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

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