Announcing rich text support in messaging

Announced on | Rollout starts
March 17, 2025 | March 13, 2025

Zendesk is pleased to announce that rich-text formatting is now supported in automated messaging conversations.

Rich text messages allow you to send messages with text formatting, including bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, and more. You can also include links in your messages, or even format them using a subset of HTML.

This announcement includes the following topics:

What is changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What is changing?

We’re introducing rich text support in messaging, allowing messages to be formatted with bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, and more. Zendesk customers can now send rich text messages to their end users in AI agent conversations, with the Sunshine Conversations API, and in other third-party bots using Switchboard APIs

These messages are displayed with the rich text formatting in the messaging Web Widget, Android and iOS SDKs, and the Agent Workspace.

We are also planning to give users the ability to format their own messages directly within conversations at a later date. Stay tuned through our What’s New page in the help center.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

Clear and effective communication is essential for great customer experiences. Without text formatting, messages can lack emphasis, leading to misunderstandings and longer resolution times. Rich text support makes conversations more expressive and structured, helping businesses highlight key information, improve clarity, and enhance overall customer interactions. This update brings greater flexibility and readability to messaging, empowering businesses to communicate more effectively and create better customer experiences.

What do I need to do?

See our help center article and rich text developer documentation for more information on using rich text in your messaging conversations.

To display generated rich-text formatting in Agent Workspace, accounts must be using the improved messaging backend.

If you are using mobile, note that you must have the messaging iOS or Android SDKs v2.30.0 or later in your mobile app, as older versions don't support rich text messages.