Announcing form messages on social channels and new field types

Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends
February 18, 2026 | February 18, 2026 | February 19, 2026

We are excited to announce that form messages are now supported across all of our social messaging channels. Specifically, this means that you can now launch structured data capture steps for conversational flows over your social channels.

Additionally, in order to help our customers to continue their transition from our Chat product to Messaging, we’ve added support and validation for decimal and integer field types to our forms. Two highly requested field types.

This announcement includes the following topics:

What is changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What is changing?

Previously, form messages were only supported by our Web Widget and Mobile SDKs and only supported email, select, and text field types. We have now extended form message support across our social messaging channels and expanded the list of supported field types to include integer and decimal.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

This long-overdue enhancement was heavily requested by customers looking to conduct structured pre-chat data capture in Zendesk. As such, we wanted to introduce a solution that allows our customers to be able to gather data in a structured way regardless of the channel they use.

What do I need to do?

Your next steps depend on how you plan to leverage this new release:

AI Agents Advanced or directly via the Sunshine Conversations API: Follow our API spec to add a form message to your conversational flow or create a Sunshine Conversations template and use that to send the form.
Agent Workspace: Create a Sunshine Conversations template and optionally store this as a macro to easily send a form at any time.
AI Agent Essentials: Add the “ask for details” step to your “answer” and publish that agent on a social channel. *Please note that due to a technical limitation, custom fields will not be populated on the ticket and can only be captured in the response.

If you have feedback or questions related to this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support.