Announcing upgrades to the Relay bulk messaging app

Announced on | Rollout on
August 5, 2025 | August 5, 2025

We're happy to announce upgrades to Relay, a Built by Zendesk app available on the Zendesk Marketplace that enables you to create and send proactive messages to your end users over SMS or WhatsApp.

This announcement answers the following questions:

What’s changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What’s changing?

Launched a year ago, Relay enables companies to send proactive messages over SMS and WhatsApp to end users. Today, we’re happy to share a wealth of upgrades to the app.

Connect Relay to your Talk Text phone number

Create saved audiences you can re-use

Improved usability for audience building with conditionality instead of search syntax

Report on campaigns with delivered and opened rates

Compare performance of two campaigns with basic A/B testing

View contacts per campaign, and their delivery status

Why is Zendesk making this change?

We want to make it easy to send proactive, exemplary customer support to your end users over the messaging channels of your choice. Improving visibility on send status, making the audience selection more intuitive, and expanding support to Talk Text phone numbers will make your use of Relay easier.

What do I need to do?

To install Relay in your environment, head to the Zendesk Marketplace to install directly into your instance.

To submit and send WhatsApp template messages to end users, you must have at least one phone number connected to the WhatsApp Business API. If you haven't already done this, complete the self-service process to create your WhatsApp Business account and connect a phone number to it (see Adding WhatsApp channels to the Zendesk Agent workspace).

To send SMS to end users, you need to add SMS as a channel through Talk Text.

For more information, see Installing and using the Relay Messaging app.

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.