Announcing user presence awareness for messaging (closed EAP)

Announced on | Rollout on
March 19,  2026 | March 19,  2026

We are excited to introduce the user presence for messaging EAP, to identify if your end users are still on the website or have abandoned the conversation by closing the website. User presence will help businesses:

Prioritize conversations where the end users are still on the website, waiting for a response over older, abandoned conversations.

Increase agents’ effectiveness by releasing capacity when conversations are abandoned by the end-user.

This announcement includes the following sections:

What is changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What is changing?

The feature, when enabled, will include user presence signals to determine messaging session state. It is available only for the web widget.

A session is considered active if the user has responded within the last 10 minutes or their presence is detected as online. It becomes inactive if the user goes offline or fails to respond within the 10-minute window, whichever occurs first.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

Agents are currently losing productivity to abandoned conversations because we cannot accurately detect when a user abandons a session. When these abandoned tickets stay in the queue, they take up agent capacity and delay support for customers who are still waiting.

What do I need to do?

If you're interested in trying out this EAP, see Understanding and managing end-user presence in messaging for information about how to sign up and how the feature works.

Once you sign up for the EAP,  we will turn on the feature for your account. You will also receive an email. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support