Designing your conversational messaging workflow

<body>
<p id="docs-hc-snippet" style="display: none;">Articles in the series</p>
<div class="front-matter"></div>
<div class="container"><div class="row">
<div class="col-md-3">
<ul class="nav nav-underline flex-column">
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/5746900266906" target="_blank">Messaging deployment guide:
Introduction</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408846454682" target="_blank">Part 1: About conversational support with
messaging</a></li>
<li class="li">Part 2: Designing your conversational messaging workflow</li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/5746038824346" target="_blank">Part 3: Planning your staffing and
operational requirements</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/5746034323866" target="_blank">Part 4: Rolling out conversational messaging
support</a></li>
</ul>
<p class="sidenav-heading">Articles in the series</p>
</div>
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<div class="body">

<p class="p">At its core, messaging is a way for your customers to have direct conversations with your
agents. This is known as conversational support.</p>
<p class="p">As your support needs grow, you may want to automate some of this communication, such as offering
a simple greeting before handing the customer over to an agent or deflecting inquiries
using knowledge base articles. Later, add an AI agent that automates more of the
conversation, asks the customer questions to help clearly define their support issue,
routes conversations to the right agent, collects useful data from customers, and
presents options to help them self-solve their problems. For many accounts, the ideal
configuration is somewhere in between no automations and very complex automations.</p>
<div class="p">This article contains the following topics:
<ul class="ul" id="topic_o5n_fxt_szb__ul_vxj_ryt_szb">
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_oxk_syt_szb">Identifying your conversational support goals</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_z44_wbc_tzb">Choosing your messaging channels</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_od4_vyt_szb">Considering offline scenarios</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_wkl_tyt_szb">Choosing a conversation style</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_nfp_wyt_szb">Considering automating conversations with AI agents</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_atw_wls_b1c">Next steps</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title2" class="topic nested1" id="topic_oxk_syt_szb">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title2">Identifying your conversational support goals</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Customers want their issues resolved quickly, through a single conversation, across a
range of channels, and without having to repeat themselves. Conversational support
with messaging provides this and more.</p>
<p class="p">There are many reasons you might add conversational support, but it's important to
understand the specific reasons it's right for your organization. Your goals and
intentions should inform the decisions you make about setting up and maintaining
your conversational support workflows in the future.</p>
<p class="p">To help articulate your goals, consider the following questions:</p>
<div class="p">
<strong class="ph b">Understanding your customers</strong>
<ul class="ul" id="topic_oxk_syt_szb__ul_zkr_rcc_tzb">
<li class="li">What channels are your customers most likely to use?</li>
<li class="li">What are your customers' communication preferences?</li>
<li class="li">What devices do your customers use when seeking support?</li>
<li class="li">When do you receive the heaviest volumes of messages? Time of day? Day of
the week? Specific times of month or year?</li>
<li class="li">How likely are your customers to have simultaneous separate conversations
with your agents?</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="p">
<strong class="ph b">Understanding your business</strong>
<ul class="ul" id="topic_oxk_syt_szb__ul_xy3_3dc_tzb">
<li class="li">How long does it take for your agents to engage with a ticket? What about
solving a ticket? On average? What about longest and shortest times?</li>
<li class="li">Are your customers satisfied with the queue wait times and resolution times?
Are you hoping to improve customer satisfaction?</li>
<li class="li">How many agents are typically involved in solving a ticket?</li>
<li class="li">Do you need extensive reporting capabilities?</li>
<li class="li">How much of your agents' work is repetitive? How much of the repetition could be eliminated with
AI agents and automated features? <ul class="ul" id="topic_oxk_syt_szb__ul_lhc_m2c_tzb">
<li class="li">If you're planning to use AI agents and automation to deflect
tickets away from agents, what are your specific goals around
deflection? Completely deflect the tickets with self-service
options? Deflect some of the tickets, but expect a majority to still
reach an agent? Provide customers with more information to aid the
conversation when an agent is available?</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="li">What channels can you realistically support with your current organization?
<ul class="ul" id="topic_oxk_syt_szb__ul_hcm_mhc_tzb">
<li class="li">What channels do you currently use?</li>
<li class="li">Are there any channels you can remove because they are
under-utilized or too expensive for the value they provide?</li>
<li class="li">Are there specific channels you're looking to add based on agent or
customer feedback?</li>
<li class="li">If you're considering social messaging channels, which specific
social channels would work well for you?</li>
<li class="li">Are there specific types of inquiries that need more immediate,
conversation-based support?</li>
<li class="li">Are you able to adjust staffing and schedules to support more or
different channels?</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="li">How do you want to handle customer requests that come in during non-business
hours?</li>
<li class="li">How important is efficiency? How efficient are your agents currently? Are
you looking to increase efficiency?</li>
<li class="li">How do you route work to agents? Do you need a push-model for work
assignment, or does a pull-model work well in your organization?</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title3" class="topic nested1" id="topic_z44_wbc_tzb">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title3">Choosing your messaging channels</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">After identifying your goals for providing conversational support with messaging, you
should have a clear idea of the messaging channels you want to implement. These are
likely a compromise between what's most affordable for your company to provide and
what your customers will benefit from the most. You can choose from the
following:</p>
<div class="p">
<ul class="ul" id="topic_z44_wbc_tzb__ul_v4j_lmc_tzb">
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408827701530" target="_blank">Website channels</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408827701530" target="_blank">Mobile channels for Android, iOS, or
Unity SDKs</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408831648794" target="_blank">Social channels</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title4" class="topic nested1" id="topic_od4_vyt_szb">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title4">Considering offline scenarios</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Messaging offers a persistent and often asynchronous style of communication. It's
important to plan for situations where either an agent or customer isn't available
to respond immediately to a message. Consider the following common scenarios you
should take into account when designing your messaging workflows.</p>
<p class="p"><strong class="ph b">Agent is offline or customer responds after business hours</strong></p>
<div class="p">There are a few ways you can handle this scenario:
<ul class="ul" id="topic_od4_vyt_szb__ul_ojj_gz3_tzb">
<li class="li">If you have agents online 24/7, you can implement a policy that agents should reassign tickets
before their shifts end to prevent communication bottlenecks from occurring
while they're offline. You could <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408888828570" target="_blank">create a view</a> of unassigned messaging tickets to
aid in this.</li>
<li class="li">If you don't have 24/7 customer support and an end user responds to an
unsolved ticket while your agents are offline, the agent will see the
message in the notification list when they next sign in to Zendesk.</li>
<li class="li">For longer periods of agent unavailability, consider using the
<a class="xref" href="https://www.zendesk.com/marketplace/apps/support/49617/out-of-office/?_ga=2.215444375.140212733.1702309808-2105806428.1699381783" target="_blank">Out of Office app from the Zendesk
Marketplace</a>.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p class="p"><strong class="ph b">Customer is no longer responsive</strong></p>
<div class="p">A conversation is considered idle if no message has been received in 10 minutes.
Likewise, users are considered idle after 10 minutes of inactivity. If an end user
stops responding mid-conversation, you have two options:
<ul class="ul" id="topic_od4_vyt_szb__ul_ewg_fwc_tzb">
<li class="li">The agent can ask whether additional help is still needed. Then, after the
end user has been idle for 10 minutes, the agent can communicate to the end
user that they are updating the ticket status to Pending or Solved.</li>
<li class="li">You can leverage automation to change the ticket status to Pending, Solved,
or Closed after the 10-minute idleness threshold is reached.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p class="p">In both cases, you should keep in mind that changing the ticket status to Solved could trigger a
customer satisfaction (CSAT) query. It's considered a best practice to exclude
auto-solved tickets from the CSAT trigger, if you have one.</p>
<p class="p"><strong class="ph b">Customer responds after the ticket was solved or closed</strong></p>
<p class="p">When a customer responds to a solved ticket, the conversation goes back to the
original agent with a status of Open. However, if a customer responds to a closed
ticket, they start over with your messaging workflow.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title5" class="topic nested1" id="topic_wkl_tyt_szb">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title5">Choosing a conversation style</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Depending on your organizational needs, you can build a messaging workflow that's as
simple or complex as you like. We recommend adopting this golden rule: don't
over-engineer your messaging workflows.</p>
<p class="p">It can be quite difficult to undo AI agents and automations after you've implemented them.
Therefore, it's important to be pragmatic. Design your workflows for simplicity
first. Then, as your knowledge of messaging and conversational support grows, you
can iterate and improve your messaging workflows with more complex automations.</p>
<p class="p">Consider the following conversation styles:</p>
<ul class="ul" id="topic_wkl_tyt_szb__ul_bdj_kvc_tzb">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Short and simple</strong><p class="p">If a streamlined, live chat-like approach works best
for your agents and customers, you can implement a workflow with little or
no automation. With minimal configuration, you can offer an automated
greeting and create a simple form to collect essential information from the
customer to aid the agent who helps them.</p>
</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Intricate and comprehensive</strong><p class="p">Alternatively, you can use AI agents to address complex
customer service scenarios and provide equally complex messaging solutions.
AI agents can include preconfigured options for your customer to choose
from, pull information from external sources into the conversation using API
calls, offer choices based on customer location or time of day, and
more.</p>
</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Meet in the middle</strong>
<p class="p">If you're like most Zendesk admins, you probably want to design a messaging
workflow that falls somewhere between simple and intricate. You can use AI
agents to automate as much or as little of your messaging workflow as you
want. Just remember the golden rule: don't over-engineer your messaging
workflows.</p>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title6" class="topic nested1" id="topic_nfp_wyt_szb">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title6">Considering automating conversations with AI agents</h2>
<div class="body">
<div class="p">While choosing your conversation style, you might have realized you want to incorporate some AI
agent and automated features. Before you start planning it all out, it's important
to understand the three basic components of a messaging conversation: <ul class="ul" id="topic_nfp_wyt_szb__ul_lw5_wdj_tzb">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Greetings</strong> are the customer's first interaction with your customer
support organization.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Self-service options</strong> can be used as a next step to deflect simple
tickets, leaving your agents more bandwidth to focus on more complex
requests.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Conversation workflow</strong> includes the back-and-forth conversation with
the customer, how and when an AI agent passes the conversation to a live
agent, and the path tickets take to being solved.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p class="p">Each of these components can be automated, so think back to the conversation style
you want to achieve and your goals for your messaging workflow when deciding how to
configure them. Then consider the configuration options for each of these
components.</p>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title7" class="topic nested2" id="topic_ojs_42j_tzb">
<h3 class="title topictitle3" id="ariaid-title7">Greetings</h3>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Greetings set the tone for the messaging conversation. When you configure a
messaging widget for web or mobile, the standard messaging response is
activated. This includes a basic conversation greeting that customers see when
they launch the widget, followed by a message letting them know they're being
connected to an agent.</p>
<p class="p">The standard greeting can be
<a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4500737327258#topic_kzg_ync_gnb" target="_blank">modified</a>
to suit your needs.
Similarly, you can
<a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408838007578" target="_blank">configure automatic responses</a>to new
customer requests for social messages, too.</p>
<div class="p">Consider the following questions when designing your customer's first
interaction:
<ul class="ul" id="topic_ojs_42j_tzb__ul_nrv_r2j_tzb">
<li class="li">What do you want your first impression to be? Casual and friendly, or
more formal and professional?</li>
<li class="li">What information do you want to immediately convey to your customers?
You can use an automated greeting to set customer expectations for
services you'll provide, agent availability, and possible wait
times.</li>
<li class="li">How personalized do you want your first message to the customer to
be?</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title8" class="topic nested2" id="topic_mkt_cfj_tzb">
<h3 class="title topictitle3" id="ariaid-title8">Self-service</h3>
<div class="body">
<div class="p">Deflecting tickets can benefit both your customers and agents by saving time and
expediting the resolution of customer issues. There are a number of ways you can
implement automated self-service options within your messaging workflow. Usually
these will come at the beginning of the conversation, but they could be useful
at other points as well.
<ul class="ul" id="topic_mkt_cfj_tzb__ul_k3s_hhj_tzb">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Provide predefined answers to common questions</strong>. Identifying
common questions and automating answers to them can provide customers
with immediate answers.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Pull data from external sources into conversations</strong>. Using API
calls, you can automatically incorporate third-party data in response to
customer requests. This is particularly helpful when customers need
information that's updated frequently or unique to them.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Ask whether a question is resolved</strong>. After providing one or more
of the self-service options listed above, you can also prompt the
customer to tell you whether the self-serve options resolved their
issue. This way, they can close tickets before it gets to an agent.</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title9" class="topic nested2" id="topic_ent_4gj_tzb">
<h3 class="title topictitle3" id="ariaid-title9">Conversation workflow</h3>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Regardless of the complexity of your messaging workflow and AI agents, there will always be some
customer support requests that need to be transferred to a live agent. When
configuring messaging with any level of automation, you need to consider how and
when the transfer to an agent occurs and establish rules for how the
conversation is managed after the transfer.</p>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title10" class="topic nested3" id="topic_bmm_kcj_vzb">
<h4 class="title topictitle4" id="ariaid-title10">Design your AI agent and automation</h4>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">If you choose to incorporate an AI agent into your messaging workflow, take time to map out the
flow before you start implementing it. It will be easier to implement a
single version all at once instead of potentially creating multiple versions
if you use a phased approach.</p>
<p class="p">We recommend using process mapping to create this plan, but you can use any tool you find
helpful. The important thing is that you have a visual representation of
every action the customer can take when interacting with your AI agent,
where those actions take them, and–most importantly–label these actions with
the step type, feature, or messaging functionality that makes them
possible.</p>
<p class="p">After you create this plan, preserve it in a way that you and your team can
refer back to.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title11" class="topic nested3" id="topic_iyx_lcj_vzb">
<h4 class="title topictitle4" id="ariaid-title11">Consider the handoff from AI agent to human agent</h4>
<div class="body">
<div class="p">The handoff to an agent can be a simple message letting the customer know
they're being transferred and then adding the conversation to an agent's
queue. If necessary, you can incorporate any of the following into the
handoff interaction:
<ul class="ul" id="topic_iyx_lcj_vzb__ul_fmj_sbk_tzb">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Forms</strong>: Gather additional information the agent might need to
solve the customer's issue.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Estimated wait times</strong>: Set customer expectations
appropriately.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Notification options</strong>: Give the customer options for how they
want to be contacted when an agent is available to assist them.</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title12" class="topic nested3" id="topic_ijm_4cj_vzb">
<h4 class="title topictitle4" id="ariaid-title12">Decide how conversations are routed to agents and resolved</h4>
<div class="body">
<div class="p">You also need to plan how the conversation is managed after the AI agent hands it off to a human
agent. Consider the following: <ul class="ul" id="topic_ijm_4cj_vzb__ul_xlr_1ck_tzb">
<li class="li">How do agents receive messaging conversations? Are they assigned to
groups and agents (push model) or do agents need to pick them up
themselves from <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408829483930#topic_gnx_2tm_vt" target="_blank">views</a> (pull model)? You can choose from
the following options: <ul class="ul" id="topic_ijm_4cj_vzb__ul_mfq_51h_vzb">
<li class="li">
<a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409149119514" target="_blank">Omnichannel routing</a> provides
Zendesk's most sophisticated routing logic and the ability
to route tickets from multiple channels based on agent
availability and capacity.</li>
<li class="li">
<a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/5020833543450#topic_nzf_pdb_pmb" target="_blank">Notification routing</a> broadcasts
notifications to all agents for all relevant conversations.
Agents can click <em class="ph i">Serve Request</em> to start working on
the message.</li>
<li class="li">
<a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/5020833543450#topic_u3c_rrn_mpb" target="_blank">Assigned routing</a> evenly
distributes messaging conversations among online agents.
Only one agent is notified for each incoming message at any
given time.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="li">How are you going to notify customers when an agent enters the
conversation?</li>
<li class="li">How are you going to manage the tickets generated by messaging
conversations?</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title13" class="topic nested1" id="topic_atw_wls_b1c">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title13">Next steps</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Continue walking through the
<a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/5746900266906" target="_blank">Messaging deployment guide</a>. The next article in the
series is
<a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/5746038824346" target="_blank">Planning your staffing and operational
requirements for messaging</a>, which will help you consider your staffing
needs for conversational messaging.</p>
</div>
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