About ending messaging sessions

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In a messaging conversation, a session is the real-time exchange between the end user and a human or AI agent. A messaging session can be ended – manually by agents or automatically using triggers – providing the flexibility to disconnect the conversation in the messaging channel when needed.

For instance, ending a messaging session can be useful for an agent when:

They have all the information they need from the customer but must perform some wrap-up tasks before closing the ticket. Ending the session prevents the customer from continuing the discussion or bringing up different issues within the same conversation.

The conversation can be handled better in another channel, such as email or voice.

When you’re ready, you can turn on the end session feature for your agents.

This article includes the following sections:

About the terminology used in this article

Understanding workflow changes when you allow agents to end messaging sessions

Understanding the agent experience when messaging sessions are ended

Understanding the end-user experience when messaging sessions are ended

About the terminology used in this article

Some terms used in this article are also used as general references when discussing Zendesk messaging features. In this article:

Conversation: The entire lifecycle of a customer request. A conversation begins when the end user clicks the Web Widget launch button and enters a comment or otherwise initiates communication and ends when the related ticket is Closed.

Session: The real-time, live chat-style interaction between an end user and an agent. Agents can end sessions, which prevents the end user from interacting with the agent through any messaging channel. Each messaging conversation has only one session.

Ticket: Messaging tickets are created when messaging conversations are handed off from an AI agent and routed to a human agent, group, or queue in Support. Each messaging ticket is associated with a messaging session. Tickets include all manual and automatic events applied to the ticket, such as status changes, triggers and other business rules, and both public and internal replies.

Understanding workflow changes when you allow agents to end messaging sessions

When an agent ends a messaging session, the messaging channel is essentially turned off for that customer interaction which affects the following aspects of the conversation lifecycle:

Ticket routing

Triggers

Agent capacity

Ticket status

CSAT surveys

Ticket routing

When an agent ends a messaging session, the associated ticket can be treated as an email ticket rather than a messaging ticket for the purposes of omnichannel routing and agent capacity.

Depending on your routing configuration, all tickets associated with an agent-ended messaging session can be treated as messaging tickets or email tickets. Alternatively, if you want to route some agent-ended messaging session tickets as email tickets but not all of them, you can create ticket triggers using the Ticket > End session or Ticket > Set routing channel actions. Both of these actions automatically end the ticket's messaging session, but the Set routing channel action can also change the routing channel to email.

If you choose to treat some or all agent-ended sessions as email tickets, you can create a custom queue using the Ticket > Channel | Is | Messaging and Ticket > Routing channel | Is | Email conditions to route these tickets.

Note: If a ticket's routing channel is messaging after the messaging session is ended, it is ineligible for routing and removed from any queue it might be in. You must use the routing configuration setting or ticket trigger action to change the routing channel to email for the ticket to remain eligible for routing by omnichannel routing.

Triggers

Because the messaging channel is unavailable on a ticket with an ended session, messaging triggers can’t run on them. However, ticket triggers will still act on them when conditions are met, including triggers with the Ticket > Channel | Is | Messaging condition.

When you allow agents to end messaging sessions, a new ticket trigger condition is added: Ticket > Messaging session ended reason. When used in combination with the Ticket > Channel | Is | Messaging condition, you can build ticket triggers that fire on messaging tickets with ended messaging sessions. These conditions are helpful if you need to replace the bypassed messaging triggers or want to send a CSAT survey when an agent ends a session.

Two new ticket trigger action is added as well: Ticket > Messaging session | End Session, which automatically ends the ticket's messaging session and Ticket > Set routing channel, which changes the routing channel to email and ends the messaging session if it's ongoing. These can can be helpful when managing surges in tickets, ticket received outside of business hours, and reporting on messaging tickets after their sessions are ended.

The following recipes can help you create ticket triggers with these conditions and actions:

Recipe: Managing a surge in messaging traffic (messaging routing configuration)

Recipe: Managing a surge in messaging traffic (omnichannel routing configuration)

Recipe: Managing tickets created outside of business hours using End session as a ticket trigger action

Recipe: Reporting on messaging tickets with ended sessions

Agent capacity

The agent’s messaging ticket capacity is released after they end a messaging conversation session. The agent’s email ticket capacity is not affected.

Ticket status

A ticket’s status does not automatically change when an agent ends the associated messaging session.

CSAT surveys

Because the messaging channel is turned off when an agent ends a messaging session, the action of solving the ticket doesn’t occur in the messaging channel and, therefore, the conditions in the default messaging CSAT trigger can’t be met.

Using customizable CSAT (available on Suite Growth plans and above), you can create a trigger that automatically sends the survey to end users when an agent ends their messaging session. See Recipe: Sending a CSAT survey when a messaging session ends.

Understanding the agent experience when messaging sessions are ended

When you allow agents to end messaging sessions, they can do so in the composer in Agent Workspace.

When an agent ends a messaging session in a conversation, the related ticket is updated in the Agent Workspace in several ways:

In the composer, the Messaging channel option is deactivated for that conversation. Agents can contact the customer through other available channels.

If the end user’s email address is known, the composer defaults to public reply; if no email is provided, the composer defaults to an internal note.

The end session event is captured and displayed in the ticket event history.

Agents can continue communicating with one another on the ticket using internal notes.

The status of the associated ticket isn’t influenced by the messaging session’s state.

Understanding the end-user experience when messaging sessions are ended

After an agent ends a messaging session, the customer can’t reply to the related ticket through that messaging conversation. If a customer enters new replies in the messaging channel after the session is ended, it’s treated as a new agent interaction that initiates a new messaging session and, ultimately, a new ticket.

Customers aren’t automatically notified when an agent ends a messaging session. To prevent customer confusion, you may want to instruct your agents to inform the customer that they're ending the conversation and any new replies will result in a new messaging conversation and ticket. To streamline this communication, admins can create a macro with a standardized statement for them to use.