Side Conversations

Side conversations have added a whole new dimension to Zendesk, enabling support teams to better organize different communication streams with a variety of different stakeholders.  There are so many different use cases that this can support, but given that it is a new product, there are still some shortcomings that we hope Zendesk can rectify in the future.  This article is composed of the following sections, including links to different pages for further information.

* Side Conversations supported on Zendesk Suite Professional and Enterprise only

Use Cases

Side Conversation Channels

Product Feedback

Tips and Tricks

Use Cases

1. Grocery - check out this write up on using side conversations to manage online grocery order and delivery, from platform to packaging and delivery and more.
2. Logistics - all different types of logistics providers can follow this sample case for managing the different tasks that come up while handling customer use cases.
3. E-Commerce - customer requests regarding their online order can often involve many different teams, from CS and platform to app or finance, making side conversation a great tool to help organize communication with teams inside and outside of Zendesk as described in the sample use case here.
4. Insurance - see here for a sample insurance use case for how to manage the various stakeholders, such as members, brokers, providers, or doctors who are involved in resolving a ticket.

Side Conversation Channels

Currently Side conversations support the following different types:

• Email
• Slack
• Microsoft Teams
• Child Tickets

The UI for creating the different types of side conversations is mostly the same, with the main difference being how the recipient will receive the ticket.  The limitations inherent in the side conversation feature are largely the same for all of the channels.  For more information on Side Conversations, please view the following Zendesk articles:

• About side conversations
• Side conversation resources

Product Feedback

Regarding feedback about the product, there are some excellent existing product feedback posts, such as the following:

1.  Adjust Child Ticket Requester Field from Side Conversation Panel
2.  Side Conversation Limitations - comprehensive overview of limitations and suggestions.  Give it a look and an upvote!
3.  Side Conversation Ticket Update using Macro

In addition to the details provided above, based on our personal experience and having worked with clients across a variety of use cases, we find that the biggest improvements that Zendesk could make are in the following areas.

1. Setting the Requester of the Child Ticket - basically the idea is that you may want to create a child ticket for another team, but rather than the recipient team needing to respond to you directly, you are creating the ticket on behalf of another team.  However, you would like to maintain the linkage with the parent ticket.  In this case, it may be easier to simply create a new ticket rather than child tickets.
2. Responding to a child ticket that belongs to an external group: even if you are the requester of the ticket, if you do not have access to the ticket's assigned group, when the child ticket is responded to, you can see the response in the child ticket side panel, but you cannot write further responses.  What we have seen some users do is to simply create a new side conversation at that point, which becomes a significant amount of overhead.  It is worth noting, that instead of creating a child ticket and relying on it for the communication, simply assigning the ticket to a new group may work just as well.  The main advantage of child tickets being that they provide a more tightly connected relationship between the different streams of work.
3. Using macros on side conversations: macros can only be applied to the creation of the child ticket.  On subsequent updates, macros are not available.  So the workaround we recommend is applying the macro to the main ticket thread and then copying over the information to the side conversation.

Tips and Tricks

Some of the common use cases for side conversations can benefit from the following additional workflows:

1. Open parent ticket when side conversation responded to: basically the idea is that while waiting for a response to a child ticket you would put the parent ticket in on-hold status.  Then when the recipient of the side conversation responds to the ticket, the parent ticket would be moved to open status.  Please see this article for more details about setting up this workflow.
2. Place parent ticket on-hold status when side conversation created: basically the idea is that a ticket should be placed into on-hold status while waiting for side conversation to be responded to.  This should be applied regardless of the channel through which the side conversation was created.
3. Notify ticket assignee when side conversation is responded to: even though Zendesk provides in product notifications when a side conversation receivens a response, if the agent is not logged in or is not paying attention to the Zendesk interface at that time, it can be very easy to miss the notification.  So in this case we can set up a trigger notification to go out to the agent.  See the official Zendesk documentation or check out our help article here for more detail.