Delivering exceptional customer support is a team effort that requires collaboration between support teams, customers, engineers, and often third-party vendors. It takes everyone working together to resolve issues quickly.
However, customer support teams often struggle with managing conversations outside of the support ticket while simultaneously handling the customer’s problem, leading to fragmented conversations, email overload, and delays in resolving issues.
Important details can get lost when agents switch between platforms or tools to collaborate with team members or external partners.
This disjointed workflow causes slow responses, frustrates customers, and makes it hard for support agents to maintain clarity and focus.
The good news is that Zendesk Side Conversations can help alleviate many of these issues by allowing you to collaborate directly within a Zendesk ticket.
In this article, we’ll focus on how Zendesk Side Conversations can help your team collaborate and solve issues faster, and we’ll walk you through how to enable this feature and get the most out of it.
Let’s dive in!
What are Zendesk Side Conversations?
Zendesk Side Conversations are a separate thread within a Zendesk ticket.
They provide an easy way for teams to collaborate internally or with external partners directly within a ticket.
You can streamline discussions through email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Zendeks’s ticketing system without cluttering the main customer thread, keeping your workflow efficient and your customers satisfied.
Ultimately, Zendesk Side Conversations enable everyone to collaborate in Zendesk without spreading information across multiple tools or interfaces
You can think of a Side Conversation in Zendesk as a separate stream of dialog where agents can have “side conversations” with a specific group of people to discuss a particular area of concern or a course of action.
You can use them to organize different streams of information about a ticket.
Improving team collaboration with Zendesk Side Conversations
Collaborating with your team, customers, and third parties with Zendesk Side Conversations gives your company a centralized communication hub for streamlining all information related to a support ticket, including:
Increased productivity - Communicate more efficiently. Eliminate the need to switch between various tools and build streamlined workflows.
Team alignment - Break down silos by centralizing team collaboration and communication, ensuring all customer data and interactions are easily accessible and shared.
Faster responses - Provide faster support by giving agents the context they need to solve complex problems faster.
Better organization - Keeps the support inbox organized by moving conversations out of the main ticket thread into a dedicated discussion linked to the ticket.
Improved accountability and tracking - All side conversations are linked to the original ticket, so nothing gets lost.
Centralizing your customer support communication in Zendesk using Side Conversations gives your company the tools, information, and workflows you need to deliver a great customer experience and build a more productive and happier team.
When to use Side Conversations in Zendesk
Side Conversations are best for when you need to bring in a third-party resource or even an internal team member who doesn’t have a Zendesk account. In general, side conversations are great for:
Looping in third-party vendors who can help you resolve an issue.
Collaborating with other departments, such as engineers, who don’t have a Zendesk account.
Having multiple standalone conversations that are separate from each other but related to the same support ticket.
Getting outside help without pulling other people into the main ticket.
For instance, imagine you work for an email marketing platform that relies on a third-party email delivery service such as Sendgrid to deliver your emails.
A customer reaches out for support because they notice their emails are bouncing. You investigate the problem and, after exhausting all of your resources, decide it’s time to contact Sendgrid’s support team for help troubleshooting the bounced emails.
At this point, you have two options:
Send a one-off email to SendGrid’s support team (or your direct point of contact if you have one), creating a silo of information and disjointed communication.
Start a Side Conversation in Zendesk and keep the discussion accessible and linked directly to the ticket for easy tracking.
Option A might eventually get you the desired result, but option B is a more coordinated, organized, and streamlined way to collaborate.
That’s because their support agent replies to your inquiry and provides additional information about the issue. You and your entire support team can then view that side conversation, enabling anyone to jump in and see the relevant context and chatter about the problem.
Enabling Zendesk Side Conversations
It’s important to note that Zendesk Side Conversations is only offered on the Professional, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus plans. Assuming you’re on one of those tiers, enabling side conversations is simple.
Head to the Admin Center, click Workspaces, and select Agent tools > Side conversations. From here, choose which channels you want to enable side conversations for. Options include Email, Slack, and tickets.
Once you enable Side Conversations, you’ll see a new tab labeled “Side Conversations” in the ticket view.
Types of Side Conversations
Zendesk allows you to create side conversations via email, Slack, or directly within the ticket. Let’s take a quick look at an example of each.
Email Side Conversations - Send an email directly from the ticket to relevant parties. For example, you might reach out to a vendor for a product issue using a side conversation instead of cluttering the customer thread.
Slack Conversations - Spin up a dedicated Slack thread for a side conversation and sync all activity into the Zendesk ticket. For example, you might be seeking help from the development team on an issue; in this case, you could ping their Slack channel and start a conversation while ensuring all of that chatter is captured and accessible within the ticket.
Ticket Side Conversations - Start a separate Zendesk ticket as a side conversation to involve another team. For example, you can loop in the billing department, which also uses Zendesk, to help resolve an issue.
How do Zendesk Side Conversations work?
A single ticket can have multiple side conversations.
Starting a Side Conversation is simple, and replies to the Side Conversation go directly into the Side Conversation tab within the ticket, giving you and your team complete visibility of relevant discussions.
It’s important to note that side Conversations are only ever recorded as internal notes or private comments hidden from the end users.
Starting a side conversation
Click the side conversation “plus” + icon.
Choose Email, Slack, or Ticket.
Type the recipient's name or email.
Alternatively, you can configure triggers and macros to kick off a side conversation.
Managing replies
From the ticket view, select the side conversation.
Scroll up to any earlier replies and review the most recent activity.
Add your reply, include any necessary attachments, and click send.
Zendesk allows you to format replies using a rich text editor, just like when you respond to an actual ticket.
Extra tips for using Zendesk Side Conversations
Side Conversations open up a ton of flexibility for your team to communicate more efficiently. For larger teams, they enable you to scale effectively without creating information silos and causing messy customer experiences.
If you decide to use Side Conversations, here are some additional tips to help you succeed:
Have clear guidelines on when side conversations are appropriate.
Train team members on how/when to use side conversations.
Set up triggers to spin up side conversations based on different criteria.
Choose the right channel for your audience and level of urgency (e.g. Slack vs. Email).
Set expectations clearly if you need a response within a specific time.
Use clear subject lines so everyone knows the main topic of the conversation.
Improve your communication workflow and collaboration
If your team struggles with collaborating and keeping information about customers organized, you should consider using Side Conversations.
When used correctly, Side Conversations can boost your team’s efficiency and enhance the customer experience.
If you’re looking for other ways to streamline and improve your Zendesk instance, you should also check out all of Swifteq’s Zendesk apps in the Zendesk Marketplace.
From free apps like the Zendesk Macro Export or Help Center Export or free trials on apps like Help Center Manager or Triggers+ChatGPT, there’s almost no limit to how you can make Zendesk work better for you.
Jake Bartlett