Last year I wrote an article about sending messages to customers over Messaging (WhatsApp, Web Widget,...) via the Sunshine Conversations API. This flow not only allows you to bypass the 24 hour rule for WhatsApp but also makes it possible to send messages to customers via triggers and automations.

➕ Sending Automated Messages via WhatsApp with Sunshine Conversations and Zendesk

Learn how to leverage the Sunshine Conversations API included in Zendesk Suite to automatically send out messages to your customers.

Internal NoteThomas Verschoren

A while back I had a reader reach out who wanted to convert my Pending automations for custom statuses (link) into a flow compatible for messaging.

So, this is exactly what this article will be about. But first, some context.

What are Pending automations

When an agent replies to a customer ticket, they can use the Pending status when submitting the ticket when they need a response from the customer before they can move forward.

This could be a confirmation that the issue is resolved, a request for more information, or just a reply for some clarification on the issue.

Putting the ticket on Pending has a few benefits:

• It's removed from the Open Tickets view.
• Your SLAs are put on pause.
• You can automate these tickets and send out an email reminder to the customer that you're still waiting for their response.

Those reminders make sure your agents get the responses they need, and if no response is given, we can either reopen the ticket so the agent can do one final attempt to reach the customer, or an automation or the agent can manually or silently solve the ticket to remove it from our active tickets altogether.

This works great for email based tickets like those submitted via email, web forms or API. But when it comes to Messaging tickets via the Web Widget or WhatsApp we run into a few issues.

For most customers we do not have an email address on file, so our automation, which can fire on a messaging ticket, will not work and will not send out an email.
Messaging also has different rules. A Web Widget conversation times out after 72 hours and WhatsApp is even stricter with a 24 hour limit.

So to resolve this we can build our automations a bit different, and leverage the Sunshine Conversations API and a Cloudflare Worker to set this up.

Setup

Worker

As explained in the original article, the Sunshine Conversations API requires some identifiers that are not natively accessible in Zendesk triggers and automations. We need a conversation id and a user identity . We can derive both from the requester_id of our ticket requester, but even so, we can't connect to the Sunshine Conversations API directly from our triggers.

For this reason we need to deploy a Cloudflare Worker (or similar cloud script on make.com, zapier, Google Cloud or similar). You can find the worker in the GitHub repository below, or you can deploy it to Cloudflare for free via the Deploy button below.

GitHub - verschoren/outbound_messaging

Contribute to verschoren/outbound_messaging development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubverschoren

Webhook

Secondly we need a webhook that calls our worker (or other cloud function). Assuming you deployed the Cloudflare Worker, your webhook will be hosted on https://outbound-messages.yourdomain.workers.dev

Automation

Assuming we want to send out a reminder to our customer after eight hours, we can setup an automation with the following conditions:

Once the conditions are setup, we can configure our actions:

The payload.

{
    "requester":"{{ticket.requester.id}}",
    "message":"We marked this conversation as pending and are awaiting your answer"
  }

The Result

Or via WhatsApp:

Conclusion

I really hope that someday the Zendesk triggers and automations can access the Sunshine Conversations API directly without resorting to an external script to grab the right variables.

Or, since we're hoping, a way have a Send message action in our triggers that can directly send a message to Messaging channels would be even nicer.

Either way, for now the above flow will allow you to send out automated reminders over Messaging to your customers!