Managing Queues, Wait Time and Sending Reminders in Zendesk Messaging
Zendesk Messaging now includes native wait time and queue position indicators, plus automated customer reminders for pending replies. These enhancements simplify setup, improve responsiveness, and help manage asynchronous conversations more effectively across all messaging channels.
As an Omnichannel platform Zendesk offers support for a myriad of channels. Email was traditionally the basis for most customer support interactions, with phone conversations being another popular channel.
Email is ideal for long complex inquiries, and has a built-in expectation of delayed responses. Voice on the other hand has the expectation of immediate support, with the added complexity that some issues need investigation before they can be solved, and voice is inherent a 1:1 channel that occupies the attention of customer and agent for a 100%.
In the middle between those two channels is Messaging. This evolution of chat conversation has the benefit of being live and immediate, while being able to easily switch to an asynchronous conversation. Look no further than your own conversations over iMessage or WhatsApp to see this in action. Short quick burst of messages with friends are interchanges with delays in responses when people are working, sleeping or otherwise occupied. But what's important is that even though the conversation might be handled with delay, all reactions happen within the same thread. And people can easily switch from direct live conversations to that delay.
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When Zendesk first made the move to messaging it required a mental shift for most customers. The expectation of chat being live for many companies had to be replaced with the concept of asynchronous conversations.
But as companies (and customers) go through this shift a few things become critical: customers need to know if someone is available now or if their message will be followed up later. Similarly if they hope to get the issue escalated to and resolved by an agent, they need to know how long they should wait.
And in parallel, since messages can be replied to with a delay, there should be a way to alert both agent and customer that something happened. For social channels like Instagram DM and Facebook Messenger or for mobile apps that use the SDK, that's easy. We can send a push notification when an agent replies.
But even though we can notify the customer that a reply is there, we sometimes want to nudge our customers that "hey, maybe you forgot about that message"?
These are just a few of the scenarios that Zendesk's latest updates to their Web Widget and Messaging channels try to solve. Let's dive in.
