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.
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.
Showing Wait Time and Queue Position
Late last year Zendesk added new actions to its Messaging triggers that allowed you to send wait time messages to customers. Before a conversation was escalated to an agent, the system could add a few replies of its own. We could tell the customer the current queue length and average wait time based on prior conversations.
This flow worked, but had the downside that these messages showed up in the conversation logs and were static. If the queue length updated, the message didn't update.
Thomas Verschoren
With the release of a native Wait time feature for the Messaging Widget, this limitation is removed.
A native way to show wait time
When you dive into the settings for a Web Widget in Admin Center | Messaging, you'll find a new section for Wait time.
This section allows you to enable both a Wait time and Queue position message. Once enabled a new bubble will appear above the reply box showing the customer an up to date view of the current queue length and wait time.
If you use traditional Zendesk routing with triggers, this will be the queue length of all conversations across all groups. However, if you use the (in my opinion) better queues in combination with omnichannel routing, the displayed values will reflect the specific queue a ticket belongs to.
Sending out reminders
Where queues and wait time messages are a good way to set expectations for customers, there's a second factor that impacts customer experience and that's customer wait time. Customers expect their tickets to be resolved quickly and efficiently. And where the delay often occurs on the agent side, tickets can be blocked because of the customer. If a customer forgets to confirm an order change, forgets to send that screenshot or photo or otherwise leave the agent waiting, a ticket can be needlessly blocked.
That delay in response is not always on purpose. The customer could've read the message, thought "I'll send that photo when I get home" or "I need to check my calendar first". And then totally forget.
The best way to handle these scenarios is to build in a way to remind the customer of pending actions. Traditionally we use automations for these, where we add an automated reply to an email ticket after being stuck in pending for a while. And if the customer still doesn't respond, you can silently solve the ticket and remove it from your agents' queues altogether.
Doing this for email based tickets was easily done with native automation steps, but you could hack this behavior into Messaging by leveraging the Sunshine Conversations APIs
Thomas Verschoren
I use hack here in a good sense. It works. It's stable. But it's complex to setup and each channel requires its own unique template.
A native way to remind customers.
Similar to how we can now natively show Wait time, we can now natively remind customers of pending conversations.
Where wait time messages are setup as part of the Web Widget settings, Reminders are setup as part of the main Messaging settings. This has the benefit that you don't need to setup reminders for each channel one at a time. But also comes with the downside that the reminders are active for all channels, regardless of channel type (or customer type).
I'd love to see a way to filter out specific channels (e.g. my Business brand) or my VIP customers.
Under the capacity release settings of Messaging there's an option to react to inactive conversations after a short while. This will free up capacity for agents – by default only active conversations count – and set the ticket status to Pending.
It's here that you can choose to also send out a reminder to the customer. You can choose between no, 1, 2 or 3 reminders. Each reminder can be delayed up to 15 minutes, and the last reminder will always solve the ticket.
For each reminder you can choose the message to be send, and yes, dynamic content is supported. Reminders show up as messages in the conversation and are sent from either a default system user or if you've configured your AI Agent, its name and avatar.
What's next
These native Wait Time notifications and Reminders are two nice quality of life updates to Zendesk Messaging. It's nice to see Zendesk moving "complex" configurations into simple checkboxes. It shows they're actively listening to customer feedback and it makes these use cases a lot more discoverable.
Things that seemed impossible until you read articles like mine (😝) now become discoverable by anyone browsing through the Admin Center.
I hope Zendesk keeps moving forward this way. Native ways for customers to end a conversation, a way to login from within the Web Widget or a way to let the customer choose if they want to also receive conversation updates over email are just a few of those often requested features that can, and should, be native in the widget.
Bonus: Privacy Policy
To quote that big fruit company: there is one more thing.
Within the Web Widget settings you can now enable a privacy notice. This will add a message at the top of your web widget with a link to your privacy policy. Perfect to explain customers how (and if) you're using AI, or all those other important privacy notices.
And to wrap up the article with one final feature request: I'd be awesome if that notice could have custom text.
