Zendesk Chat handoff usage

Overview

By integrating Zendesk Chat and Ada, you can provide your customers with a frictionless experience that instantly hands them off from the AI Agent to a live agent. The customer will begin their conversation with the AI Agent, and if required, live agents will be invited to join the chat to support the customer - all within the same interface.

This article has been designed to outline the experience on the Zendesk side of things once you have configured Ada with your Zendesk environment. For detailed instructions on configuration, please see Configure Zendesk Chat.

Customer Experience

When the customer reaches the point in the handoff dialog where the Zendesk Live Agent block has been placed, they will be added to the appropriate queue, provided the customer is within your support department’s operating hours. Within their chat window they will be provided with a banner indicating their queue position and will no longer have the ability to chat with the AI Agent.

The agent joins the conversation in the same chat window. This creates a seamless customer experience. The agent’s name and Ada live agent avatar display in the chat window. To personalize the Ada live agent avatar, navigate to Channels > Chat > Appearance > Chat window > Avatar.

Agent Experience

When the customer reaches the point in the handoff dialog where the Zendesk Live Agent block has been placed, Ada will route the conversation to your live agent(s), placing them in a queue until a human agent becomes available. The handoff process relies on the Zendesk routing mechanisms, meaning that you will want to ensure that your departments or groups and hours of operation are appropriately configured within Zendesk.

The Zendesk department or group that you identify in the Zendesk Live Agent Block will be the department customers are routed to for handoff. If there are no agents available in the preferred department, either due to your queues being full, or all agents being offline, the customer will be routed to the the Off-Hours dialog.

If the request to handoff to a live agent comes outside of your live chat hours of operation (as set in Zendesk), the AI Agent will route the customer to the Off Hours dialog. Your live agent can then choose to accept the chat from the Zendesk dashboard, as normal.

If the AI Agent has captured specific information from the customer, such as their name, email, or phone number, that information will map to the chat, as will any tags you have set up on the Zendesk Live Agent Block. They will also see the conversation the customer had with the AI Agent leading up to the handoff, as well as any tags included in the Live Agent Block.

As a reminder, what is handed over from the AI Agent to the live agent is the transcript up to the point when the customer transferred to the live agent queue. Further, please note that the agent will not be able to see what the customer is typing before they send the message. They will see that they are typing, but not what they are typing.

When your live agent is speaking with a customer who transferred over from speaking with the AI Agent, the live agent will have access to all of their usual Zendesk actions, including transferring chat to another agent, creating a ticket, and more. Please note that when a customer speaks with an agent, the chat populates in the ticket as a public comment; however, in email tickets, the chat populates as a private comment.

If a customer goes idle (triggered between 20 seconds and 2 minutes of not having the chat window in focus, or 20 mins of inactivity), the conversation with the agent will automatically be ended, and the customer will be provided with any dialog blocks that follow the Zendesk Live Agent Block. The customer can re-escalate if they would like to reconnect to an agent.

Transcript Summaries

With Transcript Summaries, Ada can automatically attach a summary of a customer’s conversation to a handoff transcript. This summary helps human support agents quickly determine the reason for the escalation.

• The feature examines the customer’s messages and looks for key phrases that represent what the customer is trying to ask or do.

• The summary includes up to three customer messages.

• The summary appears after the last message of the transcript.

• Summaries only consider the customer’s text messages, and not button clicks or AI Agent messages.

• Summaries are available for English conversations only.

File Transfer

The file transfer in Zendesk Chat provides a two-way file transfer, meaning both customers and agents can share files within the live agent chat conversation. By default, customers and agents can share the following file types: JPEG, PNG, GIF, PDF, and TXT, to a maximum of 20 MB, with only one file being shared at a time. To enable additional filetypes, you can add them in your Zendesk settings. To learn how, see Managing file sending in live chat at Zendesk’s documentation.

The customer will have the option to either drag and drop or click the paperclip icon to select the file from their computer. If they click the paperclip icon they will be provided with a window in which to select their file, and only files that meet the limitations mentioned above (file type and size) will be selectable, all other files will be greyed out. If the customer drags and drops an unsupported file they will receive an error message alerting them that the file is too large, unsupported, etc.

The experience of the agent will be the same as that of the standard Zendesk live agent chat, where agents can click the file icon in the Zendesk live chat interface to share a file with the customer.

Once shared, the files are hosted in Zendesk, but those with access to the Ada dashboard will be able to view the files from with in the Conversations view.

Additional Information

• We do not currently support live agent surveys.

• We do not support rating requests from agents.

• Zendesk triggers are not supported.

• For clients on Zendesk Agent Workspace — Tags are supported, as well as the automatic mapping of name, email, and phone variables to ticket fields as long as they are lower case global variables in Ada.

• We do support the ability for agent-to-agent transfers, cold transfers, and transfers to departments in both Zopim and Zendesk Agent Workspace.

• We support the following transfers for both Zopim and Zendesk Agent Workspace:

  • Agent-to-agent (transfer and leave, or invite).

  • Transfer to department.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: My conversations appear to be disconnecting, why is this?

There are a few reasons why the conversation may be disconnected:

• If the customer is on a mobile device, and the device goes to sleep, the live agent will be disconnected (this is intended behaviour from Zendesk and not Ada-related).

• If the customer is using a computer, and browser privacy is enabled, if the user navigates away from the page, the live agent will be disconnected.

Q: Can more than one agent be involved in a conversation?

No. Currently only one agent can be involved in a conversation at one time. If more than one agent is involved in a conversation, all the information will be routed to the first original agent. Any subsequent agents will not receive any information.

Q: What happens when the live agent ends a chat?

Any blocks, as well as quick replies, can be included after the live chat handoff block, so that when live chat ends, the AI Agent can re-greet the customer.

Q: After agent to agent transfer will the second agent get the same transcript?

Yes, they will.

Q: Do we support the Zendesk automatic translation feature?

Yes, we do. Ada is also multi-lingual, so all languages are supported out of the box. For example, messages announcing the customers queue, presence messages, etc. are all translated.

Q: Do we support emojis in live chat?

Yes, we do.

Q: Is Zendesk Chat through Ada supported on mobile?

Yes, on iOS and Android.

Q: I have set everything up, but when I attempt to hand off to an agent, I get a ‘Conversation ended’ message.

The Zendesk API’s client secret or ID have probably expired or were deleted. Please re-generate the client secret and update it in the Settings > Platform > Zendesk Live Chat platform modal. If that doesn’t work, you may need to whitelist the AI Agent by adding the AI Agent’s URL to your whitelist.