Zendesk Side Conversations

Zendesk side conversations let you ask a third party something without leaving the ticket or looping the customer in. Genuinely useful, and easy to overuse.

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What Zendesk side conversations are for

A side conversation is a separate thread attached to a ticket: an email to a supplier, a message to another team, a Slack thread, kept alongside the customer conversation rather than inside it.

The customer never sees it. The context stays attached to the ticket instead of disappearing into somebody personal mailbox, which is the entire point.

Side conversation, child ticket or forward?

Side conversation when you need an answer from someone else to resolve this ticket, and they don't need their own queue or SLA.

Child ticket when the other team needs to own a piece of work with its own tracking.

Forward from your own mailbox: almost never. That's how context leaves the system and nobody can pick up the ticket when you're off.

The failure mode

A ticket that's waiting on a side conversation looks like a ticket that's being worked, so it ages quietly while everyone assumes it's in hand.

Set a status that means "waiting on a third party", report on those separately, and chase the side conversation rather than the customer. Otherwise you get the worst outcome: an aged ticket, an unaware customer, and a supplier who never replied.

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