Side Conversations

Jarod Stanton

Updated 04 December 2025 19:48

Q: What are Side Conversations?

A: Side conversations are spaces in a ticket where agents can have a side conversation with a specific group of people, or discuss a specific area of concern or course of action. You can use them to organise information about a ticket.

Side conversations are only available if they have been activated by an administrator.

Q: How do Side Conversations Work?

A: When you create a side conversation...

They can be sent via Email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams (depending on your Zendesk setup).
Each Side Conversation is like a mini-thread connected to the ticket.
Agents can see all Side Conversations linked to a ticket, track replies, and resolve them.
When a Side Conversation is resolved, it does not affect the main ticket status unless manually updated.
Side Conversations can be assigned to specific agents or groups just like tickets.
When you create a Side Conversation, you choose the assignee to own the conversation.
The assignee receives notifications about replies in the Side Conversation.
This assignment is separate from the main ticket assignee, so the ticket can be assigned to Agent A while a Side Conversation is assigned to Agent B or a group.
Assigning Side Conversations helps ensure accountability for the conversation with the external party.

Q: What is the benefit of using Side Conversations?

A: Using side conversations can make it easier to do things like:

Find, organise, and manage information about a specific part of an issue
Have a conversation with the right people
Find specific questions, answers, and replies. Ensure conversations happen outside of the main conversation with the requester.
Have multiple standalone conversations that are separate from each other
Get outside help without pulling others into the main ticket directly

Creating Side Conversations

Agents, light agents, and admins can create side conversations on open or closed tickets.

When someone replies to a side conversation on a closed or archived ticket, triggers won’t be run on it even if they include side conversation conditions, but a follow-up ticket is automatically created (see Understanding follow-up tickets for side conversations).

Any time someone creates a side conversation, a notification appears in the Zendesk Support interface for 60 seconds.

Using Macros to start Side Conversations

You can add a Side conversation action to any macro, and when it runs, a new side conversation is started and immediately pops open. Ticket information and some extra boilerplate text are added automatically to the body by means of placeholders, leaving you to add any additional recipients or information that you want to include.

There are a few important things to note about how this feature behaves:

When you use a macro to start a side conversation, the macro is not applied to any of the side conversations that are already on the ticket. It is only applied to the new side conversation that you're starting now.
Keep in mind that your macro may include other actions that change ticket fields. If you don't submit the ticket, those changes will be lost.

There are Side conversation actions in macros, which include:

Side conversation via email: When you add this action to a macro, you can also enter the email addresses of the users that you want to include in the email notification. If you manually enter an email address into the To field, make sure that the email address is correct. The email addresses you enter will become the recipients of a side conversation when the macro is used.
Side conversation via child ticket: When you use this action, you create a side conversation on the original ticket and a new child ticket is created (see Using side conversation child tickets). Note that you can specify only groups that you have access to and agents within those groups in the To field.

For a step-by-step guide on how to use create side conversations with macros, please review the following Zendesk Help support article: Using macros to start side conversations.