Getting started with the Chat Conversations API

Great update! Can't wait to get started with this!!

I have a clarifying question that I hope you can help to elaborate. We are supporting customers in 10 languages, so we are a heavy user of departments and assigned chat routing. For us it is important to know more specifics about this limitation before we get started:

Does not fully support Assigned chat routing. Assigned chat routing will only work if the agent that uses the Conversations API is the only agent in the department

What is possible with chatbot and assigned chat routing? Can you give an example of a flow where the chatbot hands over the chat to a human?

// all the best, Jonas

Thanks Jonas!

To answer your questions - a classic scenario is when you've deployed a chatbot, say, for customer support (FAQ) function and you put the bot in a dedicated department <FAQ Bot Department> and let all incoming visitor messages to go to the bot / department.

The chatbot would greet and resolve FAQs that are already in the bot's KB / engine. When the bot can't answer a certain question, or when the visitor is unhappy with the answer provided by a bot, the bot then can show a list of departments for the end user to choose from and transfer the conversation to that selected department. 

The limitations mentioned for bots + assigned chat routing is that currently, bot routing works on a department level (as opposed to more granular, individual agent skill level). All the transfers to/from a chatbot are working on a department-to-department level for now, and a chatbot wouldn't know it's supposed to pick up all the new conversations transferred into a department if it's sitting in the department along with other human agents.

Hope this helps :)

Hi Zain! You can sign up for a demo here: https://www.zendesk.com/chat/chatbot/

Can we see this feature in action, is there a demo available?

Is subscription message from user chat a feature only available for Enterprise tier? Does the demo from the gist works with account with Professional? From the pricing Tier is "Real-Time API" the service required for doing this example?

Hi Cristophe!

For Chat account that was created in Support, the authorization page URL should contain subdomain query string. For example, if your account subdomain is donut_store.zendesk.com, the URL will look something like this:

https://www.zopim.com/oauth2/authorizations/new?subdomain=donut_store&<other query string stated in https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/chat/auth#authorization-code-grant-flow>

Hope it helps!

This API is great and we were able to use it from a stand-alone Zendesk Chat account.

Unfortunately, we did not succeed to use the OAuth authentication when the Zendesk Chat account was created in Zendesk Support.

When we try to follow the OAuth documentation (https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/chat/auth), we are asked to login to account.zopim.com for which we have no credentials.
When we change the OAuth URL to use the Zendesk Support OAuth on a subdomain, we receive an error saying that the scope is invalid (for the "chat" permission).

Can you please help us to solve this issue?

Many thanks,

Hi Bliss ໃ_າ! 

That's correct, this capability is available on the Chat Enterprise plan only. The Real-time API is different from the Chat Conversations API. In order to leverage chatbots in Zendesk Chat, you would need to be using the Chat Conversations API that is available on the Enterprise plan. 

Hope that helps! 

Hi there!

My use case:

We created a chatbot in angular, also we are using IBM Watson Assistant APIs and we are looking for to transfer the conversation to the live agent in some point using the ZenDesk APIs.

Question:

It's possible to use a customized chatbot created in angular in order to transfer a conversation to live agent with ZenDesk or it is mandatory the use of ZenDesk Widget?

Regards,

Jorge

Hi Jorge, it is mandatory to use Zendesk widget because Chat Conversations API allows you to act as a Zendesk agent, which can converse with visitors that started a chat from the Zendesk widget.

One possible setup that I can suggest is to make a bot agent using the Conversations API (it can use IBM Watson Assistant APIs), put the bot agent in a department and route all incoming chats from the widget to that department (reference). This way, all incoming chats will be served by the bot first. And then, the bot can transfer the conversation to a live agent using the transferToDepartment mutation. You can check the getting started guide above for more information.

Hi Greg, another questions by the way,

1. when I set the client's scope by "read%20write%20chat", and then check its scope by "

curl https://www.zopim.com/api/v2/oauth/clients

", the result shows my client's scopes are "read write", there is no "chat".  Does this because my Zendesk chat plan is "basic", not "Enterprise or Premium (legacy) plan"?    As I can see that "The Conversations API is available on Zendesk Chat Enterprise or Premium (legacy) plan.", your engineers do the access control when the client is authenticated.

2. I checked my Zendesk plan and the chat is 'Basic'. When I plan to upgrade my Zendesk plan to ENTERPRISE，I found that there is no 'basic' plan in Chat? Is this an old version? After I finished to upgrade to ENTERPRISE plan which cost $70/month, will I be able to  set the scope with 'chat' and use the chat conversational API?

Hi Cong, good questions! The answer is yes, once you upgrade to Enterprise, you will see the Chat scope in your OAuth token. The Basic plan is a legacy version from a couple of years ago and the correlated plan is now "Lite", which is the current free version. 

Hope that helps!

Hi there!

I have created in NodeJS a service following your example of Chat Conversations API.

Everything works fine, but I can't do 2 things:

- How do I get or generate the value of {chatMessage.channel.id} to start a conversation automatically?

- I do not receive messages in (sender .__ typename === TYPE.AGENT) if they are generated by an Answerbot (with or without flowbuilder). I only receive “Live Agent” type messages. Can this be done?

Thanks a lot!! Alex