n-Zendesk Chat turns a website widget conversation into a ticket. It doesn't know who's really on the other end of it.
Zendesk Chat is the live chat widget you put on a website or in an app so visitors can message your team in real time, with the conversation becoming a ticket agents can work from the same queue as email. It started life as a separate product called Zopim before Zendesk acquired it. It routes on what's typed in the chat itself. We connect it to what you actually know about the account chatting with you.
What Zendesk Chat covers
The core of it is the widget: a chat box on your site or app that creates a real-time conversation and turns it into a ticket when it ends (or sometimes immediately), so it lands in the same place as every other support channel. You can set up pre-chat forms to collect a name or email before the conversation starts, proactive greeting rules based on page or time on site, and routing to specific agents or teams.
Chat triggers work similarly to ticket triggers: conditions based on what's happening in the chat (keywords typed, department selected, time waiting) that fire an action like routing to a specific team or sending a canned message.
If you're trying to support customers across more channels than just a website widget, like WhatsApp or SMS, that broader cross-channel messaging is really Sunshine Conversations' territory rather than Chat's. Chat is specifically the widget-based live chat experience; Sunshine Conversations is the API for unifying conversations across many more channels than just your website.
Where native chat routing stops being enough
Chat triggers can act on what's typed and basic session data, but they can't act on what your business actually knows about the account behind the chat unless that data is somehow already in Zendesk. A customer's contract tier, their open orders, whether they're mid-renewal, none of that is visible to a chat trigger unless someone's wired it in.
That means a high-value account and a first-time visitor get treated identically by native routing unless you've built the piece that checks who's actually chatting before deciding what happens next.
What we build on top of Zendesk Chat
Routing that checks the account before the chat even starts
A business wanted VIP accounts to skip the general queue and go straight to a senior agent with their order history attached. We built the lookup that runs the moment a logged-in customer opens the widget, before native chat triggers alone could tell the difference.
Chat-to-ticket handoff that's already categorized
When a chat converted to a ticket, agents still had to read it and tag it themselves. We built a step that tags and prioritizes the resulting ticket automatically based on keywords and the account data pulled in during the chat.
Want Zendesk Chat to actually know who it's talking to?
Tell us what account or order data should change how a chat gets routed. We connect that data in before the conversation starts, not after.
Is your Zendesk Chat treating every visitor the same regardless of who they actually are?
That's a data problem, not a chat-widget problem, and it's fixable without replacing the widget. We build the connection to whatever system actually knows your customers, chat included, across whatever else your business runs.
Tell us what should change