Zendesk and Agentmatica: how the agent hands shoppers to your team

Most stores we work with already have a home for support, and for a lot of them that home is Zendesk. Adding an AI agent to the site shouldn't give your team a second inbox to watch. So the agent takes the conversations it can finish on your site, and the ones that need a person arrive in Zendesk as ordinary tickets.

What the agent handles before Zendesk sees anything

Shoppers ask the agent the questions they would otherwise email you: which size to get, whether two products work together, how long delivery takes, what your return window is. The agent answers from your own pages and catalog and links the page it used. When the answer isn't on your site, it says so and the question goes on your list of gaps to fill.

It also sells. It recommends products as cards, and on Shopify and WooCommerce it adds an item to the cart when the shopper asks for it and hands over a checkout link. None of that needs a ticket, so none of it reaches Zendesk.

When a chat becomes a ticket

A ticket opens when a conversation needs a person. The plainest case is a shopper asking for one: "can I talk to someone?" The agent also hands over when it decides a person should take the conversation, for example a refund it can't settle, or a topic you've told it to pass to the team.

Two quieter signals can open a ticket too. The agent watches how the conversation is going, and when a shopper is getting frustrated it hands over before they have to ask. You can switch that off in the agent's settings. And a shopper asking about wholesale, bulk or a custom order is flagged to your team, because those are the conversations worth a person's time.

If you want every lead in Zendesk as well, turn on Lead captured and each shopper who shares their contact details becomes a ticket.

What your team sees in the ticket

The subject says which agent it came from and why, such as "Escalation from Trailhead Supply: damaged order on arrival". The body has the reason, a short summary of the conversation and a link that opens the full chat in Agentmatica, so nobody has to ask the shopper to repeat themselves.

The shopper is the ticket's requester, so your reply goes to their inbox like any other ticket. Every ticket is tagged agentmatica, plus escalation or lead, which makes it easy to build a view or a trigger for them. If you set a default group, tickets land there.

Why we wait for the shopper's email

A ticket without the shopper's email can't be answered. Zendesk files it under your own account, so your reply comes back to you instead of reaching the shopper. So when a shopper asks for a person before they've shared any contact details, the agent asks for their email first, and it doesn't tell them the team has been told, because it hasn't yet.

The moment they share it, the ticket is created with them as requester. One conversation gets one ticket: if the same shopper also becomes a lead in that chat, the escalation ticket already carries their details, so no second "New lead" ticket appears.

If you'd rather have a ticket even when a shopper leaves only a phone number, turn off Only when visitor email is known on the Zendesk card.

Connect it in a few minutes

Open your agent in the dashboard, go to Integrations, and under Team Handoff click Connect on the Zendesk card. Enter your Zendesk subdomain, the part before .zendesk.com, then approve access in Zendesk.

Back on the card, choose which events open tickets, paste a default group ID if you want tickets routed to one team, and save. Send a test lead ticket and a test escalation ticket to see exactly what your team will get. Test tickets are tagged agentmatica_test and start with [TEST], so they're easy to clear out. Zendesk is available on every plan, including Free.

Replying while the shopper is still on your site

Replies from Zendesk reach the shopper by email. They don't appear in the chat window. That suits most handoffs, where the answer needs someone to check an order or approve a refund.

When you want to talk to a shopper while they're still browsing, take over the conversation from the Agentmatica dashboard, or turn on Slack live handoff, where your team replies in a Slack thread and the shopper sees the reply in the chat. The agent picks the conversation back up when you hand it back.

Using a different helpdesk

If your team works in another tool, or you route everything through Zapier, the custom webhook sends the same lead and escalation events to any URL you choose.