Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Growth or higher |
| Access | Admin |
A sandbox lets you try messaging changes without customers seeing them, which matters because the widget is public.
Why messaging in particular
Most Zendesk configuration is internal. The messaging widget is on your website, so a mistake is visible to every visitor immediately, and there is no draft state.
Set it up
- Create or open a sandbox from Admin Center.
- Add messaging to the sandbox. It is not there by default, for web, mobile or social, and has to be added by hand.
- Put its widget on a test page, not your live site.
- Work through the conversation as a customer would.
- Apply what you learned to production.
What comes across, and what does not
A great deal arrives. A sandbox replicates your triggers and automations, your shared views and macros, your groups and group memberships, organisations, ticket fields and user fields, and your agents. So the rules you want to test against are already there.
What does not come: personal views and macros, most tickets, and both Talk and Guide, which are not part of a sandbox at all.
One detail that saves an afternoon: agent email addresses are invalidated with an @example.com domain. Nothing you test can email anyone, which is the right safety behaviour and exactly the wrong thing to forget while testing a notification.
What is worth testing there
- A new greeting or flow, where the wording is being reworked.
- An AI agent, before it talks to anyone real.
- Trigger changes, where getting them wrong means every visitor sees it.
What a sandbox will not tell you
Volume, and real customer language. A sandbox has the questions you thought of. The value is in checking that the mechanics work, not in predicting what people will say.
Configuration does not copy itself
What you built in the sandbox has to be recreated in production, unless you are on a plan with configuration deployment. Note what you changed as you go, because rebuilding from memory is where mistakes come back.
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