Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Team or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Messaging and email are the two channel types you pick from when you create an AI agent. The choice matters more than it looks, because each AI agent can interact on only one type of channel: one agent cannot serve messaging and email at the same time. If you want both, you build two.
| Where | What it covers |
| Messaging | The Web Widget and the social messaging channels, including WhatsApp. |
| Including tickets that arrive through the API and through a web form. | |
| Unified SDK for iOS and Android | Your own mobile app, set up separately from the messaging agent. |
| Slack and Microsoft Teams | Through the Slack for Zendesk Support integration and the Zendesk integration for Microsoft Teams. |
| Web Widget (Classic) | Article suggestions on your help center or website, rather than a full conversation. |
| Answer Bot API | For a channel of your own that is not in this list. |
Why the two behave differently
On messaging the customer is present. Questions can be clarified, and a handover reaches somebody while they are still there. Email is slower, longer and one shot: the customer wrote a paragraph yesterday and is not waiting, so the reply has to be right the first time.
That difference is the reason for the one channel rule. Reply length, tone and the moment of escalation genuinely differ. Two sentences reads as helpful in a widget and curt in an email.
One email, one request
An email AI agent acts on the first intent it recognises and no further. A customer who writes "cancel these three bookings" and lists three reference numbers gets one of them cancelled, normally the first, and hears nothing about the other two. The agent works with a single entity value per procedure run, so the extra numbers are read and then not used.
This is about doing, not about explaining: the same reply can still answer several questions from your knowledge sources. It is procedures and the actions they trigger that run one at a time.
Email is where this bites, because email is where people put three requests in one message. Say in the procedure what happens to the rest, or hand the conversation to a person as soon as more than one comes in, rather than letting the customer discover it from a confirmation that covers a third of what they asked.
Where to start
Messaging, for most teams. The feedback is faster and the format forgives a clarifying question, so you learn what your customers ask before that same behaviour goes out over email, where a wrong answer sits in an inbox looking like your considered response.
Judge them separately
The same knowledge can perform well on one channel and badly on the other. Read transcripts per channel rather than in total, otherwise the good numbers hide the bad ones.
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