Feature Request: Adjust Chat Timeout Period

Hi Alex,

Thanks for sharing your feedback regarding the session timeout behaviour. Currently, we have no plans to make this customisable per account but we are getting more requests for it on the mobile SDK due to network connections being less stable on mobile devices.

For your case specifically, are your sessions expiring because of a wait time that is longer than 5min? We are looking at improving the persistent nature of the mobile SDK conversations next year and it may include things like push notification support. Once we have something to share that is more concrete, we will let you know.

-Ramin

+1

We should be able to customize this... And/or force end the chat...

Hey guys,

I would like to bring up this topic again. We would like to change the timeout time to a longer peroid. It would help us a lot, if you could think about this feature once again.

We use your chat tool for a live stream as a support for the viewers. Beside that we use it to communicate with the technical guys who set up and manage the stream. So it is important for us, that the technical guys will not disapear after 20 Minutes.

Thank you very much,

Niko

...and for us we would like the time out to be shorter unless you give us the ability to end the chat as the agent.

Our organization would like to have more control over closing chat.  Please make this into a feature going forward.

Please add the ability to customize the chat session timeouts and allow agents to close chats.  Adding it as a option to enable/disable agent access to this feature from the admin UI might be a good solution.

We use Routed Chats and when a customer forgets to close their window/widget they repeatedly come back into the queue, passing from one user to the next each time.  Not only is this a distraction for agents but it also causes real chats to be unfairly distributed.  In our scenario an actual chat discussion can last 20 - 60 min.  One of these stale sessions lasts only a couple minutes as the agent checks to see if the user is actually returning for further support or not.  It's an embarrassing scenario, as we're practically pleading with them to close the widget.

Zendesk Chat works well but lack of this basic feature is significant shortcoming.  Please consider adding this feature so we can recommend Zendesk chat to others in the support community. 

Following - We also need this option asap!

Waiting for this feature launch !

Would love this feature as well. 

Agree with all the above comments.

In our case, visitors are returning to the chat long after the agent has left the chat, the chat duration does not take into account the fact that the chat has ended once before. The chat duration then continues to count the 'new' conversation between the same customer and a different agent. This is harming our reports as we see abnormal long durations and the last agent to handle the chat with the customer ends with a very long resolution time. 

- Ability to force close/end a chat

- Ability to edit chat timeout period

- If the agent left the chat, the customer should be made aware that the chat is closed, and would have to specifically choose a) my request is not done b) new chat

Hi,

any news on that? Any WA suggested?

Hi! I was directed here after filing a ticket about a similar issue. Our workflow for working tickets post-chat is to unassign the ticket created from the chat so that it can appear as a workable ticket in our queue. If someone picks it up and starts working it, and then the chat times out, like, 50 minutes later, it gets unassigned from them and back to the chat operator, and the person working the ticket loses visibility of the issue.

It was suggested to us to wait until the chat end/timeout before doing the unassignment in the first place, but we only offer chat for critical issues, which have an SLA of 1 hour. If we have to burn the first 50 minutes of that process waiting for the chat to timeout on the user's end, then we're gonna have a lot of reported SLA breaches.

Anyway, I hope this use case provides some validity for either shortening the timeout length or giving control to the chat operator to force-end the chat.

Thanks!

I have an issue where our Chatbot is returning generic cards in number of use cases.   Because of the never end chat session (we don't expect our users to end a chat and navigate) and our customers asking the bot several questions though out the day, the Chat widget start failing, typing slows to a halt.  I believe this is a result of the chat session never ending, when our customers are in our system performing their daily work activities and asking the bot or live agents questions.  It seems to be a direct result of the Chat history (starts with reporting 20 events) not resetting within the widget until the chat session ends, which typically doesn't for several hours.   

There are a number of issues with the Zendesk Chat integration, just read the dozens of community postings here and in other locations within the Zendesk help center.  Flexibility will be the most important enhancement to address all our needs.   Hopefully, that flexibility can be added directly to the Chat widget.  Also, let the chat agents end the chats!

hi all:

We need this feature when we use js-sdk in our Apps

As we know ,Hybrid Apps gots some benefits than native ,such as individual release

Now,when our customers go back last page, check sth,try to come back and keep chat with the agent.Guess what? the customer has losed the connection already!just because he/she close the webview(browser with chat js-sdk)


Would zendesk please make the timeout adjustable,we what to set it to 3-5 min,when we use your js-sdk
Thanks

Hi All, 

We definitely need the feature to be able to customise "IDLE" time in the chat trigger conditions. Presently it is hard coded to (IDLE - which is 2-3minutes) and that is a long wait time to customers.

What we would like to achieve here - is if a customer has been idle in an active chat for at least 90 seconds on the chat, the a trigger should fire to follow up with the customer - "Hello are you still there?" Right now, the conditions in the trigger is just "Visitor Status is IDLE" with no way to customize this.

regards 

We have the same issue: We need a trigger to end chat on a certain idle time and/or manually force to end chat by an agent.

3 years have passed... Has this functionality appeared? We just connected the chat and faced the fact that the client has to leave for 20 minutes, as the chat closes. This is unacceptable for our experience, our clients want to chat for a period of several days, they can not solve every issue by being permanently online. It's hard for me to imagine who it might be convenient for.

Is there at least some way to configure this through the code?

@Ramin Shokrizadeh

Ramin Shokrizadeh 

Do you have any news about this feature? We really need it!

There are no plans to change this behaviour with the Chat product but we are working on supporting native messaging as a channel at Zendesk and will have more to share near the tail end of the year. Native messaging is not session based and you would not run into the 20 min idle timeout setting.