Connecting the Zendesk Messaging chat widget

Overview

If customers chat with you live through the Zendesk Messaging widget, this step wires the AI into that channel. Inquiru talks to the widget through Zendesk's underlying Sunshine Conversations API: customer messages arrive as webhook events, AI replies are posted back into the live conversation, and escalations hand control to Zendesk Agent Workspace.

Prerequisites

You need an active Zendesk Messaging setup with the chat widget already embedded on your site, and Zendesk Agent Workspace enabled so human handoff works. The standard Suite Team plan includes both. Email-ticket setup is not required — the chat-widget path can run on its own.

Get a Conversations API key from Zendesk

Go to Admin Centre → Apps and Integrations → APIs → Conversations API and click Create API key. Give it a label (e.g. Inquiru AI) and copy the Key ID and Secret — the Secret is displayed once and cannot be retrieved later. The App ID (sometimes labelled SunCo App ID) is shown at the top of the same page — copy it too.

Save the credentials in Inquiru

On the Integrations page, expand your existing Zendesk integration card and click Edit. Fill in the Sunshine Conversations Key ID, Secret, and App ID. Leave the Sunshine Webhook Secret field blank — Inquiru fills it in automatically in the next step. Click Save Changes.

Set up the live chat webhook

After saving, a Live chat webhook panel appears. Click Set up live chat webhook. Inquiru calls the SC API on your behalf to:

• create a custom Sunshine integration named Inquiru AI on your SC app
• register a webhook pointing back to api.inquiru.com/webhooks/zendesk/<id>/sunshine
• store the returned webhook secret on your integration credentials

The badge flips to Configured when it succeeds. No manual webhook or trigger setup is needed for the chat-widget path.

Verify end-to-end

Open your site as a test customer and start a chat. Within a few seconds you should see the AI reply directly in the chat panel. The conversation also appears in Inquiru's Conversations page (channel: Zendesk). To test handoff, ask the AI to escalate ("speak to a human") — control passes to Zendesk Agent Workspace and the chat lands in the agent queue.

Image and PDF uploads

Customers can drag images or PDFs into the chat widget — these are forwarded to the AI as multimodal content. Supported types: JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP, and PDF. Other file types (e.g. .docx) are noted in the conversation but their contents aren't visible to the AI.

Reconnect or disconnect

Reconnect recreates the SC custom integration in place — useful after rotating the SC API key or moving Inquiru between hosts. Disconnect deletes the SC custom integration and clears the webhook secret in Inquiru, leaving the email-ticket path untouched.