1 min readsupport-platforms · messaging
What three-way messaging actually solved
Dispute cases on Upwork involve a freelancer, a client, and an agent. We put all three in one Zendesk ticket, each conversation visible only to its participants.
By Asif Iqbal
Marketplace disputes are not two-party conversations. There is a freelancer, a client, and the support agent in the middle. Handled as separate conversations, each one holds only part of the story. (Generic pattern.)
As a Senior Software Engineer at Upwork (2020 to early 2021), I was one of a small team that built a three-way messaging model for dispute cases on Zendesk's side-conversation API, working with Zendesk's API team. Freelancer, client, and agent share one ticket; each conversation is clearly named and visible only to its own participants.
Agents work one ticket instead of three browser tabs, and nobody has to retell the story.
The model is described in Zendesk's Upwork customer story.