Zendesk
Step-by-step guide to set up Zendesk as a destination in RudderStack.
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Step-by-step guide to set up Zendesk as a destination in RudderStack.
Last updated
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Zendesk is a popular CRM and customer support service suite that ensures cutting-edge sales and support across various business domains. It allows you to tend to your customers in the best way possible and satisfactorily resolve all their queries and concerns. Zendesk also offers features such as live chat, call center software capabilities, and a smart knowledge base for your executives to quickly solve any customer query at hand.
RudderStack supports Zendesk as a destination to which you can seamlessly send your customer data.
Find the open-source transformer code for this destination in our GitHub repo.
Before configuring Zendesk as a destination in RudderStack, make sure that Zendesk supports the source platform from which you are sending the events, by referring to the following table:
Connection Mode
Web
Mobile
Server
Device mode
-
-
-
Cloud mode
Supported
Supported
Supported
To know more about the difference between Cloud mode and Device mode in RudderStack, read the RudderStack connection modes guide.
Once you have verified that the source platform supports sending events to Zendesk, perform the steps below:
From your RudderStack dashboard, add the source. From the list of destinations, select Zendesk.
Assign a name to the destination and click on Next. You should then see the following screen:
Connection Settings
To set up the Zendesk destination in RudderStack, the following settings need to be configured:
Email: This is a mandatory field. Enter the email you use to log into your Zendesk dashboard.
API Token: This is a mandatory field. Enter the Zendesk API token that will be used to authenticate the request. To create an API token, check this Zendesk support article.
Zendesk Subdomain: Enter your Zendesk subdomain (not including .zendesk.com
).
Create users as verified: Enabling this setting will create users as verified (the email verification is skipped). RudderStack sends verified
as true if this setting is enabled.
Send Group calls without a User ID: Enable this setting if you don't want to associate the user with a group. If this setting is enabled, only the group will be created or updated if userId
is not present in the payload.
Once you've entered all the required settings, click on Next to finish the configuration. Zendesk should now be added and enabled as a destination in RudderStack.
The identify
call creates or updates a user in Zendesk. RudderStack uses the email
in traits
for these actions. Hence, we highly recommend including the user's email address in the identify
call.
RudderStack maps the properties to a subset of the standard Zendesk user attributes and creates a new custom field for the unmapped attributes. The mapping is shown in the following table:
RudderStack
Zendesk
email
email
name
name
organizationId
organization_id
timezone
time_zone
phone
phone
userId
user_id
userId
external_id
The organization_id
corresponds to the organization ID assigned by Zendesk.
You can use the Create users as verified dashboard setting in RudderStack to create and register the users as verified. Zendesk skips the email verification for these users.
Enable the Enable Removing Users from Organizations setting in the dashboard to use this feature.
The following payload fields under context.traits
are mandatory for this action:
company.id
company.remove
(should be set to true
)
RudderStack assumes a valid Zendesk organization_id
in the company.id
field. Then, it finds the organization corresponding to that ID and performs the action.
A sample identify
call for this action is shown below:
The above identify
call updates the user as well as removes them from the organization associated with the ID 900001329943
.
Zendesk expects an userId
for every track
call. You can set the userId
by making an identify
call before sending any track
event. RudderStack persists the user details from the identify
call to all the subsequent calls.
A sample track
call is as shown:
RudderStack uses the Zendesk Sunshine Events API for the track
calls. To successfully send track
calls to Zendesk, the following criteria should be met:
You need to have signed up for the Events API early access program.
A userId
needs to be passed along with the track
call.
You can use the group
call to create or update an organization in Zendesk. RudderStack uses the groupId
to do so.
A sample group
call is shown below:
The group
call associates the user to the organization. You can disable this feature by disabling the Send Group Calls without User ID dashboard setting in RudderStack. In this case, RudderStack will create or update the organization even if no user is associated with the event.
RudderStack maps the group traits to a subset of the standard Zendesk organization attributes of Zendesk. It creates a new custom field for any unmapped attributes.
The current mapping is shown in the following table:
RudderStack
Zendesk
name
name
domainNames
domain_names
tags
tags
groupId
external_id
url
url
deleted
deleted
RudderStack assumes that an identify
call is made before any group
call with the userId
.
If groupId
and userId
both are present in the group
event payload, then RudderStack will find the user with email
present in the traits. If it is not present, RudderStack will create the user. It will also find the organization associated with the groupId
present in the payload. If groupId
is not present, RudderStack creates that too and then does the user-group association.
If a user already exists, the organizationId
will be attached to the user and all the user information will be sent for this call.
The above discussion can be summarized as follows:
New groupId
and new email
(No Zendesk user ID associated with the email): RudderStack creates the user and the organization and associates them.
New groupId
and existing email
(Zendesk user already exists): RudderStack creates a new organization and associates the existing user with it.
Old groupId
and new email
(Organization already exists in Zendesk, but not user): RudderStack creates a new user with the email
and associated them with the organization.
Note that traits
contain the relevant group-specific information, whereas the context.traits
contains all the user-related information.
If you come across any issues while configuring Zendesk with RudderStack, feel free to contact us or start a conversation in our Slack community.