Streamline your customer relationships efforts with Zendesk integrations connector

Zendesk is a well-known multi-channel help desk solution that is primarily associated with customer support, although it really covers any type of customer communication including sales. It is a cloud-based customer service platform that is loaded with various features such as help center, live chat, voice communication, community forums – you name it – to help your support team build better customer relationships.

Zendesk already provides a number of native integrations for some popular apps, for example for Salesforce CRM, Gravity Forms, Slack or Shopify. However, if your goal goes beyond connecting just two applications with each other, but you’re rather looking for having a single ‘source of truth’ from several software systems, you are at the right address here.

About elastic.io’s Zendesk integration connector

This is elastic.io’s own connector to make it easier for the organizations to connect this powerful help desk app with a variety of other business software products such as CRM or Marketing apps. It was developed specifically for the elastic.io platform to use in the automation flows, and it comes with it by default.

The Zendesk integration connector supports both triggers and actions. This implies that you can use it to initiate or respond to a specific event. For example, if you choose it as a trigger, you can subscribe to the so called Tickets Audits, a special resource in the Zendesk’s REST API that can be used to e.g. create such an event as a new ticket. There are currently 25 audit events to choose from.

Should you choose to use this connector as an action, you will be able to create or update Zendesk objects, add attachments to a ticket, look up objects by ID, much more. You can find additional information about available triggers and actions on the connector’s documentation page, following the link above.

Due to the fact that it is under the proprietary license, you cannot change or extend the Zendesk integrations connector yourself. If you need some specific additional triggers and / or actions for your integrations, please contact our pre-sales team at ps[at]elastic.io first to discuss the details.

PLEASE NOTE: You need to have an account on the elastic.io platform in order to try the Zendesk integrations connector in your project. If you’re new to elastic.io you can sign up for a free 14-day trial here.

How to add Zendesk integrations on elastic.io

As a trigger:

Step 1

In order to connect Zendesk with other apps on the elastic.io platform, go to the Dashboard or Flows and click “Add new Flow”. If you choose to use Zendesk as a trigger, select it first from the list of the apps as shown on the screenshot below.

Step 2

After that, you’ll be asked to authenticate your Zendesk account. For that, you’ll need to know the URL of your instance which you can find in various ways (the easiest would be to visit your account’s Admin Center). In addition to that, you’ll be required to set up an OAuth Client in Zendesk. NOTE: Since you or your organization might be using several Zendesk products, you’ll need to switch to Zendesk Support product first in order to access the Zendesk API and create the OAuth Client. In our support documentation, we cover the authentication process on our platform and provide the necessary links for the Zendesk docs as well.

Step 3

Once authenticated, you can select the audit events you need. As previously mentioned, there are currently 25 of them, e.g. Voice comment, Create (which refers by default to a new ticket), Comment (= a comment was added to a ticket), Ticket sharing, SLA target change, etc. In addition to that, you can set a time frame to the data you wish to poll (the so-called ‘start time’ and ‘end time’) and define the size of the pages.

Step 4

As a next step, you’ll be asked to request a sample of the records, where you can check whether your configuration was successful, or even add a manual sample. Your Zendesk connector is ready to be used as a trigger in your automation flow.

OUR TIP: The easiest way to test this connector as trigger in an actual flow would be synching it to our Email connector – for example, to send yourself a summary of a new ticket. In an actual project, you’d probably want to connect it to something more meaningful, for example, to Salesforce or Shopify to view customer requests and sync tickets.

As an action:

When you use Zendesk as an action, it simply means that it follows some other app in your flow. Aside from that, the process will be similar: choose Zendesk from the list of accessible apps, select a function, and use OAuth to verify your Zendesk account.

With Zendesk as an action, though, you have a longer list of functions to work with. You can do a Lookup of objects (by defaul, tickets) by ID or Type, create a new or update an existing object by ID, add an attachment to tickets, and even make the so-called Raw Requests and call specific Zendesk API endpoints with any of the GET, POST, PUT, DELETE methods.

OUR TIP: Selecting our Simple Trigger to begin with is the quickest way to check our Zendesk connector’s functionality as an action. However, please note that Simple Trigger isn’t the best way to actually test the Zendesk connector for your integrations because it lacks the necessary data objects to sync with; for example, it won’t deliver any ticket IDs or, say, comments on a ticket. It’s only there to help you quickly review its configuration. A more interesting scenario would probably be if you try to integrate, say, Hubspot CRM with Zendesk, e.g. to add customer related communication as an attachment to a dedicated Zendesk ticket.

Popular Zendesk automation scenarios

Our users have created a wide range of Zendesk integrations to sync data from their help center with other business applications, with some of the most noteworthy being:

Zendesk and Salesforce integration

For example, to view or even edit Zendesk tickets in the CRM’s Account, Lead, and Contact pages

Zendesk and Shopify

To provide customers with timely support right within one’s own webshop

Zendesk and Hubspot integration

To access all help center requests and support queries of a specific Hubspot Contact in one place

Zendesk and NetSuite

To automatically sync for example sales orders or return authorizations

… and many more.

Take a look at all of the apps and systems you can connect Zendesk with to help your support team, customer success team and sales improve communication with the customers and hence, customer relationships. Get your free 14-day demo now, no strings attached. Give it a try!