How to connect Zendesk Support

Assembled integrates with the Zendesk support contact platform allowing your ticket data to be forecasted and tracked in our system. The most unique thing about the Zendesk integration is that it is actually 3 separate integrations with 3 separate platforms (Zendesk, Zendesk chat and Zendesk Talk). This article will focus on the former Zendesk.

This article will walk through how to set up the integration and verify the data Assembled pulls in is correct.

Preparing your Zendesk Support instance for Assembled

Before you connect your Zendesk instance to Assembled, we recommend working with your team’s Zendesk administrator to prepare your Zendesk data as follows:

• Channel: Assembled’s Zendesk integration requires that all Zendesk tickets be mapped to a specific channel, using the Zendesk channel field. Assembled can ingest Zendesk cases that have one of the following values in the Zendesk channel field: email, chat, voice, sms, api, facebook, web,mobile_sdk, get_satisfaction, get_sat, closed_ticket, ticket_sharing, dropbox, twitter_dm, twitter dm, twitter direct, twitter_fav, twitter_favorite, twitter favorite, twitter_like, twitter like, twitter, voicemail, text, text message, logmein, logmein_rescue, logmein rescue, any_channel, native_messaging, sunshine_conversations, instagram_dm
• Ticket fields : Assembled can create queues based on one of the following ticket fields. If you plan to separate your Zendesk data into multiple queues within Assembled, you should ensure that each Zendesk case has one of the following fields:
  • Group ID
  • Ticket tag
  • Ticket form ID
  • Brand ID
  • Via channel

Connecting to Zendesk support

Assembled connects to Zendesk via OAuth 2.0 which allows Assembled to make API requests on behalf of your account. As a result, this will cause an overall increase in your API usage.

To connect your Zendesk instance to your Assembled instance, you will need a Zendesk admin to navigate to Assembled's Third-party integrations > Available and click Add from the Zendesk integration.

If you have successfully connected to Zendesk, you will see a Synced, Sync in progress, or Connected field on the Zendesk-specific card in Assembled’s Configure > Third-party integrations page.

If you run into any issues during this step, please reach out to our Support team.

Verifying the connection

There are two places in Assembled for you to verify if the Zendesk integration has been correctly added: the Real-time agent analysis page and the Staffing timeline.

The Monitor > Real-time agent analysis page will display agent states and current adherence. Use this dashboard to make sure agent states from Zendesk are being synced to Assembled correctly. To see only Zendesk agents, use Add filter and pick Source: Zendesk.

The Staffing timeline displays the contacts of Zendesk. Select New and reopened cases to see a line graph displaying how many tickets over time. This graph will show if the sync for tickets is working.

If either of these display zero or unexpected numbers that do not match your Zendesk case volume, please reach out to our Support team.

Adding agents from Zendesk

To add agents into Assembled you can follow the steps in our People management page guide. Agents can be added manually or in bulk via Import from Zendesk (under the Add person button), CSV upload (Upload from CSV file in the same menu), or through the API.

In addition, please note that Assembled will map Zendesk’s users with the following permission levels:

Setting up Assembled queues for Zendesk

To set up your Assembled queues for your new Zendesk integration, we recommend following the steps in our queue configuration guide.

In addition, please note the following Zendesk specific details:

• Assembled will map Zendesk channels to Assembled channels as follows:

  Zendesk Support	Assembled
  email, api, facebook, web, mobile_sdk, get_satisfaction, get_sat, closed_ticket, ticket_sharing, dropbox, twitter_dm, twitter dm, twitter direct , twitter_fav, twitter_favorite, twitter favorite, twitter_like, twitter like, twitter, voicemail, text, text message, logmein, logmein_rescue, logmein rescue, any_channel, native_messaging, sunshine_conversations, instagram_dm	email
  chat	chat
  voice	phone
  sms	sms

• Any cases for which the channel field is blank will be automatically excluded from Assembled.

• Within Assembled, you can create queues based on the following Zendesk attributes:

  

Setting up Assembled agent states for Zendesk

By default, after adding the Zendesk integration you will only see the two following agent states in Assembled : Logged in, Offline.

If you’d like more granular agent states, please enable the Assembled Zendesk Application :

1. Ask your Zendesk admin to install the Assembled Zendesk application from the Zendesk marketplace. Instructions for setting up the app can be found here.
2. Note: Ensure that all agents have installed the Chrome extension for accurate agent state tracking. See this article on our best practices for accurate agent state tracking from Zendesk.
3. In the Assembled application, under Configure > Third-party integrations > Assembled App for Zendesk click Edit settings, select I've installed Assembled’s Zendesk app and Use the app for accurate adherence calculations, and click Save.

Once you've selected Use the app for accurate adherence calculations you will see more granular agent states in Configure > Agent states, listed under the platform Activity tracker for Zendesk. Here is a list of those statuses and their descriptions:

• Online (Tickets): the agent’s primary tab (in a visible window) is on a Zendesk ticket page.
• Online (Zendesk Dashboard): the agent’s primary tab (in a visible window) is in Zendesk but not on a ticket page.
• Online (not Zendesk): the agent’s primary tab is not on Zendesk at all, but the Zendesk tab is still present in the background.
• Offline: Zendesk is not open.

To set up your Assembled agent states, we recommend following the steps in our agent states setup guide

Note: if an agent is in a different state in Zendesk from what you’re seeing in Assembled, please reach out to Support.

Understanding how Zendesk data maps to data attributes in Assembled

Ticket data (Email )

Ticket data (Chat, SMS)

Ticket data (Phone)

Ticket status

FAQs

• Q: What should I do if I see a sync invalid from the Zendesk integration in Configure > Third-party integrations ?
  • A: This could mean a few things so we recommend hovering over the message :

    • If you see any 400 errors those usually are permissions-related. This sometimes happens when the person who originally authorized does not have proper permissions, the person who originally authorized leaves the company, or if someone changed the permissions settings. In order to continue to have data flowing into Assembled and receive accurate reporting, you will need someone with admin permissions to reauthorize the sync.

      

    • If you see a generic error please reach out to our Support Team and we can help diagnose the root cause.
• Q: What are the Zendesk export rate limits ?
  • A: We call all the incremental export endpoints with a rate limit of 5 requests / minute.