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24 Comments

  • Jeff Mooallem

    Our company uses Zendesk Support and our partner company uses Salesforce.  There is no current connection or overlapping data between the two systems.

    Can this Zendesk-Salesforce integration be used as a connector for a Zendesk ticket to be "sent" to Salesforce as a support ticket transfer?  Or can you recommend a different product?

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    HeyO @...

    Our integration has the Ticket Sync feature that sounds like it might work for what you're describing. When a ticket is created/updated in Zendesk, this sends it over to create/update a Case within Salesforce. Hopefully that's helpful!

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  • Naomi Watnick

    Hi - we have the following issues with the Sync.  Can you please comment?  Perhaps there's a way to workaround some of them with the recent updates? (ordered by Priority)

    • P1. Inability to break existing Account > Organization sync connections (once made). Currently need to submit tickets for each and every one.

    • P1. Sync does not respect the Contact to Account Salesforce relationship in Zendesk (and should… like how a manually added User is added). It is ignoring the existing Account to Contact relationship in Salesforce.

    • P2. The ability to limit the Zendesk Users created by the Sync (based on Contact’s Account sync requirements).

      • Currently, we only sync over a small subset of Salesforce Accounts based on a custom field

      • However, ALL Salesforce Contacts are being synced

    • P3. Log reports (via email, etc.) would be great. Currently, I have to manually check the failed logs daily.

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Hi @...

    Here are some responses to these various concerns:

    1. Inability to break relationship once made
      The only way of which I'm aware of doing so is to delete one of the objects (either the account or organization). We realize this isn't ideal, nor is the manual process to submit a ticket to have our Developers reset that relationship.

      That having been said, it should be possible for our developers to reset ALL of the account/org relationships, or do a collection of them (if record-ids are provided). This definitely shouldn't require a separate ticket for each.

      Secondly: I'm curious why there are so many connections being made that later need to be broken? Is there a workflow that's causing this? Were these connections made a long time ago with different matching criteria that are no longer relevant? Having a bit more context about how this arises may help us to build solutions that better address that workflow.

    2. Sync does not respect the contact/account relationship
      This relationship should be preserved if the account has synced prior to syncing the contact. You could test this with the following steps:
      a. create new account
      b. confirm that it syncs to Zendesk to create/update an organization
      c. create new contact belonging to that account
      d. resultant user should be placed into the relevant org from step (b)

      To help insure the accounts have already synced, we generally recommend syncing all accounts using this workflow. Once that's been done, any contact that syncs over should be matched into the relevant organizations. Additionally, any new accounts should be synced from that point going forward.

      I'm not sure I follow the question about "how a manually added user is added" - could you please rephrase that so I can better understand the workflow/issue? 

    3. Cannot filter contact-syncing based on account-level fields
      I'll definitely pass along your feedback about needing this capability. In the meantime, perhaps it'd be possible to have a workflow process that sets a drop-down/checkbox on contacts based on its account sync requirements. Normally I'd suggest a formula-field for this, but formula fields aren't available for sync-filtering, likely due to limitations in the SFDC Streaming API.

    4. Log reports
      Our development team is working on getting exports for logs, and I believe scheduling such exports may be on the roadmap as well. Again, this seems like good feedback and I'll definitely pass this along.
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  • Reuven Shelef

    @... to your "Secondly: I'm curious why there are so many connections being made that later need to be broken? Is there a workflow that's causing this? Were these connections made a long time ago with different matching criteria that are no longer relevant? Having a bit more context about how this arises may help us to build solutions that better address that workflow." question for Naomi Watnick:

    I've complained about this to ZD several times. This is a big pain. The two key scenarios are:

    1. Accounts merged in SFDC

    2. ZD's horrible limitation of inability to change the link between a Closed Ticket and an Organization, causes the need to have DUPLICATE Organizations in ZD - just to hold Closed Tickets. The SFDC Account needs to sync to the other, 'live' Organization.

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Hi @...

    Thanks for the additional context. I could see our SFDC integration team making changes to better address account merges. The inability to edit a Closed ticket is a much larger ask, as much of our product relies on closure as being the end of the line for a given ticket. Reversing course on that will have a major impact on quite a few other systems. I definitely see the use-case, but I can also see the reluctance to add that ability given the amount of overhaul/testing this would necessitate elsewhere in the product.

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  • Naomi Watnick

    Thanks @... and @...,

    Yes - What Reuven states is 100% exactly right and is the same pain we're going through.  1. Accounts merged in SFDC (or historically changed name before/after the sync switch).  and 2. It would be so great to just be able to change Orgs for closed tickets... that would solve so much of the issues we're having.

    And I'll try the Point 2 workaround by Dwight... please note that things have been developed by Zendesk without regard to existing data previously sync'd or manually created within ZD and this oversight has been very frustrating to say the least.

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  • The Original DKNY

    Can we please get an update on bi-directional sync?  This is a critical feature many have been waiting on since the release of the new integration. The lack of bidirectional sync with SFDC is making good data hygiene and the ability to keep sales teams up to date on their accounts support activity a significantly more difficult effort. Not to mention it was a feature of the prior sync method provided by Zendesk.

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  • Anika Rani
    Zendesk Product Manager

    @...

    Thanks for your feedback. In addition to what Dwight has said, I wanted to let you know that we intend to give you the ability to self manage links between synced records. I'll be sure to make an update here as soon as we have an ETA. 

    And the inability to filter based on Account-level fields in Contact sync is unfortunately a Salesforce Streaming API limitation - you can see the list of limitations we are bound by documented in Salesforce documentation here - "Relationships aren't supported, but you can reference an ID".

    Two potential workarounds:
    1. Can you filter based on the Account ID?

    2. Can you set up a trigger to update a custom Contact field from an Account field. Not ideal and certainly alot of considerations as you'll then have duplicate fields in Account and Contact. 

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  • Anika Rani
    Zendesk Product Manager

    @... 

    Can you please explain the problem you're having with merged accounts? The data sync should sync using the main record selected after the merge. A mapped field in the main record needs to be updated to trigger the sync. Happy to look into this further, if you can provide an example or perhaps a quick screen recording of the issue (via a ticket). 

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  • Reuven Shelef

    @... The 'merge' per se is not the problem. I was too quick and short-handed when typing my comment. Merge is involved, however the actual scenario can be described by two SFDC Accounts, each syncing to two ZD Orgs, then these links need to be switched.

    Before: 
    Account 1 syncing to Org A
    Account 2 syncing to Org B

    After: 
    Account 1 syncing to Org B
    Account 2 syncing to Org A

    We merged accounts to have Account 1 remain, however that is not in the core of this issue.
    Sorry for the confusion.

    I'm happy that you are working on at least providing a way to control the sync linkage.

    The second scenario I described is even more bothersome, I hope you ill resolve this constrain as well.

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  • Naomi Watnick

    Thanks for the info and suggested workaround @...

    We're looking forward to the permalink manager.  Thanks!

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  • @..., @... How are you? We are trying to sync Zendesk tickets into Salesforce with the integration and are running into 2 issues:

    1. Zendesk tickets that have a description of more than 32k characters will not sync. How can we truncate the description/first comment field as the ticket is created or before the integration trigger?
    2. We want our agents handling tickets as salesforce cases. When an agent responds to a case by email from salesforce and the customer replies that that message, which came from salesforce, the customer response creates a new ticket in zendesk and then syncs a new case in Salesforce. At that point, we have two zendesk tickets and two Salesforce cases on the same thread. Is there a way to include zendesk ticket data in the email header/metadata that will thread the customer's reply as a new comment on the original ticket and then update the already existing case in Salesforce?

    Thanks!

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  • James Irwin

    I’m currently trying to set up the Zendesk to salesforce integration and I've run into a problem. I followed the guide  but when I drag and drop the “ZenDesk_Ticket_View” LWC I get the error “Your browsing session has ended or is invalid. Please re-login to Salesforce.com again.”, but my own connection to salesforce is fine. Has anyone else had this problem and know how to fix it? 

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    HeyO @...

    I've not seen that particular error before. My first thought is that something is preventing access to the session cookie that would allow that connection to persist. Do you see in this in multiple browsers? If so, please reach out to support team as documented here as this issue will likely require a closer look.

    Thanks!

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Ah - looks like you already found the answer to this as being an unsupported browser issue: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4408398408602

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    heyO @...

    I believe the 32k description issue was posted in a number of other threads. Please see https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041467194?page=1#comment_4408051438234 for a response to that portion of your question.

    As for the email-threading issues for zendesk/SFDC notifications - I'm not aware of a way to include the necessary header information to thread properly within Zendesk when replying to a case via email from within Salesforce. A similar limitation exists on our side: we aren't able to send the threading information Salesforce expects as a part of our ticket-notification. This is one of the primary reasons that I would strongly advise using a single ticketing system for responses or having them communicate via an API instead of through email - neither system was designed to interface with another ticketing system, so it doesn't retain/retransmit the threading information in quite the same way.

    In short - although they do send/process email - ticketing systems don't function identically to email systems.

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  • Anika Rani
    Zendesk Product Manager

    We have made an important enhancement to the Salesforce Integration Contact sync feature, for syncing to multiple organization memberships.

    We now support the ability to sync both primary and secondary relationships to Zendesk organization memberships. In Salesforce you can have a Contact belong to multiple accounts (a primary account and multiple secondary accounts). These relationships can now both be reflected in Zendesk as Organization memberships. 

    We are rolling this out gradually over the next few weeks. If you are interested, please reach out to Zendesk Support to get access. 

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  • Honey Faye

    We have version 1.0 of the Salesforce/Zendesk integration.  How do I upgrade it?

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    heyO Honey Faye

    I recommend following the setup process documented in https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408821555482#topic_n1c_jtm_4jb to ensure you're on the current version. The package installation link for within SFDC can be found here https://login.salesforce.com/packaging/installPackage.apexp?p0=04t6g000008f6Kx 

    Once installed, you'll need to be sure that the connected-app permissions are set as we'd recommend, and then connect the integration in Admin Center to insure those permissions are applied. I recommend doing that connection within an Incognito / Private Browsing window to avoid session conflation.

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  • Hello, is it possible to integrate Salesforce standard Task object changes into 'Interactions' section in the ticket's essential card

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    heyO Ivan Zubarevich (Routine Automation)

    I believe the "interactions" panel is actually associated with the user and not the ticket, but it's possible I'm thinking of a different feature than the one to which you're referring.   

    Please contact our support team to discuss this further, as there are various workflows that may help with the need about which you're asking, but high-level here's what I know:

    1. If you want to get ticket info into the Case object within Salesforce, you'll be using the Ticket Sync feature
    2. If you want to display SFDC information within Zendesk you'll want to use the Salesforce Sidebar App
    3. If you want to update Zendesk tickets from within Salesforce, you can do this through the Ticket View feature, more specifically the addition of Zendesk credentials to allow editing tickets

     

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  • Sunburst Support

    Hi Dwight,

    I'm considering adding this integration, as we're currently using Zapier to try and create our Zendesk tickets as cases in SF. But a lot of the people who submit support tickets will not have a corresponding contact already in SF, and they may not include enough information with the support ticket to 

    I saw that your Tickets Sync option will create cases in SF for new and updated Zendesk tickets. Can we just use this feature and nothing else? Or will this only work if everything else in the integration is active too? I'm guessing we don't want any account/organization syncing or the list of Zendesk tickets on the SF accounts, etc.

    If the person doesn't exist in SF, does it create a new contact for them? If so, how does it determine what account in SF to add the contact too? Does that need to be a field in Zendesk, such as the account name? Can it be a different field? (we use a unique account ID that we could use).

    Lastly, there are some support tickets we don't want in SF, such as spam/different products or audiences. Are there ways to filter what tickets get synced over based on a field in Zendesk?

    Currently Zapier works pretty well, as it allows for this filtering, but Zapier only runs when a ticket is first created, not when it is updated, which is causing a lot of them to be skipped because the necessary data isn't there when the ticket is first created, only after we update it.

    Hope these questions made sense...thanks for any insight you can provide!

    Steve

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    HeyO Sunburst Support - that's a lot of questions to tackle in an article comment post, but I'll take a crack at 'em:

    1. Can we just use this feature and nothing else? Or will this only work if everything else in the integration is active too? 
      Each feature of the integration (ticket view, ticket sync, account sync, contact/lead sync, and the salesforce sidebar app) can be enabled/disabled independently, so it's definitely possible to use just the ticket sync.

    2. If the person doesn't exist in SF, does it create a new contact for them? 
      This depends on how the integration is configured (documentation here). It should attempt to create a new contact (or lead) if the  "Create if no match" option is set. 

    3. If so, how does it determine what account in SF to add the contact to? 
      If accounts are synced from SFDC > Zendesk and the organization of the ticket has been successfully linked via sync to a specific account in SFDC, then the newly-created contact will be placed into that account. Otherwise a contact will be created without an account. 

    4. Are there ways to filter what tickets get synced over based on a field in Zendesk?
      The syncing of tickets over into cases is handled via a trigger. Filtering could be done by adding additional conditions to the trigger.

    If those aren't sufficiently clear or don't fully answer things, I recommend contacting support to go a bit deeper and get into specifics. 

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