The Salesforce integration integrates Zendesk Support and Salesforce, built on Zendesk's infrastructure using Salesforce public APIs.
This integration enables collaboration between sales and support teams by providing visibility into customer information and support activities between Salesforce and Zendesk. The integration provides the ability to view, edit, and create Zendesk tickets from Salesforce. Zendesk tickets can also be synced to Salesforce so you can create custom Salesforce workflows and reports using Zendesk and Salesforce data. The Salesforce integration also enables you to sync customer information from Salesforce to Support.
This article includes links to resources for understanding, setting up, and using the Salesforce integration.
Getting started
Zendesk tickets in Salesforce
Salesforce data in Zendesk
Integration log
Advice and troubleshooting
Salesforce integration migration options
With the legacy Salesforce integration being deprecated on 30 January 2020, there are several options available for migration. For more information, see Salesforce migration: Migrating the legacy Salesforce integration to alternative solutions and Salesforce migration: Migrating the legacy Salesforce integration to the new Salesforce integration.
51 Comments
Anika,
From my perspective, the logs in both systems would need an entry, but at a minimum, the audit logs in Zendesk would require all actions both successful and failed to actually be considered a log from any reasonable perspective.
Anika, is there an update regarding the bi-directional sync capability? The timeline mentioned it being launched in the first half of 2020, but it's still not available. Thanks!
Josiah Horne unfortunately we have re-prioritised our roadmap since COVID, and therefore pushed out the bi-directional sync to likely next year, so we can focus on the things that will be most valuable, more immediately. You can find the latest updates here.
I received an email notification about an article Darren Chan wrote about Viewing the Salesforce integration log EAP. We have been waiting for this functionality. When I click on the article link, it says I am not authorized to view it. Can you lead me in the right direction to sign up for this EAP?
Melody Quinn please try now, this has been fixed :) You are automatically given access to the EAP.
Thank you Anika Rani! I was able to open the article.
Hi everyone, we have now released support from Multiple Organisations in data syncing. This means if you have multiple Contacts in Salesforce with the same email address but different Accounts, you can sync them to a single Zendesk user belonging to different Organisations (an organisation membership).
You can learn more about how this works here. No action is required for the integration to use multiple organisations. If this is enabled on your Support Account, we will syncing behaviour described.
Learn more about the Multiple Organisations feature in Zendesk here. This is a feature available only to Zendesk Professional and Enterprise plans.
Hello,
Does the salesforce integration support syncing of a Contact that has relationships to multiple Accounts in Salesforce? We have contacts that need to live in two accounts (A primary relationship and secondary relationship. We need to be able to sync the contact from either Primary or Secondary account or both, and have the ZD User only be added to the Org that Matches the accounts that have Zendesk Sync = True
Thank you!
-Dave
HeyO Dave - the closest thing to that would be our Multiple Organizations feature: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360055735814 which can put the user into multiple organizations, but will only sync their contact fields when the primary org contact is updated.
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?
HeyO Payfare
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!
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.
Hi Naomi Watnick
Here are some responses to these various concerns:
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.
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?
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.
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.
Dwight Bussman 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.
Hi Reuven Shelef (ZD Dev at OUT OF THE BOX Consulting)
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.
Thanks Dwight Bussman and Reuven Shelef (ZD Dev at OUT OF THE BOX Consulting),
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.
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.
Naomi Watnick
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.
Reuven Shelef (ZD Dev at OUT OF THE BOX Consulting)
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).
Anika Rani 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.
Thanks for the info and suggested workaround Anika Rani
We're looking forward to the permalink manager. Thanks!
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