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How does Zendesk capture the location of the end user?

Vasilia Kyriacou Le Brun
  • Edited

Question

How does Zendesk capture the location of the end user?

Answer

The user's location is based on the IP address of the user, captured the moment of the ticket creation. There will be some cases where there's a firewall or a proxy used by the end user, which could prevent this information from being accurate. 

It is not possible to capture the end-user's location or set up the location manually in tickets created via the API. The location displayed in these tickets is the one of the server of the script making a call to the API.

For Zendesk Chat, the user's location is also retrieved based on the IP address of the visitor. However, the location sometimes may not provide a specific city or even state as these are the only data available for that specific IP address.
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14 Comments

  • Mikayla Welborn
    • Edited

    Can the end-user's location be used in business rules? We would like to be able to create triggers using the end-user's location.

    0
  • Leandro Vasconcelos Sava
    • Edited

    @Mikayla Welborn.

    The end-user location mentioned above is only for report purpose. However, there are few work-around you could use to achieve it.

     

    1- Create a user field and manually add the end-user location

        

     

    2-  Create a ticket field then ask the customer to provide their location when sending you a request.

     

     

    3- There is a condition under trigger which allows you to use the time-zone, but it will not give the exactly location of the user.

     

     

    Regards,

     



     

     

    1
  • Jane Sun

    @ Leandro Vasconcelos

    Hi Leandro, thank you for the workaround. Would it be possible to include office location when I do a bulk import of of users?

     

    Thank you!

    0
  • Leandro Vasconcelos Sava

    @Jane

    Hi Jane, my apologies for the late reply!

    Yes you could, but before you do it you need to create a custom field called office location as explained here.

    Once you do it you can then import the CSV file which include the office location header. Find more information of how to bulk import users into Zendesk here.

     

    Regards,

     

    Leandro 

     

     

    0
  • EJ Gennrich

    Hi, I have a couple of questions about the granularity of this. My organization has operations in three states and multiple markets (i.e. cities) within each state.

    1. We operate in Arizona. Does the time zone that gets captured AZ time? (AZ is not on day light savings so half the year they're in Mountain time and half the year they're in Pacific time)

    2. If timezone is being interpreted by IP address, is there a way to designate between cities/markets within the same timezone (Austin, TX vs. Dallas, TX vs. St. Louis, MO)

    Thanks!

    0
  • Brett Bowser
    Zendesk Community Team

    Hey EJ,

    Great questions! It may be helpful to take a look at the following article: What timezone does Zendesk use?

    What’s shown to the user is based on the time zone set on the user’s profile. If you notice the timezone may not be correct for a specific user, you'll want to check user profile directly.

    Let me know if you have any other questions!

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  • EJ Gennrich

    Hi Brett,

     

    Thanks for the follow-up. I'm plugging in the response I received via product support in case anyone stumbles to this thread wondering if I figured out how to do this. The short answer appears to be 'no,' but that you could set up ticket macros to define the market based on rules/logic such as area code:

    Thanks!

    That is a great question regarding examination of requests by locales.  I will address that item first, then move on to your question regarding time zones.

    At its core Zendesk is not set up to provide you with a breakdown of tickets by their points of origin.  Primarily this is because the default fields for defining end users does not require them to disclose any location based information.  Unless you require this information to be taken down by an agent working the ticket, or for a client to register an account, then details such as IP address and phone number area code become circumstantial as people increasingly carry mobile phones from previous states of residence and use VPNs for privacy reasons.

    If you wanted to be able to capture this information then you could update your user definitions to require details such as residence zip code or state of residence.  Once that is established as a required field for ticket creation then it becomes searchable and can be used in analytics for measuring trends.  However this can become complicated depending on how you want to define market segments or what information you want to extract from sampling your support ticket data.

    After using the account assumption access you have granted on the account I have not been able to find defining information that Zendesk could turn into a metric for tickets already filed.  My best suggestion to analyze this data would be to export ticket data to a CSV file and use the captured phone numbers and ticket definitions to segment things up and run through the information that way.  It's not going to be 100% because of the possible deviation points I have outlined but it should give you some basics to start with.

    As to your question on how timestamp is defined:

    Technically all information in Zendesk is recorded using UTC (coordinated universal time), and your interface adjusts the times displayed within Zendesk's UI to the time zone you set yourself to as an agent or a user.  You select the default time zone for your agents in the Localization section of account settings, which has Arizona as a distinct option apart from general time zone options.  If you had remote staff in a different time zone then they could adjust their individual account settings to display correctly for their locale.  End users have their accounts display based on the default time zone you choose in this localization as well.
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  • Trevor Kanaya
    • Edited

    the tickets created by location metric in Insights

    I don't see any equivalent in Explore, is this possible still? If not, are there plans to add it? It's something that would be useful for our team. We're not too concerned about NULL or inaccurate values based on VPNs, it's still data we'd like to be able to report on.

    "Requester/Submitter Locale" in Explore does not seem to pull this data, it seems to come from the user profile settings which default to a specific locale. So it's showing that our 500,000+ tickets all come from one locale which is of course not useful at all. If there's a way in Explore to report on the data from the screenshot above, that would be ideal.

     

    Cheers!

    0
  • Joe
    Zendesk Customer Advocate

    Hello Trevor,

    Within Explore, the closest matchup would be those that you mentioned: Requester Locale, Submitter Local, and Requester Timezone which reference the User profile in Support.

    Taking a look into the Ticket Updates dataset, I do see that the Tickets Created metric works with the Update country attribute. It should be possible to slice that metric by a calculated attribute based off of that to filter for country at first update.

     

    0
  • Naomi Watnick

    Hi @Joe,

    Like Trevor Kanaya , we also want to be able to report on information we can see in the ticket events like this:

    Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/811.0.4321.155 Safari/537.36
    XX.XX.XX.XX
    San Diego, CA, United States

    The Requester Locale and Submitter Locale just provides 'en-US'-like information, which is not as fine grained as we are looking for.

    Are there plans to expose this in Explore?  OR can we get this via an API call?

    Thanks!
    ~Naomi

    0
  • Erin LemMon

    Hi,

    Like Trevor and Naomi, we also want to be able to report on the information we can see in the ticket events ie) the requester country based on IP address. Joe mentioned the workaround "It should be possible to slice that metric by a calculated attribute based off of that to filter for the country at first update." Is it possible to provide more details on how we can do this in Explore?

    Thanks in advance!

    CC: Trevor Kanaya Naomi Watnick thanks for bringing this up as well :)

     

     

     

     

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  • Elaine Hilario
    Zendesk Customer Advocate

    Hi Erin,

    It looks like you have already created a ticket with us regarding the same concern. Kindly wait for an update from one of our agents on that ticket to discuss your concern further. Thanks!

    0
  • Erin LemMon
    • Edited

    Hi Elaine Hilario

    Yes, I did file a support ticket Thursday, 5/13- after 1 week of no response on the community post. We are currently using our Insights access extension to pull ticket location reports and would love to have the location query built on Explore by June 1st. Thanks again for your time and attention to this matter!

    0
  • Elaine Hilario
    Zendesk Customer Advocate

    Hi Erin,

    As of the moment, there is still no update regarding reporting in Explore about where the tickets came from based on the IP addresses of your end-users.

    Right now, the best way for you to do this is to create a custom ticket field that is editable for your end-users and make it a required field for the country where they are currently sending in their concerns/tickets. After which, you can use this ticket field as an attribute from Explore queries that you want to build in the future.

    Hope I was of help in any way. Cheers! :)

    -1

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