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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.

Note: If you use the tickets created by location metric in Insights, IP masking may result in a null value. VPNs may also contribute to skewed location data.
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 specific city or even state as these are the only data available for that specific IP address.
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7 Comments

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  • Mikayla Welborn
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    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.

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  • Leandro Vasconcelos Sava
    • Edited
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    @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,

     



     

     

    2
  • Jane Sun
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    @ 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!

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  • Leandro Vasconcelos Sava
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    @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 

     

     

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  • EJ Gennrich
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    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!

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  • Brett - Community Manager
    Comment actions Permalink

    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
    Comment actions Permalink

    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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