

The Salesforce app for Zendesk enables agents to see Salesforce user information in a Support ticket. User information might include subscription level, whether a particular account has an open opportunity, or additional customer notes.
This article contains the following sections:
- Installing and enabling the Salesforce app in Zendesk
- Connecting Zendesk Support to Salesforce
- Configuring the Salesforce app
- Viewing Salesforce information from a Zendesk Support ticket
Related articles:
Installing and enabling the Salesforce app in Zendesk
The Salesforce app can be downloaded and installed from the Zendesk Marketplace.
- In Zendesk Support, click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Apps > Marketplace.
- In the search box, enter
Salesforce
to locate the Salesforce app. - Click the Salesforce app, then click Install.
- Use the drop-down menu to select the account where you want to install Salesforce, then click Install. The Salesforce app is installed, but not enabled, on your Zendesk Support account.
- Select Apps > Manage, and click the Salesforce app.
- Use the toggle switch to enable the Salesforce app.
Connecting Zendesk Support to Salesforce
After installing the Salesforce app, you need to connect Zendesk to Salesforce. You must have administrator credentials in Salesforce to perform this task.
- Follow the steps in Setting up your Zendesk for Salesforce Integration to create a connected app and authenticate to Salesforce. If you have already set up the integration, go to the next step.
- In your Zendesk Admin Center, select the Integrations icon (
) in the left navigation pane.
- In Salesforce Integration, click Configure.
- Click the Support app side tab, and Enable Salesforce data caching.
- Click Save.
Configuring the Salesforce app
You can customize the data displayed in the Salesforce app, and how often the data is refreshed, by configuring the app settings discussed in this section. These settings are applied when viewing Salesforce information from a ticket, and are configured as part of a single process.
A Zendesk administrator can configure these settings from the configuration link in the app, by opening up a ticket in Support, finding the Salesforce app in the sidebar, and clicking the Configuration link. The ticket must have a requester attached to it to access the Salesforce app.
Adding Salesforce objects to the app
This process allows you to define which Salesforce objects appear in the app in Support.
Only users with Zendesk administrator privileges, or users in custom roles with Manage extensions and channels privileges are able to configure the app. Configuration can be accessed by clicking the Configure Settings link in the app.
To add Salesforce objects to the Salesforce app
- Open an existing ticket in the Support ticket view. In the Apps sidebar, locate the Salesforce app.
- Click Configuration Settings, then click the Add object button.
- In the Select Salesforce object to display section, use the drop-down to select a Salesforce object (or record type) that you want to appear in your app:
The Select Salesforce fields to display section displays all fields available on the Salesforce object you selected.
- In the Salesforce fields window, click Add (+) beside each field that you want to display in the Salesforce app for that object. One of the fields you select must contain data that matches a field in Zendesk.
- Scroll down the list of Salesforce fields and expand one of the related objects to see its fields, then add fields from the expanded object.
You can drag and drop fields within each object you have selected to change their order. The order represented in the configuration will determine order of fields displayed in the Salesforce app. - In the Map fields to enable record lookup section, use the Selected Salesforce Fields drop-down to select a Salesforce field, then use the Zendesk field drop-down to map fields to enable record lookup.
For any given Zendesk ticket, Zendesk attempts to find a record in Salesforce whose data in the selected Object and field exactly matches the data contained in the specified Zendesk field. In the case of a drop-down field, this uses the field tag value instead of the title.
Note: It is possible to add a lookup record that does not return any records. This is where the Record ID in Salesforce is returned instead of the actual value of the field. For more information, see Salesforce Syncing lookup field information to Zendesk Support. - Click Add object again if you want to add another object to your Salesforce app.
- Click the Finish button to close the configuration window. When the window is closed, CRM data on the current ticket will be retrieved using the new configuration. It might take a while (depending on number of active CRM data) for the rest of ticket’s CRM data to be retrieved using the new configuration.
Configuring the Salesforce data caching setting
When you open a Zendesk ticket, the app fetches and displays Salesforce data you selected in the procedure Adding Salesforce objects to the app. By default, data is refreshed every 60 minutes.
The data refresh setting allows you to define how long Salesforce data is cached in the Zendesk database — 60 minutes, 45 minutes, 30 minutes, or 15 minutes.
- A shorter refresh rate means data is collected from Salesforce more often, and is more likely to be up to date. However, this can impact the Salesforce API limits.
- A longer refresh rate means data is collected less often, but reduces the risk of reaching the Salesforce API limits.
You can request permission to access the data refresh setting by contacting Zendesk Customer Support. Permission is granted on a per account basis.
To configure the Salesforce app data refresh setting
- In your Zendesk Admin Center, selectIntegrations icon in the left navigation pane.
- In Salesforce Integration, click Configure.
- Click the Support app side tab, and under Enable Salesforce data caching, select the data refresh setting from the drop-down list.
- Click Save.
Filtering the returned objects
You can filter the returned objects in the app.
The option to filter these objects is only available for objects with a one-to-many relationship. In the example below, the Contact object does not have a one-to-many relationship, but the Account object does.
To filter returned objects
- In the object list, click Filter next to the object you want to work with.
- In the Filter Records dialog, select the number of returned objects (up to five), and set conditions to filter the results. For example, if you're filtering Opportunities, you could set Closed is false, then only open Opportunities would display. Or you could show Opportunities that have been closed and were won by setting Won is true.
- Click Save.
Viewing Salesforce information from a Zendesk Support ticket
After you have installed the Zendesk for Salesforce app you can easily view Salesforce information from a ticket in Zendesk.
To view Salesforce information from a Zendesk ticket
With a ticket open in Zendesk, click the Apps button on the upper-right side of the ticket page. The Salesforce app is displayed in the right sidebar.
27 Comments
Is there anything we need to do to the Salesforce App (Ticket view) when we are moving from the Legacy integration to the new, built by Zendesk integration?
Thank you!
HeyO Bobby,
In order for the sidebar app in Zendesk to continue working, you'll need to take the steps above up through "configuring caching" https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038927713?page=1#topic_uch_kfk_sjb Your old app settings should still be present (in terms of which objects are pulled from SFDC), but the back-end of what's doing the pulling of those requires the new Connected App to be created in Salesforce out described above.
Please let me know if this was your question or if you were asking about the ticket-view within Salesforce (from the Account/Contact/Lead/Opportunity pages). If that was more the thrust of your question, you'll want to follow the steps described in this article: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037825954
Please feel free to reach out to support@zendesk.com if you have difficulties with any of the steps described in those docs, or if something doesn't appear to be working right for you after following those steps.
The first link in the section
Connecting Zendesk Support to Salesforce
goes to an internal KB article which we don't have access to.
Follow the steps in Setting up your Zendesk for Salesforce Integration to
Do I need to read it ?
Hi David,
Good catch! It looks like this was mis-linked. The article to which it should point is this one: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038232533
I'll reach out to our Docs team now to get that fixed.
Thanks for calling this out!
EDIT:
The link should be correct now. Please refresh your browser to make sure you're seeing the latest version of the page and thanks again :)
Is there a way to have the SF sidebar data show up when viewing the user tab or the organization tab?
When I am on those tabs I see "no apps installed" so I have to click on an actual ticket to see any linked SF data
This would be helpful when trying to administer priority support accounts or custom user segments
Right now I can only see the SF data if I am on the ticket tab
Hi William,
Right now that sidebar app has been developed to rely on ticket properties, but that's a good idea for a future enhancement!
We already completed migration to the new Salesforce integration and the sync from Zendesk into Salesforce works fine. Unfortunately, the Salesforce App for Zendesk no longer works, but for some reason the app is still shown on tickets and I can even configure settings (though it fails to synchronize). On the Salesforce App now I keep getting notified that the Legacy App was removed in January 2020 (which I am aware of). My question is: is there an alternative now that we have migrated or are we simply never going to get our Salesforce App for Zendesk back now that we have migrated? We're not investing in Workato just to get this back but if it is truly gone forever, then you have given our organization one more reason to quit Zendesk because our agents need visibility into our customers just as much as our Sales reps need visibility into their customers' tickets.
Hi Rachel,
Several customers have seen an issue where the Salesforce sidebar app (shown on the right within Zendesk tickets) shows a "failed to synchronize info" error because the configuration settings failed to reference properly within the new integration. The quickest way to fix this is to delete the objects that are there, save the configuration, and re-add those objects. I recommend taking a screen-shot of those settings so you have a record of what fields were mapped previously.
If you're still having issues after removing & re-creating those objects, please feel free to raise a ticket to support@zendesk.com as the sidebar app should be able to connect to your SFDC instance. If all the setup steps in the article above have been done and it's still not working, we want to help get it fixed for ya!
We'd like to filter on a field only if the date is in the future. Is this possible? When trying "filed > now" or "field > today", it doesn't work and I don't know what the formula conventions are for this filter.
Hi Naomi,
At the moment our sidebar app requires an explicit date (as opposed to a relative date), but this is a good suggestion for a feature to develop in the future. I'll make sure our Developers see this request. Thanks for calling it out!
I would like to +1 a Feature request on having the ZenDesk Salesforce Sidebar app also be available on the Organization and User Level.
We use Email as our mapping between SF - ZD and it would be great for our Agents to be able to see the interaction histories in Salesforce that we have on the same page in ZenDesk as the overall page of interactions that exist in ZenDesk.
Thanks!
Hi,
We have a few users that are currently piloting the Salesforce app and I've received feedback related to when then second lookup is done towards Salesforce - Is it possible to change it? At least I'm not able to do it myself.
The problem we have is that we have certain fields that needs to be filled. In this case it is customer number. In our configuration in the app, we have customer numbered configured for the lookup. The agents add the customer number, however they need to wait about 1 hours before the ticket is updated which is too long.
Any suggestions or ideas?
Thanks!
Hi Emelie Stjernquist
I'd be happy to have your account added to a beta feature which would allow that time to be set as low as 15 minutes. I'll reach out to you in a ticket for a more formal authorization of this.
Thank you Dwight Bussman, that sounds great!
Hello again,
When using the Salesforce app and getting a hit, you can (depending on how you have configured it) receive a direct link to Salesforce - is there any way to setup a direct link to Saleforce when not getting any hits of the lookup when it looks like this?
The benefit of it is to make it easier for the Agents to access Salesforce, it makes their daily work more efficient. Now they need to open a new tab in their web browser and select a saved bookmark in order to get there...
Since we already have the app installed and integration setup where we know which Salesforce subdomain to connect to it might be possible somehow...?
Thanks!
heyO Emelie Stjernquist
Our sidebar app does not currently provide a link over to Salesforce when not matching records are found, but that's a neat feature request! To what page would you expect such a link to go? https://DOMAIN.lightning.force.com/lightning/page/home would be my first thought. I will mark this as product feedback for our Devs to consider adding in the future.
Hi Dwight Bussman,
Yes, the start/home page as you wrote would be the best option I think.
Thanks!
We may receive a ticket into Zendesk where a customer is asking about pricing. Through the integration, we can see which AE manages this account, but is there an easy way to send a Chatter message to them? Something like:
"@Chad This customer is asking about purchasing 100 more seats. Can you follow up? Thanks!"
I prefer that our agents never leave Zendesk and we want to avoid purchasing unnecessary seats in Salesforce.
Is it possible to not show the option to create a lead or contact via the sidebar app please?
Hi james.beniston - that option should be going away shortly as the feature behind that button was deprecated a while back. Sorry for any impact this is having on your workflow.
Dwight Bussman The Lead-thing, will it be available depending on settings in the integration?
From my point of view, it looks like something we would like to use.
Emelie Stjernquist - I believe our developers had planned to remove that feature (or rather, not to implement it for the current version of the integration), but I will check with them and relay your interest in having that feature available.
One workaround I've seen is to leverage the ticket sync functionality with the "Create if no match" setting for Leads. This can be made more selective by adding a condition to the trigger which only sends tickets to SFDC when a ticket checkbox is checked. Customers added a "Create lead in SFDC" checkbox to tickets, and agents would check it whenever they saw that the requester was not already matched to a lead in Salesforce.
Hopefully such a workflow could be helpful in your case!
Hi Dwight Bussman,
Thanks, OK - thanks for clearing that out.
As long as the functionality is there in some way I think it's good enough. Your workaround sounds good to me.
Thanks!
Hi,
I've installed the app and managed to synchronise Salesforce with Zendesk, the data is showing on the app bar on Zendesk.
But I can't seem to be able to create a lead or contact from the ticket: the error is simply "Failure to create the item. An error occurred". Could you please advice?
Thank you for your help.
HeyO Giang Priest
Sorry for the confusion on this; that "create" button for Contact/Lead objects was part of an older version of the sidebar app, but is no longer functional. If you'd like to create Contacts or Leads, please consider a workaround like I mentioned a few posts ago.
Hi Dwight,
Thank you!
I've seen your comment about the option "Create if no match" but I don't see it anywhere on my SF Integration parameters...
Does it mean I haven't installed the right version of the app (how can it be possible?)
Giang
Hi Giang Priest - I'm not sure why that option wouldn't show up, but I will reach out to you in a ticket to look into this more closely.
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