How does Zendesk capture the location of the end user?

Question

How does Zendesk capture the location of the customer? Can I get the customer's location through the API?

Answer

The system determines the location based on the IP address of the user and captures it at the moment of ticket creation. How you find the IP address depends on the type of ticket.

Note: If the end user uses a firewall or a proxy, the information might be inaccurate or appear with an empty value.

Email

If the end user sent an email in a ticket, follow these steps to find a possible IP address:

1. In Support, find and open your customer ticket
2. Hover the mouse over the last problematic message sent by the end user
3. Next to that specific message bubble, click the ⋮ icon > View original email
   
   
4. Click the Source tab > click ... > wait 5 seconds for the content to load
5. In the content, the Received field will contain a potential IP address in this example format: 209.85.208.175
   • Only the IP in the Received header which includes a zendesk.com address format is not potentially spoofed, for example: mail-pod-17.int.zendesk.com
     

API

In tickets created through the API, you cannot capture the location of an end user or set up the location manually. The location in these tickets is the location of the server of the script that makes that call to the API. Instead, ask the developer of that script to verify possible logs on their end.

Live chat

With live chat, the 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.

Any other recent example

If you cannot find any IP address with the steps above, contact Zendesk customer support with a ticket URL to explore further logs that may be available. Provide a recent example, Zendesk can access these types of logs for only 2 to 3 weeks.

For related information, see this section: People advice and troubleshooting.