Question
How does Zendesk capture the location of the customer? Can I get the customer's location through the API?
Answer
The user's location is based on the IP address of the user, captured at the moment of the ticket creation. In some cases, when the end user uses a firewall or a proxy, the information can be displayed as null, with an empty value, or inaccurate.
It is not possible to capture the end-user's location or set up the location manually in tickets created through the API. The location displayed in these tickets is the location 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.
For related information, see this section: People advice and troubleshooting.
17 comments
Trevor Kanaya
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!
2
Joseph
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.
-1
Naomi Watnick
Hi @Joe,
Like @... , we also want to be able to report on information we can see in the ticket events like this:
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: @... @... thanks for bringing this up as well :)
1
Elaine
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!
-2
Erin LemMon
Hi @...
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
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! :)
-3
Ramona Arora
Hi Elaine,
Is there a way to pull IP address associated with the requester/end user of a ticket through an api call?
0
Dave Dyson
Hi Ramona,
Ticket Audits, which are created when a ticket is created or updated, include a metadata section that includes IP address information for update channels that include it: Ticket Audits
0
C.H. Dev
Hi Dave,
How can I set ip_address from API?
0
Jeff C
Hi C.H. Dev,
None of our API endpoints has the ip_address object/parameter hence this is something that cant be set in Zendesk.
0
C.H. Dev
Hi Jeff,
in my app client call our server, then our server call zendesk server. ticket has always ip of our server.
How can I proxy headers or hidden params with user ip to zendesk?
0
Jeff C
Hi C.H. Dev,
I am not 100% sure on the possibility of proxying headers or hiding the IP when submitting a call to Zendesk and this is better suited for our Developer Community. I'd suggest that you create a post here.
-1
CJ Johnson
It appears this information is now no longer consistently available in ticket audits, or in tickets. This was confirmed by Support, who told me it is "not a bug", so it doesn't look good for this data point making to Explore. The majority of tickets no longer have this information captured at all.
0
Simon
Hi,
End-user profile timezone settings seem to default to our timezone set in admin meaning all end-users have the same timezone unless manually updated. I contacted support to confirm and they mentioned this is by design. Why aren't end-user profile timezone settings updated based on their IP location?
0
Brett Elliott
Hi Simon,
Thank you for the excellent question that, unfortunately, I don't have a great answer to. That's how things were built back when Zendesk was first created 15 years ago. There are much better ways of doing this now, such as using the user's IP location. We don't have anything scheduled for improving this. If that changes I'll report back here.
-2
Simon
Thanks for the quick response Brett Elliott, I have created a feature request.
Much appreciated, from Simon and Briany.
0