Configuring data sync from Salesforce to Zendesk

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92 Comments

  • talib raza

    Hi, I am trying to set up Salesforce account-to-Zendesk user sync. Push Topic is not enabled in my org for the standard user profile. The Documentation refers to editing the Standard User profile, which is a standard Salesforce profile and can't be edited. Should I clone the Standard user profile? What name should the cloned profile have? Any other workaround?

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Talib - sorry for the confusing documentation. There's an open ticket with our docs team to clarify this better above. I believe it should refer to the profile of whatever user connected the integration (not necessarily the standard profile). Please let us know if this helps to clear things up. This article may help as well: Zendesk for Salesforce integration - Required profile permissions

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  • Hello Everyone

    I have a customer wanting to sync both Leads and Contacts from SF to Zendesk.

    Considering they can only select one, does anyone have any best practices on how to work with this limitation?

    Cheers, Chad

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    HeyO Chad, 

    I'm not aware of a good workaround for this, but: 

    1. If anyone else has a good workaround, I'd love to hear it!
    2. I recommend writing out a product feedback post so that our product managers can see the need for this capability
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  • Justin Federico

    Are there any known issues with syncing contacts to users and having "Allow users to belong to multiple organizations" enabled for customers?

    I have seen that having two Orgs for the same user caused the sync to fail or not occur. I disabled the "Allow users to belong to multiple organizations" option and there is no issue.

    When only one org is allowed the sync will update the org, if different in SFDC vs ZD, and all other mapped fields will sync as well.

    Having two orgs caused none of the fields to sync even though one of the orgs matched SFDC. Maybe the matching org needs to be the default but I have not tested further.

     
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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Justin -

    For more information on the expected behavior when contacts belong to multiple accounts in SFDC and the "allow users to belong to multiple organizations" feature is enabled, please see Using the multiple organizations feature in the Salesforce integration 

    I believe what you're describing is intended given the context in that article. If you find behavior that doesn't align with that documentation, please let us know!

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  • Permanently deleted user

    We've hit a significant issue with SF data not flowing through to Guide's User Segments.

    In SF we have an existing formula text field, which we need synced to a ZD dropdown field, so that the associated dropdown field Tags can then be used in the Guide User Segments. But I've read that these fields are a mismatch.

    Is there a workaround to this?

    I don't see why we can't set up the mapping so that an SF text value can be mapped to a known dropdown value? If it doesn't match, then ignore it.

    Or, why we can't use text values in the User Segments?

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  • talib raza

    Chad - I think its because formula updates can't be used to trigger Process, Flow or platform event. Dendesk - Salesforce user sync work on platform events.

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    While you're correct that updates to formula fields don't trigger sync events within the salesforce streaming API, they can be forced to do so using a workaround as documented here: How to initiate a sync from Salesforce based on a formula field update

    I suspect Chad's issue is more to do with the field-types: that our integration doesn't allow the mapping of text-field in SFDC into drop-down (similar to a pick-list) in Zendesk. This seems to be a deliberate omission on the part of our developers to insure value mappings align which would only be possible with a pick-list on the SFDC. 

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  • Permanently deleted user

    Dwight is correct.

    We have existing SFDC fields which are obviously in use and will not be changed. It would be nice if ZD was able to better work with these fields. I don't see why a ZD dropdown field requires such strict association with an SFDC picklist?

    This puts us at a significant disadvantage in Zendesk.

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  • Amber Barnes

    I'm having a bit of trouble with domain mapping. In Zendesk we have a number of organizations that have multiple domains associated with them. The data sync only allows for one to be mapped and will just overwrite vs add to the list.

    Also, sync to domain allows for invalid formats. For example, we tested syncing SF account website sync we don't capture company domain and more often than not, the website domain matches their company email domain. We found that subdomain is NOT stripped from the url though and Zendesk will not associate users if it is in that format. 

    Not sure how to work around this. We could just not sync email domain but given we have many accounts and they are constantly being created, the manual upkeep is near impossible. Most SF contacts will be synced in the Contact Sync but we have plenty occurrences of non-contacts reaching out via email under their company domain. 

    Any potential solutions/workarounds?

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    HeyO @...

    While the data-sync only allows for the mapping of a single text-field, that field can contain multiple domains 

    for instance, this mapping in admin center:

    and this field-value in SFDC: 

    results in this value in the org in zendesk: 

     

    As for the invalid-formats, you'll need to map a field that contains only the domain itself, not any of the surrounding https:// or trailing characters like /index.html - I believe the SFDC field may show that bare domain, but actually stores the full URL which includes invalid characters. You should be able to see what it's syncing over in the Salesforce Logs

    In terms of a workaround, it may be possible to make a formula field which collects various other domain-fields (as we only allow you to map one). If you're going that route, I recommend this formula-field workaround to insure that changes to the formula field triggers a sync.

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  • Amber Barnes

    @... - We are going to use the formula field work around to strip subdomain from website, but that means we lose the ability to have multiple domains in a field as you suggested right?  Pre-integration we would create and update organizations every time we added a new customer, and email domains need to be preserved (30k + orgs). This is information we don't capture in salesforce either. So just to confirm, there isn't a way in the integration to just ADD to the existing domain list in ZD, only over-write completely?

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    @...

    The architecture of our integration only allows for overwriting of a mapped field at present, but I'll definitely let our Developers know about the desire for such a feature. I also recommend writing in to request this in our Product Feedback Forums so that other folks can reply with workarounds or vote in support of this idea. 

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  • Jeff Callahan

    When a Contact is sync’d from Salesforce and creates a new Zendesk User does the newly created ZD user receive an email notification?

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    HeyO Jeff,

    Per point 11 in the article above: the sending (or not) of a welcome email to a user created by the Contact sync is controlled by the "Send welcome email" checkbox within the Contact Sync settings under General Options. If the box is checked, a welcome email will be sent. 

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  • Maik Künnemann

    Hi, we have an issue - if the Emailaddress of an Salesforce contact is changed, the address is not changed in Zendesk, the new address is added as secondary address to the contact. So the default one in Zendesk is still the old wrong address.

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Hi @...

    Per our developers, this is the intended behavior of our integration, as replacing a user's default email identity can lead to access issues (among other things). Adding as a secondary identity is a safer move, even if it does require a bit of manual cleanup after the fact. If this behavior is frustrating to you, feel free to reach out in our product feedback forum so that our product team hears your feelings directly and can see how many other folks feel similarly.

    Thanks!

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  • Justin Federico

    We are migrating data from one SFDC instance into another that has data sync configured to our Zendesk instance.

    What is the expected behavior for accounts that are duplicated by sync from SFDC?

    If duplicate accounts are merged within SFDC what would be the expected behavior in Zendesk?

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    @...

    It should not be possible to create truly duplicated accounts within Zendesk (i.e. two distinct organizations with the same name) because we enforce name-uniqueness within Zendesk.

    That said, the matching criteria used to identify a sync-match can create organizations with very similar names. 

    The sync doesn't check the matching criteria until the record attempts to sync, so if one was matching based on account name = org name, and there were two records whose names aligned, but had never synced, changing the account name might create a "seeming-duplicate" - really - it's an account that tried to sync, correctly found no match, and so created a new org.

    To avoid this, I generally recommend doing a one-time batch sync of accounts as documented here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041028094 to insure that all accounts have synced at least once. After an account has synced, subsequent name changes (or changes to the matching criterion, whatever it may be)  are irrelevant, as the link/relationship between account & org has already been established.

    As for merging - Zendesk doesn't have an analogous action to account-merging for organizations. When an account is merged, it is seen as an update to the account which is the "merge winner". This account would sync over to its corresponding organization, but the organization associated with the "merge source" (aka "merge loser" - the account that gets "removed" by the merge) would remain in zendesk and require manual cleanup. This is likely due to a limitation on the salesforce streaming API that merging accounts triggers an SFDC streaming API event only on the "winning" record, so there isn't a good way for Zendesk to know about the "losing" record to clean up the corresponding organization.

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  • Ryan Russikoff

    is there a way to sync ticket requester data from zendesk TO salesforce?

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    The Ticket Sync functionality allows for the creation of Contacts/Leads if no matching record exists within SFDC:

    but will not overwrite existing Contact/Lead data with user-data. When a Contact/Lead is created via this mechanism, mapped custom fields in the Data Sync page are brought over from Zendesk to the resultant Contact in Salesforce.


    Additionally, some requester info (name/email address) is synced over into Case fields called:

    • Zendesk Support Ticket Requester Name
    • Zendesk Support Ticket Requester Email

    Although this doesn't directly change Contact/Lead fields in Salesforce, it would be relatively low-effort to create custom logic (workflow process/apex trigger) within SFDC to take the case-field info and apply it to the Contact linked.

    For information beyond those two pieces, I've seen some customers work up custom solutions where they send information in a Ticket field mapped to a Case Field, and then rely on a workflow within Salesforce to take that info from the Case and apply it to the matched Contact. This custom logic isn't something our integration was designed to do, but is definitely possible.

    Hopefully that helps to answer your question!

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  • Ad Astra Support

    Is there a way to make custom organization fields read-only? Our agents need the ability to update SOME fields on the organization record, but not the mapped fields to Salesforce. Because of this, limiting their permissions to the entire organization record is not an option.

    We have created custom Organization fields to sync to Salesforce and have noticed that agents may change the value of that field in Zendesk, rather than updating the record in Salesforce. The next time a sync is triggered from any of the mapped fields in Salesforce, it will update ALL of the mapped fields in Zendesk, so any outdated values that are lingering in Salesforce will override what is existing in ZD. This is becoming more problematic and seems that having the ability to lock custom fields to read-only would prevent this nuance from happening since Salesforce and Zendesk are only a one-way sync. 

    Does anyone have ideas?

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  • Sabra
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Hey Ad Astra Support! At this time, we don't have a way to make organization fields read-only, but I would recommend following this Feedback post: Make some Organisation fields uneditable to Agents

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  • Ad Astra Support

    Thank you Sabra, I gave my feedback on the post you suggested. 

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  • Steven Major

    Hi Everyone,

           Could you tell me if there is a time frequency setting that controls how often the interface syncs between the two softwares? I am not seeing anything off hand and am looking to decrease the time so it syncs more frequently.

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    heyO Steven Major

    The sync of individual records takes place whenever one of the mapped custom fields is changed on the Salesforce side.

    If you'd like to sync a large number of records at once, I recommend this workflow.

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  • Chen Shemer

    Hi, 

    We used the Zendesk integration to sync ticket multiline fields to salesforce case text area fields. After Jan-24-2022 this sync stopped working.
    We created a new field instead of the multiline field, but it can be mapped only to a simple Salesforce text field that has a limit of 255 characters. When the Zendesk field has more than 255 characters, the integration fails.
    Do you have a solution for that?

     

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  • Dwight Bussman
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Hi Chen Shemer

    I see you've raised a ticket with our Support team to discuss this as well. We can report back here if they're able to find a good workaround for that.

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  • William Grote

    Dwight Bussman

    By the way thank for all you help in the past! 

    Ive been following this thread since I want to have certain 'sales lead'  tickets that are from Messaging / Chat channel AI bot create a lead in SF so we don't have to do it manually - if the ticket is a sales inquiry ( just Name and email  - possibly a few custom fields later )

    Not sure if this is possible (or if its all or nothing, ie, every new request in ZD will create a lead/contact in SF, not just ones from certain tickets that are created from Chat/ Messaging) , but if it is possible, with either ticket view or ticket synching, that would be great,

    I was trying to look at the settings you mention above in -Ticket Requester Matching - but I can't get to that option and the little 'action in process' icon is shown where the "install package" button should be, my settings look like this, any suggestions?

     

    and if I go to Data Synch I see this 

    So something is askew - any ideas?

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