

Zendesk and Salesforce have fundamental differences in the way they store users. In Zendesk, each user must have a unique email address. This is not required for Salesforce contacts or leads.
In order for multiple Salesforce contacts that share an email address to sync to Zendesk, the integration uses a Support feature called multiple organizations. This feature is enabled in Support and is available on the Professional plan and above. For more information, see Enabling multiple organizations for users.
This article explains the syncing behaviour for the Saleforce integration when multiple organizations is enabled.
Related information:
Understanding the multiple organization syncing process
When the multiple organizations feature is enabled, multiple Salesforce contacts with the same email address which belong to different Salesforce accounts can be connected in Zendesk Support to a user belonging to multiple organizations. The linking of a user to an organization in Zendesk is known as an organization membership.
In Salesforce, when multiple contacts share an email address, the first contact linked to an account is considered the syncing record. The syncing record is the main Salesforce record and is identified by a user account during syncing.
The syncing record updates its corresponding user entry in Zendesk during a sync when changes have been made to the user fields in Salesforce.
The syncing behavior between Salesforce and Zendesk is governed by the following rules:
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If an organization doesn’t exist in Zendesk, organization memberships won’t be created
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The integration’s Account to Organization sync and the multiple organizations feature in Support need to be enabled for the sync to use multiple organization behaviour
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Organization memberships are only added, not deleted
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Mapped fields are synced if the Salesforce primary account-contact relationship matches the user’s default organization in Zendesk
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An organization membership in Zendesk is only created if a Salesforce contact is linked to a Salesforce account
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Secondary relationships between a Salesforce account and contact are not synced since new organizations would need to be created in Zendesk for all other accounts
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The integration respects existing default memberships which are manually assigned
Sync behavior when multiple organizations is enabled or disabled
To understand what happens during syncing, the following table describes some scenarios and the actions and results when the multiple organizations feature in Support is enabled and disabled.
Scenario flow | Multiple organization feature | Action | ||
Sets the user’s organization in Zendesk | Creates an organization membership | Syncs the contact’s mapped fields | ||
Scenario 1
|
Disabled | No | N/A | Yes |
Enabled | No | No | Yes | |
Scenario 2
|
Disabled | No | N/A | Yes (new user is created) |
Enabled | No | No | Yes (new user is created) | |
Scenario 3
|
Disabled | Yes | N/A | Yes |
Enabled | No | Yes | Yes | |
Scenario 4
|
Disabled | Yes | N/A | Yes |
Enabled | No | Yes | No | |
Scenario 5
|
Disabled | No | N/A | Yes |
Enabled | No | No | Yes | |
Scenario 6
|
Disabled | Yes | N/A | Yes (new user is created) |
Enabled | Yes | No | Yes (new user is created) | |
Scenario 7
|
Disabled | No | N/A | Yes (new user is created) |
Enabled | No | No | Yes (new user is created) |
1 Comments
What would be the best way to synch a scenario where in Salesforce, there are 'parent' or 'umbrella' accounts that contain several smaller organizations, each with different email domains, and our company wants to treat them as a single organization in Zendesk for ticket handling and account management purposes ?
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