Issue symptoms
- The name of my user changes to an undesired name or string on its own, or when the user logs into Zendesk.
- My user changed their name themselves after logging in, or another agent or admin may change the name, but the original value overwrites the change.
- No one is manually resetting the name to the wrong value, this is done automatically.
Note: The same issue can make a user's role change on its own, and that is explained by the behavior described in this article.
Conditions
- The affected user is signing into Support through Single sign-on (SSO).
- The agent's name in Zendesk resets to the same value as established through SSO.
or
- The account installed the Salesforce integration.
- The Zendesk for Salesforce integration has user/contact or user/lead sync set up.
- The agent's name resets to the Salesforce value.
Resolution steps
The name change of the use happens because your SSO method or Salesforce integration is overwriting your current user name.
With SSO, all user management and authentication happens outside of your Zendesk. For example, when a user logs in using SSO, your SAML attribute mapping overwrites the name field mapped to the first name in Zendesk and updates the name of the user.
- To stop this behavior, either update your user name within the identity provider you use to log into Zendesk from or stop using SSO to log into Zendesk.
With Salesforce, setting up the user/contact or user/lead syncing in Salesforce allows the integration to update user information every time the contact or lead profile is updated in Salesforce.
- To prevent this behavior, either update the user name in Salesforce or turn off the user syncing in the Zendesk for Salesforce integration.
For more information, see the article: Viewing and editing your user profile in Zendesk Support.
11 comments
Stephen Barbarino
If we're using Azure AD SCIM provisioning and setting a users display name based on their preferred name while leaving their first name in azure set to their legal first name it shouldn't update the name in Zendesk during SSO.
Are there any plans to fix this? Telling us to "stop using SSO" isn't a sufficient answer.
5
Jack D Williams
What if we have no option but to use SSO? Our organization's names are all correct and certainly aren't "FirstName LastName" – it's really frustrating when a staff member replies to a user on the forum and their name isn't shown. Looks really unprofessional.
1
Gi from Firstbase
We've also had this issue of an agent's name changing on its own and it was due to a Stripe integration. Fixing the name on Stripe for the customer with the agent's email resolved the issue!
0
Morgan
This is happening to a couple of our agents, but not all agents. That leads me to believe the issue is not SSO related and we don't use Salesforce. We try to protect our agent's privacy at all cost, but the system keeps including an agent's last name in his interactions with customers. This is not ok. The other agent impacted is a Light Agent and their name keeps changing to gibberish.
0
Brett Bowser
This definitely sounds like it could be SSO related even if it's not affecting all agents on the account. I've seen this happen if an agents name in their Active Directory is different from their name in Zendesk. Even if you change the name in Zendesk, as soon as that agent logs in via SSO it will sync from AD over to Zendesk.
Were you able to confirm with your IT team that the names in your SSO system is set correctly for these individuals?
Hope to hear from you soon!
0
Morgan
@brett Yep, per our IT their names are totally correct in active directory. This is not SSO related. There have been instances in the past where this same issue has happened on customer accounts. Thanks for the suggestion. I have an open ticket with support, so hopefully they'll find something. *fingers crossed*
0
Anna Valdez
This is happing on endusers and it is really frustrating because all the macros take the wrong name or better said the unformatted name. So then the place holders first name don´t work properly.
Example
Anna Valdez or anna.valdez
then in macros with placeholders fist name comes Hello anna.valdez instead of Hello Anna
Any idea how to fix this? This is really bad user experience for the agents
0
Melissa Freeman
Dear Zendesk team,
We have just discovered this issue after implementing SSO.
It is not an option in our identity system to select preferred name.
It would be so much better if Zendesk offered a way for agents to use their preferred name.
It's such a simple thing, and was NOT an issue until we moved to SSO.
1
Stephen Barbarino
For those of you struggling with this, let me provide the detail that Zendesk support should have provided instead of just saying "it's SSO".
If you are mapping a display name to first name in Zendesk using SCIM when provisioning users, you'll notice that the first name of the user in Zendesk will update. This is great, it's what most of us want.
Here comes the issue : When the user logs in via SSO, your SAML attribute mapping is overwriting the name with whatever name field is mapped to first name, that's why it's updating the users name.
Take a look at your SAML attribute claims in your SSO configuration in your identity provider (Azure AD in my case) for Zendesk, that's where you'll see where you need to make the update. The default claims maps givenName in azure to first name in Zendesk. I can't tell you how to fix this but this at least gives you some direction in how to get this solved. If you're not responsible for your identity provider configuration, this information should at least point those that are in the correct direction for a solution. In my case, since I'm using Azure AD, I was able to adjust the default claims to stop SAML from updating our users first name when they log in.
Zendesk support, it really wouldn't have killed you guys to provide a bit more information other than "it's SSO" especially when so many of us already told you we were provisioning users from the same identity provider that we're using for SSO. This is totally fixable in most IdP's.
Hope this info helps.
0
Melissa Freeman
Can anyone from Zendesk say, if we don't send firstName in our SSO response, will the person be signed in without changing their name, or is firstName mandatory?
Our identity team told me it wasn't possible to send the preferred name because it's in a different system.
0
Stephen Barbarino
Melissa, I'm not with Zendesk but what you described is how I fixed it in my environment. I removed first name from the SAML attribute map which stopped it from updating the name field whenever a user with a preferred name authenticated into the app. Just be warned, every environment is different so you should 100% test this before rolling it out to production. We use UPNs as unique keys Zendesk which is why we were able to remove first name safely. I did keep last name in there though.
I hope that helps.
0