Question
I use Single Sign-On (SSO) from my website. How can I seamlessly authenticate end users from my website to the help center?
Answer
It's possible to set up your help center to use the same authentication method as your external site by setting up SSO. However, when the end user visits your help center in the same session as the one they signed in to your external site, they still need to use the sign-in option on the help center to be signed in there.
To remove this extra step, you can use different methods:
With a JSON Web Token
If you use a JSON Web Token (JWT) create a custom script with JWT authentication and automatically send login data from your website to Zendesk. The user is allowed to access Zendesk without entering separate sign-in credentials.
Zendesk Customer Support does not support scripts however, you can use this documentation:
Without a JSON Web Token
Otherwise, configure your help center so that it requires sign-in to access when visitors are signed into your external site in the same browser session. This way the help center carries across the external authentication automatically when they visit it.
If you don't want to require sign-in to access the entire help center, link to a section that requires sign-in, for example, an article that is restricted to signed-in users only. When the user is directed to that page, the authentication kicks in, signing them in automatically. This option doesn't work in an open help center if the user navigates directly to your home page.
3 comments
Marci Abraham
Can this work with the web widget? If so, please direct me to the documentation. Thanks!
0
Dane
For the web widget authentication, you can refer to Enabling authenticated visitors in Web Widget (Classic).
Hope this helps!
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Alan Pugh
Just a heads-up: This is information that a lot of folks have been looking for for years, like multiple comments on this guide.
I developed a workaround specifically for scenarios where an authenticated website user is clicking a link to visit the Help Center, which is to append /signin to the Help Center URL. This causes the Help Center to check for (and complete) that authentication automatically and drop them back on the Help Center homepage.
(Note: Looks like help.yourdomain .com/hc/en-us/signin)
Note that you wouldn't want to use this trick in places where unregistered users may need to click the link and view public articles, because it'll take them to your sign-in screen and they don't have credentials, so they'll never be able to get to those public articles.
Good feature here might be for Zendesk to incorporate a quick check on the homepage to determine whether the user is authenticated before the page loads and adjust accordingly.
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