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Authenticating end users for messaging



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Aimee Spanier

Zendesk Documentation Team

Edited Dec 23, 2024


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158 comments

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Prakruti Hindia

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi everyone, 

External id is now available in user profile for authenticated end-users. This improvement was rolled out in the week of Aug 23. I wanted to ensure that everyone following this discussion received the update. 

Thank you all for your patience. If your team is unable to view external id and you have raised a support ticket, we will help you resolve it.  

- Prakruti

 

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Unfortunately, all the limitations here make it so that we cannot enable Messaging. The name and email is not carried over when the ticket is created, and private guide articles are not referenced when a customer is authenticated to the widget. 

Such a downer

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Hi Aimee Spanier, I noticed that the diagram in the Overview now includes Mobile SDK.

Previously the Mobile SDK has a different JWT flow where Zendesk will request the JWT token from our back-end.

1. Based on the updated flow, does it mean now the Mobile SDK also has the same JWT flow as messaging?

2. Is the primary key also using external_id ?

3. If I submit a request via Mobile SDK, and also trigger a request via messaging, will both requests be tagged to the same user profile?

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Hi,

In my sandbox environment, I am able to login using JWT and able to obverse the user profile has the name and external_id that I set in the JWT token.

But in the production environment, I am not able to see it. From the logs, there are no error. Is there a way to check the Zendesk logs if the API is called successfully? I have engaged the support but the forum or blog.

If you have any additional questions, we recommend reaching out through the web and possibly by joining our developer community Forum (https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics), Blog (https://developerblog.zendesk.com/) and/or Slack (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScm_rDLWwzWnq6PpYWFOR_PwMaSBcaFft-1pYornQtBGAaiJA/viewform) as this is the venue where you can reach out directly to our developers.

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Prakruti Hindia
Issue is still there.
Users are not mapped correctly (a new duplicate user gets created once initiated Messaging session).
It's very sad. So much time we were waiting for the fix. 

Guys, do anybody can claim opposite - that issue had been fixed? 

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I can confirm that the messaging authentication is working as designed and conversations from users who have existing end-user profiles are being merged into that profile with the corresponding external ID in our Zendesk environment.

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Prakruti Hindia

Zendesk Product Manager

Francis, support for signed email is on the roadmap. Are you referring to carrying over private guide articles to the tickets ? 

External ids set by agents are always authenticated. I assume this is intended behaviour?

Yes, this is intended behavior. 

What happens if they signing key is deleted? Does the authentication badge disappear?  Does the whole external id get deleted?

Previous data - users and tickets will not be affected, if you decide to disable authentication. 

How do I query if a user external id is authenticated via API?

We do not support this. 

Ong Chin Shin and Zakhar, can you please raise a ticket with us ? We will look into it. 

- Prakruti

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Hi Zendesk team

web widget - login jwt payload was sent along with the email value, but we found an issue where the value was not saved.

Is the email value of null intentional? Or is it a bug?

step to reproduce

  1. web widget login
    • payload { scope: 'user', role: "end-user", external_id: userEmail, email: userEmail, name: userName };
  2. get user information

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Prakruti Hindia

Are you able to provide any kind of timeline for support for signed email (which you mentioned is on the roadmap)? This becomes a much, much larger implementation for us without it.

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For those who found alternatives, will you please share what you used instead of this? It appears the email issue isn't going to be resolved soon and I don't see the value in this if we lose the fallback email options and all of the connected ticket history.

Also, is anyone else having issues with their bot re-initializing anytime the page is loaded, even after a conversation has been handed over to an agent? The history of the conversation remains present - but if you refresh the page, the bot re-starts from the beginning flow as if it's a brand new inquiry.  This behavior is not present where we use the widget without authenticating users so I don't understand why it's happening when authenticating a user.

I opened a ticket but estimated response was 2 days so hoping someone else may have some insight. 

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Does anyone have authenticated users set up for messaging that can tell me if this is working now?

By working I mean, when a customer is authenticated in messaging/web widget with the bot and is then transferred to an agent, does that messaging ticket get linked to a user account in Zendesk and show the customer's email address/user account in the requester ticket field?

We would love to implement this, but I am unsure if the problems were resolved. We need those tickets to come in attached to a user or have a new user created, just like tickets from other channels. Thanks for your help!  - Jen

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Hi Jen C - it is not working for us. Authenticated users come in without a name or email address, although the authentication is working based on the end user not being asked to enter their name or email.  We are having issues with the bot re-launching on page refresh even though the history is brought in and I believe it's linked to the behind-the-scenes merge that is happening and the end user not being identified as having already been handed over to an agent.  Perhaps someone else has additional details - I have an open ticket with ZD but am waiting for a reply still.

 

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The big lack of info of this article is how to use in the flow builder infos that we've loaded/got by authentification..

A placeholders reference (such as {{sf.requester.email}}) would be most welcome

To be able to say "Hi {{requester.first_name}} how can I help you" for instance.

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Raphaël Péguet - Officers.fr I wasn't even aware that we could do this within our workflows... that would open a lot of possibilities.

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We're still waiting for the feature where an authenticated end-user's email address is displayed in the Zendesk chat UI.

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HI Prakruti Hindia,

Is there any news on this bug? is your team working on it? there are already 82 comments of people blocked and we haven't heard from you in a while. It's been almost a year since we identified this issue.

Can we organize a meeting with our developers to help? please give us any deadlines, we choose Zendesk to use the Guides for only logged-in users and we still can't use it.

Thank you,

Sergio

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Prakruti Hindia

Zendesk Product Manager

Hi everyone, 

Wanted to chime in on the discussions here.

For cases where email is the primary identifier, I suggest passing email as external id. If the system finds another user with the same external id , it will reference the same end-user. Currently, the email value is not passed along. It is expected to not be able to retrieve email user using the Users API. 

Surfacing email provided as part of authentication API is on the roadmap and are targeting Q1 for the rollout. 

- Prakruti

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Hi Prakruti Hindia ,

Our primary identifier is not the email, it's our internal ID. We have tried to pass it on the external id and it doesn't work either. Any other work around?

Thank you,

Sergio

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Hi Sergio,

Just to add our experience.  We've been aiming to use Zendesk Messaging for a long time now.  Initially the main blocker was the lack of authentication (and so there would have been no way for our agents to know who a customer was without asking them - a non starter).

Following the release of authentication support, the next issue was that the "external_id" wasn't surfaced by the API (like you describe, we are setting this to our internal id for a user).

The "external_id" that you supply as part of authentication is now surfaced from the Zendesk Support API on the user object as of mid August this year.

We already have an internal app/plugin that we have written for Zendesk Support which fetches user details, order history etc from our CRM and displays it to our agents.  Now that the "external_id" is available, we can use that - and so our plugin displays the customer name and email address to our agents.

Creating a Zendesk Support app/plugin is perhaps not the workaround you are looking for but it's definitely a solution.  There are other benefits in being able to surface any information/context you want to your agents all within Zendesk Support.

Our thoughts are that Zendesk Messaging has been very much a work in progress/draft since it was released, and prior to August this year pretty much unusable for anything real (unless you want a terrible customer experience).

It's now usable we think with the above caveat, but still not an out-of-the-box solution.  The improvements are arriving slowly, this is definitely "the future".  We've evaluated a lot of alternatives to Zendesk and they all seem to fall short in other ways (lack of native mobile SDKs, lack of support for particular channels etc) so I think Zendesk is the most comprehensive solution.

Hope this is helpful.

Thanks,
Daniel

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Hi! We are using jwt sso for messaging to authenticate users who use our mobile app. Currently we have faced a problem with end users created with random names in tickets. In zendesk admin panel > Customers section new users are being created as for example Visitor 88802267, but in jwt we are sending user name and email that user has in our mobile application. Before using jwt sso users would enter their name and/or email (in ios) and ticket would be created with name user entered, and then we decided to enable sso to use same email and name as in our mobile application. JWT generate process works as follows:

1. User signs in in our app.

2. Application sends GET request to our api that we developed in our backend with following data in payload -> user's name and email

3. API generates jwt and responds

4. Mobile application (which is written in Flutter) calls ZendeskMessaging.login() and sends jwt that it got from api request as paramater for login() method

5. zendesk messaging page opens and user starts conversation

Here is the example jwt token that is generated: eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsImtpZCI6ImFwcF82Mzg5OTcxNjdlM2NiMzAxMDVjMWJiODIiLCJ0eXAiOiJKV1QifQ.eyJzY29wZSI6InVzZXIiLCJuYW1lIjoidGVzdCIsImVtYWlsIjoidGVzdEBtYWlsLmNvbSIsImV4dGVybmFsX2lkIjoiODNjODA5NzItMjNmNi00MGU2LWEzNGItOWU2MmViYzhjZDRjIiwianRpIjoiZjRhZjg4NjAtMzg0OS00OGQ1LWI0Y2YtZTZmMmU3ZjEyZmZiIiwiaWF0IjoxNjcwMDY5MDI0fQ.HISo3nXh_4Egr80ffxwLsDUBSlbYqi5sPkkhZWyBxdE

We didn't quiet understand what is login redirect url is and that's why we just respond with jwt itself. Is it because we are using jwt sso incorrectly? 

We were trying to view tickets in salesforce and we did manage to view, but after enabling jwt sso, tickets stopped being viewed in salesforce. I guess it is because the problem with users being created as Visiter + some random numbers.

Could you please help with finding what is the problem? 

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Nara

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Abdurasul, for specifics regarding individual JWT auth attempts in your Zendesk account, please reach out to our support team directly so that we can take a closer look at what might going on here and advise within a ticket. Cheers!

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Anyone else getting a random name (ex. Visitor 66340348) for the user even though a name is in the token? The name seems to be received on Zendesk's end since the chat has a message saying "Changed their display name to ...", but the name is not actually changed. 

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Hi Prakruti Hindia

Could you please confirm if the email address being passed through is on track to be completed in Q1?

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I'm having the same issue Eric. No matter what I do everything comes across as Visitor and some numbers.

I also can't figure out how for new conversations to appear in a separate ticket from the same authenticated user. Marking as solved, closing the chat on the user side, waiting over 10 minutes doesn't make a difference, it always just re-opens the original already Solved ticket.

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Is there a roadmap when the current limitations will be resolved? Like email address mapping to existing user?

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Hi,

Hi, as per this article when do you think realistically the email address will be included in the newly created contact. This is important for us before we go live with chat on our site and we have been told on numerous occasions that this is coming soon but over a year later this is still a problem.

When a user of our site is logged into our site and engages with ZD messaging, we log them into the Zendesk chat using a JWT token that contains name, email and external Id.
Whilst the name and external id are set, the email address is not and it is vital to our operations to ensure this is automatically set rather than our agents having to manually set it which is both error prone and time consuming.

Please can you give an update on this work with a realistic timeframe for it being implemented?
Thanks

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It is now Q2, is there any update on this improvement for the ability to pass the email address? The metadata is now available in flow builder, how come it cannot pass into agent workspace?

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Our organization found another workaround for passing in the email address: before authenticating to messaging, we generate the token used for SSO authentication, and have the browser make a call to the Zendesk JWT SSO endpoint https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408845838874-Enabling-JWT-single-sign-on#topic_w5x_1fh_3fb (in no-cors mode, ignoring the response). We also set the same externalId for each user on both SSO JWTs and messaging JWTs.

The end result is that anyone signing into messaging has their account linked to the one used by SSO, and the email shows up as you'd expect.

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Thomas (internalnote.com) You need to use external ID to match users with one another.

When a user is created in your system, you need to create it in Zendesk with the given external ID from your system. Meaning, you need to use the Create or Update API endpoint, to create a user in Zendesk every time a User is created in your system.

When a user signs into messaging and is authenticated using JWT, you need to pass external ID as a parameter.
This will automatically merge the User that just signed in, with the user that is already created in your system, linking the Messaging Ticket immediately.

To circumvent Zendesks implementation of the JWT authentication, I'd also recommend always having a User Create or Update Call before passing the JWT auth.

This will guarantee that even if a new user is logged in through Messging, the user is first created with his Email and external ID, and then can be merged into for future Messaging conversations.

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Thomas (internalnote.com) Wow.

I just watched your video and I am stunned by how this feature is still not properly implemented yet. I am glad I postponed our implementation after taking an initial look at it. 

My impression was, and even from reading the support article, this is the behavior I would expect, is that once a user authenticated through messaging, a user is with an external_id is created in Zendesk, and merged into potentially an existing user (if that existing user shares the external_id).

The current state of the implementation seems like a bit of a mess, since the "external id" that is shown... is not actually an external ID as you would expect in Zendesk. It's just the SunCo external ID surfaced next to the user... 


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