The Make an API call step allows you to configure an API call out to another system, such as an internal CRM or ERP, or to push conversation details to an external endpoint, like Amazon Event Bridge or Google Analytics.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the procedures involved in including and configuring the step in a bot flow.
For an overview of the Make an API call step and its configuration rules, see Understanding bot step types: Make an API call.
This article includes the following sections:
Adding a Make an API call step to your bot
Adding the Make an API call step to your bot includes a number of distinct tasks.
The procedures below assume you have already created a bot flow, and are adding this step to that bot.
To add a Make an API call step
- Open the bot in Flow Builder.
- Click the Add new icon where you want to insert the step, either at the end of a branch, or between two existing steps.
- In the Configuration panel, click Make an API call.
- Enter descriptive information for the step. Note that this is visible to your team – customers will not see the information entered here:
- Name: A name for the call that makes it easy for your team to identify.
- Description (optional): A short description of the action taken by the call.
- Continue with the procedure described in Adding API details, below.
Adding API details
Use the API details section to configure the HTTP call you want to make including the HTTP request method, location of the external resource, and adding headers if needed. The steps below are a continuation of the procedure in the previous section.
To add the API details
- In the Configuration panel, click API details.
- Use the dropdown to select a Request method:
- GET retrieves data from a server at the external resource. This is the most commonly used method.
- POST sends data to create or update a resource at an external system. If the resource already exists, the data sent modifies the resource.
- PUT sends data to update or create a resource. If the resource already exists, the data sent replaces the resource.
- PATCH sends data to update a resource at an external site. It is used to apply partial modifications to the resource.
- DELETE removes the resource at the external location.
- Enter an Endpoint URL. The endpoint URL is the location of the external resource you are connecting to. The endpoint URL supports
https://
protocol. - Optionally, select a connection to authenticate the API call.
Note: You must create a connection before authenticating the API call.
- If needed, enter the key and value for an optional header.
- Click the Make Test API Call button to make a test call. If variables are added to the step's URL or header, you can include optional test data to your external service to check if the API call is working as expected. Please note this will make an HTTP request to the configured endpoint URL.
Saving the API response as a variable
A variable is a way to store API responses. Variables can be used in a few different ways:
- Personalizing the bot's message to customers. For example, you can save a customer's name as a variable and refer to it in a bot message. You can add variables anywhere in the flow after the Make an API call step in which the variable was created, in steps that include a configurable message:
-
Passing data in the call to an external system. For example, you can prompt a customer to provide an order number and then make an API call to your eCommerce system for shipment status for this particular order. When using variables on the Make an API call step, there are a few restrictions to be aware of.
In the Endpoint URL field, variables can be added only to the URL path or query string values. Variables cannot be used in the domain or subdomain part of the URL. The table below shows examples of what you can or cannot do with variables:
Valid configuration Invalid configuration https://myshopify.com/admin/api/orders/order_number.json
Retrieve an order by specifying the order ID from Shopify.
https://domain.com/api/search?input=value
Variables can’t be added to domain/subdomain
https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place?input=city_name
Retrieve a location by keyword searches from Google’s places API.
https://example.com/api/search?key=value
Variables can’t be added to query string key
If a variable becomes invalid (if the API schema is changed, for example) the bot will skip the variable when displayed to the end user. You can create up to eight variables in a Make an API call step.
After configuring the API details and testing the API call, you can use the returned Response data to create your variables. The steps below are a continuation of the procedure in the previous section.
To create a variable from the Response data
- In the Configuration panel, click Make an API call.
- Expand the accordion and identify the data from external system that you want to turn into a variable.
Tip: Switch to the Response body tab to view the raw response that has came back from the external system.
- Click Save.
- Give the new variable a name. Variable names must include only lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores.
Authenticating the API call
In the Make an API call step, you can use a connection to authenticate API calls to the external service or system.
To do this, you first must create the connection in Admin Center. A connection lets you safely store and pass credentials for the service. See Creating connections in Admin Center for more information and detailed instructions.If you are having troble adding the connection, consult the Audit Log in admin Center for more information.
About the step branches
The Make an API call step is a branching step. Adding this step splits the bot responses depending on whether API was successfully executed.
At bot run time, any 200 response codes will have the bot moving down the successful branch. All 400 or 500 response codes will have the bot moving down the failed branch. Please note that if the API returned 200 with an empty response, any variables saved from this step will be skipped at runtime.
34 Comments
This is awesome Aimee Spanier! Will it be possible to request information from the user in order to use their input as parameters in API request (e.g. validate email address on external CRM)?
Yes Pedro Rodrigues - this is on the roadmap to be delivered in the next few months.
Awesome, thanks for the follow up!
This is great. Can we use this to get info from our own ZD instance? I would love to get messaging ticket count and display that to customers. This would help set wait time expectations since we can't do that natively. I tried but keep getting unauthorized 401 errors. I also tried setting the user and pwd - key and value.
Hi @Jason , at the moment it is not possible to collect this information, as we were not able to use the parameters of the other requests to use in the new request.
Follow the example images
I saved the userid as a variable, and I can't use this variable in another API call like this.

And for your 401 error, you need to create a global token or use a Base64 token with your username and password, and you need to enable that within Zendesk.
You can follow this instruction https://developer.zendesk.com/api-reference/ticketing/introduction/#security-and-authentication
Hey there! I am currently working on including an external API into our bot. I am trying to do a POST request, but having troubles with the request body.
The format that I enter for the request body is normal JSON, like for example
{"test": "hello"}
Now the problem I encounter is that the external API that I use is returning that the request is invalid. When sending the exactly same request manually (for example through a browser console) the request is being processed correctly.
So my question is, do I have to format the JSON body in any specific way for Zendesk to correctly forward the request to the external API?
I have checked the Integration logs and it appears that the request body is being sent to the Zendesk servers as a string. Is it possible that when parsing the JSON string later into JSON some error occurs on your side?
The above seems like what is happening here to me, because when I checked the logs of one of our APIs that I tried to call using the tool, the request body contains not the actual JSON, but a stringified version of the JSON (with escaped quotation marks).
Any thoughts?
Can you provide us a code snippet of the request so we can take a look?
Thanks!
How can I do API Call with database json And redirect to a específic group?
Eric Nelson
Sorry for the late response, but let me give you an example. In this example I am calling an API hosted on AWS, I will share the request logs to demonstrate the problem.
Let's start with the Zendesk request. This is what I put in Zendesk (Note that I added all implicitly required headers, they are just not in the screenshot and they are not relevant for the problem)
The above request leads to this being logged in our API:
You can see that the quotes are double escaped. Also I am not exactly sure where that \n at the end is coming from, I don't think I have entered a new line, but it's probably not relevant anyway.
Now when I send a request using Javascript directly the outcome is different. A request example:
This yields the following logs:
Here it just logs the JSON as a string, the way it was sent. This is also what is expected and correct.
So my question would be, am I using the API call in the flow builer wrong and the JSON should be entered in a different format? Or is there a problem in the software that breaks the JSON when sending the HTTP requests?
Please let me know if you have any other questions about the example I provided.
Hi there,
How can we pass variables stored in the chat to an API request URL?
For example, is it possible to store the customer question as a variable to pass as a param in the URL?
Thank you in advance
Unfortunately there currently is a bug where we stored variables are not translated when used in text.
This is quite detrimental to the end user experience.
Hi Zendesk team,
Can you add the info:
- how to make API calls to the Zendesk instance to :
1- get info
2- do updates on the ticket?
- what should we put as key and value to be able to connect to our proper Zendesk Instance?
Thank you
We're trying to use a GET call to an endpoint on our server that receives a user's e-mail and returns a json with several data points about our user. However, as we try and test it out, we get an error saying that the API call can't include a period so sending an email as a variable in the call doesn't seem to work.
Can you provide an example of the endpoint URL you're making the request to, including any query parameters (being sure to redact any sensitive info). Also, could you include the full error you're seeing when making the request.
Thanks!
Tipene
Hi Tipene, certainly, here are the steps to reproduce, in Bot Flow Builder:
- Add Step
- Make API Call
- In API Details, include GET Request Method with this type of request https://XXXXXXX.XXXXX.XXXXX/api/admin/users/{{sf.requester.email}}/
- Select Add Variable and select Responses from Customers: Email, which adds {{sf.requester.email}} as displayed above
- Press Make API Call and then are asked to include Test Data in the email. I put in my email XXXXXX@gmail.com and get an error "Variables added in the URL path must not contain periods."
Thanks for providing this clarification for me!
Unfortunately the error that you're seeing is a result of having a period in the variable, as you mentioned in your earlier comment. This is a system rule and can't be overwritten. Variables with additional symbols or punctuation should be sent as a payload body in a PUT or POST request.
Feel free to reach out with any questions!
Tipene
Hello
I have a problem with the headers keys: i need to use "authorization" key with a bearer token, but the field value it's short!
So my bearer token was truncate and i have an authorization error....
Thanks for reaching out!
The character limit for the value field is 256 including spaces. Generally, you shouldn't see oAuth tokens exceeding that length. Can you make sure there are no extra spaces in the value field that might be causing the issue?
Thanks!
Tipene
My web service use JWT token leght 372 c.
"eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJodHRwOi8vc2NoZW1hcy54bWxzb2FwLm9yZy93cy8yMDA1LzA1L2lkZW50aXR5L2NsYWltcy9uYW1lIjoicGFwZXJpbm8iLCJodHRwOi8vc2NoZW1hcy5taWNyb3NvZnQuY29tL3dzLzIwMDgvMDYvaWRlbnRpdHkvY2xhaW1zL2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOiIwMi8wNi8yMDI2IDEzOjU5OjM1IiwiZXhwIjoxNzgwNDA4Nzc1LCJpc3MiOiJJc3N1ZXIiLCJhdWQiOiJBdWRpZW5jZSJ9.VG7qHYzzojd2HwVteMrm4gDOFN8KGUsP2F24DtTgX7E"
There are many web service with long token...
Hey okean123
Thanks for the feedback. The issue has been fixed and it would be great if you can confirm.
Hi Tipene Hughes - we noticed that we can send a payload body with POSTs but not with GET requests. Is it possible to enable us to send a payload in a GET? That would solve our problem of not letting us include e-mails in the URL of the original GET request but rather in the body.
Hey Gabriele/Gianmarco
Thanks, I have captured your feedback for us to fix.
Hi Diego Villarreal,
Unfortunately it isn't possible to send data as a payload via a GET request; you will need to use the appropriate POST or PUT request method.
I've logged this as feedback to our product team who may look at adding this as additional functionality in future updates depending on demand.
Sorry I couldn't be more help!
Tipene
Is there a way to send the current user context to the make an api call step with the help of a variable ? I want to present a different flow for authenticated versus anonymous users in flow builder...can you let me know the details ?
Hey Gauri Sanil
This is not possible but this use case has been prioritized on our roadmap to solve for H1, 2023. Thanks
Is it possible to access the external_id value of the user?
We are planning to expose external_id as a system variable in Q1,2023.
Is there any variable we can use to identify the user other than external_id? Such as a ZenDesk ID we could sync to our db
Hi Shiyu Zhu also curious about Carlton's question if you have any thoughts. How can we insert variables that are customer-specific via an API call with FlowBuilder?
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