PM Roundtable on Salesforce Integrations Response from the Product Team

On September 12, the Zendesk Community hosted our latest PM Roundtable with community members to hear and address feedback on Zendesk's integration for Salesforce. After hearing from customers about their pain points, feedback, and feature requests for the Salesforce integration, the product team drafted this response on key issues raised during our roundtable. We've shared their summary, resources from the event, and a complete event recording of our event.

Response from the Product Team

Dear Zendesk customers, 

Huge thanks to everyone who attended the PM Roundtable on our Salesforce integration. I appreciate the time you made for us and the feedback you provided on the integration. We'll be driving an active roadmap for the integration starting in 2024, and the feedback from this session will help inform the updates and changes we make to the product. 

Below is a summary of the session and the main areas of feedback. If we've missed anything, please add comments below, and we'll try to incorporate this as well.

Error notifications and monitoring

• The app can break at different times, and there's no notification when it does. Big need for notifications for any failures, disconnections, or any time something goes wrong, with clear instructions for how to remediate
• Need for a method to monitor the health of the integration, not just logs
• More robust retry mechanisms when things fail, or API limits are met

Customization of the Sidebar app in Zendesk

• Our Sidebar app in Support is very restrictive and needs to show more than the five objects it retrieves today.
• The app also needs to be responsive to the new adaptable Agent Workspace
• Be able to look up objects using different fields, like record or external ID. Render out the record name using the lookup IDs, too.
• More frequent refreshes of the app cache to ensure the most up-to-date data is displayed in the app. Alternatively, be able to request a refresh of data from within the app.

Customization of the Ticket View in Salesforce

• The ticket view needs to show within Salesforce the same fields, data & columns we show in Zendesk.
• The filters or attributes used to retrieve tickets also need to be configurable to ensure the tickets shown in Salesforce are more relevant.

Syncing of Zendesk Orgs and Salesforce Accounts needs more flexibility

• Mapping of hierarchy across organizations and other objects is critical. Parent, child & sibling relationships between accounts in Salesforce need to be synced into Zendesk.
• Organization merge (within Zendesk) is under development, and a beta release is coming towards the end of the year. There is a need for merging to be facilitated by our integration to support syncing of merging from Salesforce back into Zendesk.

Data sync needs to be expanded for bi-directionality, more objects, and custom objects.

• Our syncs are all one-way, but there's a significant need for the syncs to go in the other direction. Particular request for our User <> Contact/Lead sync to send updates back from Zendesk to Salesforce.
• We need to sync data from custom objects in Salesforce to the system or custom objects in Zendesk and vice versa.
• Ability to create custom fields from within the setup of the field sync

Our integration with Salesforce is essential, and we recognize how critical it is to our customers. It's a crucial part of your workflow, and we're committed to making it the best it can be for you.

Thanks again to everyone who attended the session. We appreciate everyone sharing their feedback and recommendations with us. Please comment below if we've missed anything or if folks have other feedback or thoughts they’d like to share with our team.

Cheers,

The Zendesk Strategic Integration team

Event Resources

• Event Recording
• Event Presentation