Using Salesforce actions in action flows

What's my plan?

All Suites

Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus

By connecting the action builder to external systems, such as Salesforce, admins can integrate Zendesk with external systems in automated workflows, improving collaboration and maintaining a seamless experience across multiple platforms.

Note: The steps associated with external systems in action flows are referred to collectively as external actions.

This article contains the following topics:

• Connecting Salesforce to action builder
• Using Salesforce actions in action flows

Connecting Salesforce to action builder

Before you can include external actions in your action flows, you must connect the action builder to the external system.

When connecting to external systems for use in action flows, the following best practices are recommended:

• All external actions performed by an action flow are attributed to the user who connected the external system. Therefore, it is a best practice to use a dedicated service account rather than personal credentials when connecting to each external system.
• All integrations request access to necessary scopes. However, it's important that you review and validate the scopes before authorizing the connection to the external system.
• When managing credentials for API key-based tools, such as OpenAI, it's best to store keys in a secure vault or credential manager.

To connect action builder to Salesforce

1. In Admin Center, click Apps and integrations in the sidebar, then select Actions > Action flows.
2. Create or edit an action flow.
3. Open the step sidebar.
4. Under External actions, click Salesforce.
5. Click Connect.
6. Use Salesforce to authenticate the account.
   Note: All external actions performed by an action flow are attributed to the user who connected the external system. Therefore, it is a best practice to use a dedicated service account rather than personal credentials when connecting to each external system.

After you've connected to the system, you'll see an indicator that it's connected and details about the instance you're connected to, as well as the actions available for Salesforce.

Using Salesforce actions in action flows

The Salesforce action steps can be used to automate many of the actions an agent might take as they work tickets. For example, you can use the Salesforce actions in action flows to automatically create new leads or other Salesforce objects when a user contacts you, automatically add notes to a Salesforce record after a customer interaction, clean up duplicated data, look up Salesforce contact data prior to sending a Slack message or creating a Jira issue, automatically convert highly rated leads identified by AI scoring models, and more.

The Salesforce actions can be used with the following Salesforce objects: leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, cases, and campaigns. The following actions are available for each of these objects:

• Create record
• Update record
• Delete record
• Find record
• Convert lead to opportunity

Creating a record

Use the Create record action to add a new record to object (leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, cases, and compaigns).

This action has the following inputs and outputs:

	Variables
Inputs	name, phone, description
Output	id

Updating a record

Use the Update record action to change field values for an existing Salesforce record.

This action has the following inputs and outputs:

	Variables
Inputs	name, phone, description
Output	id

Deleting a record

Use the Delete record action to remove a lead or case from Salesforce.

This action has the following inputs and outputs:

	Variables
Inputs	object_id
Output	none

Finding a record

Use the Find record action to search for a record based on identifying information such as an email address or ID.

The inputs and outputs vary by object:

	Variables
Inputs	Accounts: name, phone, description Leads: first_name, last_name, email Contacts: first_name, last_name, email Opportunities: name Cases: case_number Campaigns: name
Output	Accounts: id, name Leads: Full lead metadata Contacts: Full contact metadata Opportunities: Pipeline metadata Cases: Case metadata Campaigns: id, name, status

Converting a lead to an opportunity

Use the Convert lead to opportunity action to transform a lead record into an opportunity record in Salesforce.

This action has the following inputs and outputs:

	Variables
Inputs	lead_id, account_id
Output	opportunity_id