As a Zendesk reseller I have heard several times from my customers that they would love to be able to have new customers "Auto-follow" a specific section in their Help Center ie. Announcements etc.

There is no trigger in zendesk that can fire on "new user", so you need to involve the use of a 3rd party application and the zendesk API.

The solution i describe here does require a paid subscription to Zapier since Zendesk is what they call a premium app, but i think the subscription is well worth the money! Here is what i did:

• Create an account in Zapier (there are mulitple services out there that can be used for this, but since i am using zapier already i thought i'd go with them)
  
  
• Connect your Zendesk to your Zapier account by adding it as a connected account (the easiest is to add it when creating a new "zap" and it will guide you on how to connect it)
  
  
• Choose the action "New User" and test the step to make sure it can retrieve a user.
  

• Hit continue, continue, continue and find the action called "webhooks by zapier".
  
  
• Here it gets a little tricky, but if you add the following data it should work:
  
  
• URL: https://{{yourdomain}}.zendesk.com/api/v2/help_center/sections/{{section_id}}/subscriptions.json
  Remember to remove the {{ }} when replacing with your own domain and sectionID.
  You can find the section ID by navigating to the section in your helpcenter and look for a number ie. https://acmeinc.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/202378569-Announcements
  
  
• Payload Type = json
  
  
• Data (consist of 4 rows):
  subscription__source_locale = en_us (replace with your default locale)
  subscription__user_id = step1:id
  subscription__include_comments = false
  subscription = 
  
  You get the "Step1:ID" by clicking the little plus icon and finding ID on the list.

• Wrap Request In Array = No
  
  
• File =
  
  
• Unflatten = Yes
  
  
• Basic Auth = admin_email@yourcompany.com/token|verylongapikey
  
  You get an API key by creating one in the admin interface in Zendesk under Channels > API.
  * Please notice that there is a | between token and verylongapikey

• Hit Continue, give your Zap a name, enable it and you are done!

Zapier is capable of much more than this, so an obvious extension of this "Zap" could be to send the customer an email saying that you "auto-followed" them via their Gmail integration or one of the other many integrations they have working out of the box!