Salesforce Integration - a wishlist

The Zendesk provided Salesforce app and integration is a key element in our systems setup, but it could use some serious TLC in 2023. Below is a list of issues that need attention, enhancement requests and new feature ideas that I think would really bring this app into a top-tier integration.


1. Responsive UI for Ticket App 
Zendesk is working on Layout Builder, which will provide so much more flexibility for admins, allowing us to move apps around and resize panels to make best of use space.

The Salesforce app isn’t responsive and looks rough in flexible panels. It would be great if it was able to display content responsively. Below are screenshots showing the issue. Most Zendesk published apps are responsive, it would be super if this one joined the club.

Config Screenshot in Layout Builder:
Preview - Note the second column

2. The config interface.

This config UI will be the thing that finally kills my scroll wheel. The endless scrolling to select fields and trying to move them around is a tedious, error prone and a frustrating user experience. Grabbing a field to move up to the top of a fieldset isn't easy either, you need to move it 3-5 fields, let it go (since you can't hold it and scroll in this UI) and then find it again. Here's a video showing this experience. There’s so much screen space that can be leveraged to better configure and manage the display settings for this app!

3. Lookup functionality

We can select an option in the data sync that will write the Salesforce ID for an Account or Contact onto the Zendesk equivalent. Why can we not use that ID as a lookup matching criteria? What’s the point of writing the ID if it can't be used as the lookup condition? String-matching for lookups is bad for the soul and especially challenging if you have accounts with similar names.

Please let us use Organization custom fields or other org properties for matching and not just ticket fields.

4. Related Object limits

5 objects is inadequate. In a support org for examples, we want to see all the Asset records a user has relevant to Support. That can easily be more than 5. For example, a customer might have a primary software subscription, supplementary Add-ons, and multiple items of hardware (ex: printers, payment terminals etc.) or other entitlements, like Priority Support.

Please display all records (or at least double it, or let us filter by some other attribute on the record like Record Type)

5. Custom Objects

I am so excited about the new Custom Objects in Zendesk! There’s a lot of potential here, the main one being able to store asset info from Salesforce in Zendesk in a manner that can interact with tickets and be seen in reports. It would be game-changing to have the integration being able to map a Salesforce Object to a Zendesk Custom Object!

This would handily kill the most common questions I get from execs around the subject of ‘why do we use Zendesk instead of ServiceCloud?”

6. Caching

It would be great if we could reduce the cache option to less than 15 minutes. For orgs that have API room to spare, let them select a lower rate, like 1-5 minutes. Put a link to an info page about API limits in SF and ZD and advise that lower settings may impact API availability and it should be monitored.  Being able to get live or near live data on a user would be really valuable. In some scenarios, we’re stuck waiting for 15 minutes to see updates made to customer accounts, which isn’t a great experience when you’re on the phone with the user.

Thanks for reading!