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Zendesk Position on Bring Your Own Channel

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Mick O'Donnell

Zendesk Product Manager

Posted Oct 16, 2023

What is Bring Your Own Channel?

BYOC is an integration path in which a customer's (or technology partner's) developers will implement their own client side widget or SDK for use on a website or mobile app using APIs provided by Zendesk. This is a more complex path than leveraging Zendesk Embeddables to power an end user experience. It can be difficult to support customers and partners on this path and it is more costly for them to implement. As such, customers and partners need to be aware of Zendesk's position if they should choose to go down the BYOC route.


Zendesk's Position on Bring Your Own Channel

Zendesk will allow you to build your own native channel for the End User Experience; Referred to in Zendesk as "Bring Your Own Channel". Specifically, you can use Zendesk's APIs (if available, within your purchased Zendesk package) such as the Sunshine Conversations APIs (including the Switchboard API) to build your own native web or mobile channel for your website, a customer's website, or a mobile app.

⚠️ If proceeding on the "Bring Your Own Channel" integration path, it's important to understand the complexities, Zendesk API Rate Limits by Plan and development effort involved.

 

Zendesk API Documentation 📄

Written, updated and maintained with the purpose to highlight how the Zendesk available API’s can be utilized to support integrations using Zendesk Embeddables.

 

API Change Management/Testing 🧪

Zendesk does make changes to the API’s and does perform rigorous testing to ensure backwards compatibility with our Zendesk Embeddables. However, your BYOC solution may be impacted because we release API changes. In that case we would require for you to reproduce the issue in our Zendesk Embeddables and then submit a bug request.

 

Zendesk API Rate Limits

Zendesk does have API Rate Limits and if you are considering BYOC, we strongly recommend you review our policies and best practices guide. If you make a lot of Zendesk API requests in a short amount of time, you may bump into the API rate limit. When you reach the limit, the API stops processing any more requests until a certain amount of time has passed. 

 

Zendesk Support 

It may be challenging to design the solution for building your own channel based on Zendesk APIs, and Zendesk solution teams will be limited in the support that they can provide in validating such a solution. In addition, Zendesk would only be able to support the official APIs themselves, and not a channel implementation built upon those APIs.

For these reasons, it's important to carefully consider the implications to your business of pursuing this development path. If possible, we recommend less riskier integration paths such as leveraging the Zendesk Web Widget and SDK to power your End User Experience.


Bring Your Own UI or Headless

Relating to BYOC is the headless integration path. Zendesk plans to offer you the ability to implement your own User Interface (referred to as “Headless”) on the Zendesk Web Widget and Mobile SDKs. This is already possible today using the Sunshine Conversations Web Messenger and Mobile SDKs. This is a different type of integration over BYOC as you are still using a Zendesk client (Widget / SDK) on your website or mobile app.


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