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[Channel Framework] Push endpoint: fields array is not behaving as expected



Posted Jan 28, 2025

Hello everyone,

We are WAX, a solution that offers brands the possibility to chat with their customers through WhatsApp, some of the brands (mostly our key accounts) also have a Zendesk account and want to have their WAX conversations brought to their Zendesk support so that agents can seamlessly answer the brand customers.
 

As Zendesk does not offer ticket webhooks to get the agent responses, we are forced to create a channel framework and provide these brands with our private app.

When we create a ticket through the channel framework we have no way of specifying the phone number of the ticket's author, we can through a custom field but not through the native Zendesk field, which forces us to edit the "details" user field with some custom values but it is not ideal as it seems it randomly does not work…
 

It is a huge problem for us, we have tried iterations over iterations to work around the fact that we can't provide the user phone number and the documentation of the API is misleading.

It says in the author object documentation that the fields array should use the english name for a system field of the user model. So it would look like:

 

{
	...rest_of_payload - no issues there,
	"author": {
		"external_id: "123",
		"fields": [
			{
				"id": "details", // this works
				"value": "my_details"
			},
			{
				"id": "phone", // this does not work
				"value": "+33646282539"
			},
			{
				"id": "123", // a numerical custom field id, this works
				"value": "my_custom_field_value"
			}
		]
	}
}

Same goes for the `fields` of tickets. It is very problematic for us as it forces us to schedule another API call to the other API to  try to find the user based on an id we put in the details field and update the user with the phone number, we have found it is very prone to errors.

We would appreciate help towards finding a solution with a single API call that does not imply losing features.

We have considered moving our integration to create tickets through the Ticket API but that would not offer the possibility to “chat” between an agent and an end-user.

Best Regards,
Yorick


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1 comment

image avatar

Erica Girges

Zendesk Developer Advocacy

Hi Yorick, 
 
Unfortunately, only the standard ticket fields can be accessed via name as the identifier in the fields array. You can find a list of the default/standard ticket fields here. You would have to use a custom ticket field to store this data. 

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