Recently we’ve come across a very common use case: People often have customer data in a Google Docs Spreadsheet. This makes a lot of sense: the online spreadsheet is easy to keep up-to-date across the whole organization and you can use Google Forms to collect the data. But when agents are replying to a ticket it’s difficult for them to look up customer details in the spreadsheet.

This is where our app comes in. We’ve added Google Sheets support to our Zendesk app and I thought I’d share a short guide on how to set everything up. I hope this is useful to all people who use Zendesk and Google Sheets. If it is, let us know at support@factbranch.com :)

Our Solution

FactBranch is an app that loads customer info from a variety of external sources and displays them in Zendesk when you open a ticket. Now that data source can also be a Google Sheet. The app looks like this:

Let’s get started

1) Prepare the column labels

Open the spreadsheet from your Google Docs account and make sure every column you want to display has a title in the first row.

If you want to look up your customers by email, name that column “Email”. If you want to look them up by phone number (when you get calls via Zendesk Talk), call the column “Phone”.

If you want to display a column as a link, add “[link]” to that column’s name. Your spreadsheet should look something like in the screenshot below. First row is for data labels. The rest is for the data itself.

2) Share the spreadsheet with the app

Hit the blue SHARE button.

In the box that pops up click on Advanced.

Then on Change... to change the sharing settings.

Now select On - Anyone with the link. This allows the app to access the spreadsheet.

Click Save in this window and Done in the next ones.

You should now be back to your spreadsheet. Copy the spreadsheet's link from the browser’s address field. It should start with https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ followed by a lot of random characters.

3) Connect the app to the spreadsheet

Now head to factbranch.com and create an account if you haven’t signed up already. Don’t worry, you can try everything out for 2 weeks for free.

If you have to be GDPR compliant, you can also accept the data processing agreement and add your GDPR contacts.

Go to My Account > Configure Integration and select Google Sheet as your data source.

Paste the link to your spreadsheet that you’ve copied previously:

Click Next, then select how many agents use Zendesk, click Finish setup.

Now the hard part is over. The only thing left to do is installing the app in Zendesk.

4) Install the FactBranch app from the Zendesk Marketplace

Copy the FactBranch API-key and then click on FactBranch App from the Zendesk Marketplace.

On the app’s page hit the Install button and when prompted paste the API-key you’ve copied one step earlier.

Click that Install button one last time.

5) Done!

Now when you open a ticket, FactBranch looks up the customer in your spreadsheet and displays their data in the ticket sidebar.

Contact

If you have questions, feedback or love how the app works, please leave a comment below or send an email to support@factbranch.com