A Complete Guide to Zendesk Integration

Zendesk supports your front-line agents across customer success, sales, and even marketing. But it’s far from the only tool these essential teams use. Customer success agents often have to escalate tickets to other systems, whether it’s to managers or software developers. Marketers co-ordinate campaigns through project management tools and other apps. Sales people practically live in their contact management tools and sales pipeline.

Zendesk integration is how you get all the data from these disparate tools in one place.

What is Zendesk?

Zendesk is a popular customer service and CRM platform, often the single homebase for customer support, sales, and customer engagement. It’s not uncommon for customer service agents, salespeople, and marketers to collaborate in this platform. With strong AI features, Zendesk can also automate essential customer-facing work, saving teams precious time.

What is Zendesk integration?

Zendesk integration closes the gap between Zendesk and other tools, unlocking new workflows and streamlining existing ones. This allows customer support agents to escalate tickets, salespeople to handoff closed deals, and marketers to plan their campaigns without long email chains or constant meetings.

Zendesk is often integrated with tools like:

• CRM tools like HubSpot and Salesforce.
• Software development platforms like GitHub and Azure DevOps.
• Project management platforms like Jira, Asana, and Smartsheet.
• Other customer support or service apps like ServiceNow and Freshservice.

Why does Zendesk integration matter?

Integrating Zendesk with other tools creates significant benefits for customer support teams, IT, salespeople, and marketers. Benefits like:

• Improved average resolution time: When customer success teams don’t have the context they need, everything from answering a ticket to escalating complex issues to developers becomes slower. That can impact resolution times and other metrics customer success cares about.
• Better visibility on revenue teams: Marketing, sales, and customer success essentially have the same objective. Revenue. But they typically work across different tools. Integrating Zendesk with these tools doesn’t just make their collaboration smoother, it gives revenue leaders a better view on how these functions work together.
• Stronger reporting: Without integrations, customer success leads have to gather data from multiple tools manually to create reports in spreadsheet tools. With Zendesk integrations, you can move data to your reporting solution of choice automatically.
• Increased productivity: The cross-functional work involved in customer-facing workflows usually involves meetings, email chains, and status updates manually copied from multiple tools. Zendesk integrations eliminate the productivity drag that comes from these tasks.

3 types of Zendesk integration

Not all Zendesk integrations are created equal. Some cover basic automations but take only a few minutes to set up and use, with a relatively flat learning curve. Others support a wide range of tools and workflows, but are more complex, or require technical resources to deploy. It’s usually a matter of matching the right integration solution to your workflow.

Built-in Zendesk integrations

Zendesk offers multiple ways to integrate it with other tools, with different learning curves and functionality. Here are a few ways this can be done:

• The Zendesk Support for Jira integration allows business users to set up a basic integration between the two tools.
• App Builder is an AI-powered platform for building apps with natural language (i.e., you write out what you need in plain terms). You get code, UI, and functionality, which can allow you to build basic integrations.
• The Web Widget and SDKs allow developers and other technical users who know Javascript to add Zendesk features like messaging to other platforms.

Automation tools

Automation tools use straightforward technology to automate a wide range of actions across hundreds, if not thousands, of tools. You choose an event that triggers an automation and an action it performs for you. That’s it. These actions are typically simple, like updating a single field or creating a work item (e.g., a Jira issue to match a Zendesk ticket). Once the automation runs, it doesn’t send any further updates to that field or work item. It’ll only run when it’s triggered again (i.e., you change a field or create a new work item).

Examples of popular automation tools include Zapier, Workato, and IFTTT.

iPaaS

An iPaaS platform gives you a single place to build and deploy integrations for Zendesk and the other tools you use. These platforms are generally easier to use and maintain than more complex integration solutions, though this can vary by platform. Some of these tools allow you to build integrations with a simple, no-code interface, while others require some code to get the most out of your integrations.

Examples of popular iPaaS platforms include Unito, Tray.ai, and Boomi.

How to integrate Zendesk with Unito

Here’s a look at how an integration between Zendesk and other tools works with Unito.

Step-by-step integration guide

1. Connect tool accounts to Unito: After signing up for Unito, click +Create Flow and connect Zendesk and the tool you’re integrating it with to Unito.
2. Choose flow direction: Flow direction tells your Unito flow where you need work items created. Most Unito flows are two-way, meaning they automatically create work items in both connected tools.
3. Set rules: Unito rules use trigger-action logic to filter out work items you don’t want synced or automate certain actions, like automatically assigning new Zendesk tickets it creates. To build a rule, choose a trigger Unito should look for and the actions it needs to take.
4. Map fields: In most flows, Unito can automatically map fields in Zendesk with fields in other tools. From there, you can customize field mappings to match statuses across tools, send data from some fields to fields specific to your workflow, and more.
5. Launch your flow: Once you map your fields, your flow is ready to launch. After an initial sync, Unito will check for changes in real-time.

Want to know more? Check out these tutorials for syncing Zendesk with other popular tools.

• Syncing Zendesk and Wrike
• Connecting Zendesk with Jira
• Integrating Zendesk and Azure DevOps
• Syncing Zendesk with ServiceNow
• Connecting Zendesk and Smartsheet
• Integrating Zendesk with Asana

Challenges to watch out for when integrating Zendesk

Before you pick a method for integrating Zendesk, consider the following challenges.

Deployment times and technical resources

Every integration platform requires some time and resources to deploy and maintain, but the actual amount required varies by platform. Some platforms can be deployed in minutes, with business users able to deploy their own integrations. Others require technical resources to build and maintain, which can happen over weeks and months.

Integration depth

Integration depth refers to the range of actions an integration can automate and the fields it can move data through. Some integration solutions only support a limited range of actions or fields, essentially only giving you a snapshot of work happening in other tools. Other integrations are deeper, meaning you can get most, if not all the data from your tools into other systems. Not every workflow needs deep integrations, but knowing what you need is essential.

Scalability

While simpler integration platforms, like automation tools, are great for first-time users. You can quickly build integrations that support important workflows. But as your needs scale, these platforms often start to struggle. Maintenance requirements increase, until you reach a point where you’re spending more time fixing integrations than they’re saving you. Evaluating integration solutions involves researching how well they’ll scale with you, whether that’s in the types of workflows they support or the amount of data they can handle.

How to keep Zendesk integrations secure

Since Zendesk integrations handle customer data, keeping them secure is essential. Here are things to keep in mind for this.

• Data handling and scope: Whenever you’re dealing with customer data, you need to take data security especially seriously. One way you can keep integrations secure is to create tiers in your data, defining the types of data you can and shouldn’t integrate. This can prevent especially sensitive data from accidentally being shared with less secure systems.
• Access control: This allows you to restrict who has access to an integration platform as well as what they can do once they have that access. Integration solutions with robust access control features, like role-based permissions, are more suited to larger organizations.
• Security certifications: Where data security is concerned, this is the first thing you should evaluate when researching potential integration solutions. General certifications like SOC 2 Type 2 are a strong baseline, while industry-specific (e.g., HIPAA) and jurisdiction-specific (e.g., GDPR) certifications can ensure you get an integration that meets your specific requirements.

Best practices when integrating Zendesk

When rolling out your first Zendesk integration, follow these best practices:

1. Start with a small pilot project between a few Zendesk tickets and work items in another tool. This allows you to test integrations and adjust them before deploying them across your entire workspace.
2. Evaluate the results of your pilot project before implementing integrations at scale. Look for situations where integrations have saved time, where they stumbled, and where your teams had to adapt their work.
3. Consider whether the integration you choose needs to be broadly accessible to business users or whether they should need technical knowledge to use.
4. Review the integrations you use once a year. Compare them to other vendors to see if you’d be better served by a competing solution.
5. Use built-in Zendesk integrations when possible to enhance any third-party integrations you deploy.

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