Documentation Experience Platform Destinations Guide

Zendesk connection

Last update: Mon Jan 22 2024 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

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Zendesk is a customer service solution and sales tool.

This Adobe Experience Platform destination leverages the Zendesk Contacts API, to create and update identities within an audience as contacts within Zendesk.

Zendesk uses bearer tokens as an authentication mechanism to communicate with the Zendesk Contacts API. Instructions to authenticate to your Zendesk instance are further below, in the Authenticate to destination section.

Use cases use-cases

The customer service department of a multichannel B2C platform wants to ensure a seamless personalized experience for its customers. The department can build audiences from their own offline data to create new user profiles or update existing profile information from different interactions (for example purchases, returns etc.) and send these audiences from Adobe Experience Platform to Zendesk. Having the updated information in Zendesk ensures the customer service agent has the recent information of the customer immediately available, enabling quicker responses and resolution.

Prerequisites prerequisites

Experience Platform prerequisites prerequisites-in-experience-platform

Before activating data to the Zendesk destination, you must have a schema, a dataset, and segments created in Experience Platform.

Refer to Experience Platform documentation for Audience Membership Details schema field group if you need guidance on audience statuses.

Zendesk prerequisites prerequisites-destination

In order to export data from Platform to your Zendesk account you need to have a Zendesk account.

Gather Zendesk credentials gather-credentials

Note down the items below before you authenticate to the Zendesk destination:

Credential

Description

Example

Bearer token

The Access token you have generated in your Zendesk account.
Follow the documentation to generate a Zendesk access token if you do not have one.

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Guardrails guardrails

The Pricing and Rate Limits page details the Zendesk API limits associated with your account. You need to ensure that your data and payload are within these constraints.

Supported identities supported-identities

Zendesk supports update of identities described in the table below. Learn more about identities.

Target Identity

Example

Description

Mandatory

email

test@test.com

Email address of the contact.

Yes

Export type and frequency export-type-frequency

Refer to the table below for information about the destination export type and frequency.

Item

Type

Notes

Export type

Profile-based

You are exporting all members of a segment, together with the desired schema fields (for example: email address, phone number, last name), according to your field mapping.
Each segment status in Zendesk gets updated with the corresponding audience status from Platform, based on the Mapping ID value provided during the audience scheduling step.

Export frequency

Streaming

Streaming destinations are “always on” API-based connections. As soon as a profile is updated in Experience Platform based on audience evaluation, the connector sends the update downstream to the destination platform. Read more about streaming destinations.

Connect to the destination connect

IMPORTANT

To connect to the destination, you need the View Destinations and Manage Destinations access control permissions. Read the access control overview or contact your product administrator to obtain the required permissions.

To connect to this destination, follow the steps described in the destination configuration tutorial. In the configure destination workflow, fill in the fields listed in the two sections below.

Within Destinations > Catalog search for Zendesk. Alternatively you can locate it under the CRM category.

Authenticate to destination authenticate

Fill in the required fields below. Refer to the Gather Zendesk credentials section for any guidance.

Bearer Token: The Access Token you have generated in your Zendesk account.

To authenticate to the destination, select Connect to destination.
Platform UI screenshot showing how to authenticate.

If the details provided are valid, the UI displays a Connected status with a green check mark. You can then proceed to the next step.

Fill in destination details destination-details

To configure details for the destination, fill in the required and optional fields below. An asterisk next to a field in the UI indicates that the field is required.
Platform UI screenshot showing the destination details.

Name: A name by which you will recognize this destination in the future.
Description: A description that will help you identify this destination in the future.

Enable alerts enable-alerts

You can enable alerts to receive notifications on the status of the dataflow to your destination. Select an alert from the list to subscribe to receive notifications on the status of your dataflow. For more information on alerts, see the guide on subscribing to destinations alerts using the UI.

When you are finished providing details for your destination connection, select Next.

Activate audiences to this destination activate

IMPORTANT

To activate data, you need the View Destinations, Activate Destinations, View Profiles, and View Segments access control permissions. Read the access control overview or contact your product administrator to obtain the required permissions.
To export identities, you need the View Identity Graph access control permission.
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Read Activate profiles and audiences to streaming audience export destinations for instructions on activating audiences to this destination.

Mapping considerations and example mapping-considerations-example

To correctly send your audience data from Adobe Experience Platform to the Zendesk destination, you need to go through the field mapping step. Mapping consists of creating a link between your Experience Data Model (XDM) schema fields in your Platform account and their corresponding equivalents from the target destination.

Attributes specified in the Target field should be named exactly as described in the attribute mappings table as these attributes will form the request body.

Attributes specified in the Source field do not follow any such restriction. You can map it based on your need, however if the data format is not correct when pushed to Zendesk it will result in an error.

To correctly map your XDM fields to the Zendesk destination fields, follow these steps:

In the Mapping step, select Add new mapping. You will see a new mapping row on the screen.
In the Select source field window, choose the Select attributes category and select the XDM attribute or choose the Select identity namespace and select an identity.

In the Select target field window, choose the Select identity namespace category and select a target identity, or choose the Select attributes category and select one of the supported schema attributes.

Repeat these steps to add the following mandatory mappings, you can also add any other attributes you want to update between your XDM profile schema and your Zendesk instance:

table 0-row-3 1-row-3 2-row-3 3-row-3
Source Field	Target Field	Mandatory
`xdm: person.name.lastName`	`xdm: last_name`	Yes
`IdentityMap: Email`	`Identity: email`	Yes
`xdm: person.name.firstName`	`xdm: first_name`

An example using these mappings is shown below:

IMPORTANT

The Attribute: last_name and Identity: email target mappings are mandatory for this destination. If these mappings are missing, any other mappings are ignored and not sent to Zendesk.

When you are finished providing the mappings for your destination connection, select Next.

Schedule audience export and example schedule-segment-export-example

In the Schedule audience export step of the activation workflow, you must manually map Platform audiences to the custom field attribute in Zendesk.

To do this, select each segment, then enter the corresponding custom field attribute from Zendesk in the Mapping ID field.

An example is shown below:
Platform UI screenshot example showing Schedule audience export.

Validate data export exported-data

To validate that you have correctly set up the destination, follow the steps below:

Select Destinations > Browse and navigate to the list of destinations.
Next, select the destination and switch to the Activation data tab, then select an audience name.
Monitor the audience summary and ensure that the count of profiles corresponds to the count within the segment.
Log in to the Zendesk website, then navigate to the Contacts page to check if the profiles from the audience have been added. This list can be configured to display columns for the additional fields created with the audience Mapping ID and audience statuses.
You can alternatively drill down into an individual Person page and check the Additional fields section displaying the audience name and audience statuses.

Data usage and governance data-usage-governance

All Adobe Experience Platform destinations are compliant with data usage policies when handling your data. For detailed information on how Adobe Experience Platform enforces data governance, see the Data Governance overview.

Additional resources additional-resources

Additional useful information from the Zendesk documentation is below:

Changelog

This section captures the functionality and significant documentation updates made to this destination connector.

View changelog

table 0-row-3 1-row-3 2-row-3 layout-auto
Release month	Update type	Description
April 2023	Documentation update	We updated the use-cases section with a clearer example of when customers would benefit from using this destination. We updated the mapping section to reflect the correct required mappings. The `Attribute: last_name` and `Identity: email` target mappings are mandatory for this destination. If these mappings are missing, any other mappings are ignored and not sent to Zendesk. We updated the mapping section with clear examples of both mandatory and optional mappings.
March 2023	Initial release	Initial destination release and documentation publish.

recommendation-more-help

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