Chapter 6. Integrating and Extending Zendesk

While Zendesk is a powerful tool for responding to customer enquiries, most likely, it will become a part of a larger eco-system. In order to make the most of our Zendesk environment, we need to integrate Zendesk into our existing systems and extend its capabilities when needed.

Luckily for us, Zendesk allows us to do both of those things.

In this chapter, we will discover Zendesk's extending capabilities by looking at two of the most common integrations – JIRA and Salesforce. Before going into details, we will cover a few more Zendesk basics, including Zendesk apps.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• The Zendesk apps

• Commonly used Zendesk apps from the Marketplace

• Using custom apps to extend Zendesk's capabilities

• Integrating JIRA

• Integrating Salesforce

Zendesk apps

Zendesk apps are a great way to add functionality to our environment. While we can choose from a range of different apps from Zendesk's own marketplace, most companies will choose to create their own custom apps to enable their agents.

In order to gain a better understanding of what Zendesk apps are capable of and how they can be utilized, let's look at a few commonly used apps developed by Zendesk. The best place to find those apps is the Zendesk Marketplace.

Zendesk Marketplace

In order to navigate to the Marketplace, follow these steps:

1. Click on the Admin icon (gear symbol) located in Zendesk's sidebar.

2. Click on Marketplace located under APPS within the admin menu:

Zendesk will open the following web link in your browser: https://www.zendesk.com/apps/

Once the page has loaded, we can either use the search bar (if we have an app or keyword in mind) or start by clicking through the categories located at the bottom of the page:

Not all categories are visible here. We can scroll...

JIRA integration

Integrating JIRA is not as simple as installing an app from the Marketplace. In order to understand the whole process, you should have some experience with JIRA or (and this is how I prefer to do it) work together with someone in charge of the JIRA setup.

Integration preparations

Before we can start, we need to make sure that a few conditions are met:

• You must have admin rights in both Zendesk and JIRA

• The JIRA account is both in the jira-administrators and the jira-software-users group

• The reporter field has to be present on the Create Issue screen

• Third-party cookies are enabled in your browser

• Atlassian add-ons need the permission to access JIRA projects

The first condition is a no-brainer. Without having the admin permissions, we simply cannot make the necessary changes for this to work. It might be noteworthy though that it is recommended that you use an actual administrative Zendesk account rather than using just any agent with admin permissions.

Why?

When escalating a JIRA...

Salesforce integration

If ExampleComp were using Salesforce, its integration surely would come with a lot of advantages.

Being able to view Salesforce data in Zendesk allows agents to make more informed decisions, but there is a lot more to it. Here are some of the other features:

• Sales reps can see Zendesk tickets in Salesforce

• Sales reps can send Zendesk tickets to Salesforce

• Sync organizations from Salesforce to Zendesk

• Sync users from Salesforce to Zendesk

Integration requirements

There are a few requirements that have to be met before we can go ahead with the integration:

• You must be at least on the Zendesk Team plan

• Your Salesforce organization must be at least on the Group edition

• If you are using Zendesk's host mapping, you will have to set up hosted SSL also

• You will need Salesforce and Zendesk admin access

Installing the integration

First, we will have to install the Zendesk for Salesforce package. Here is the direct link to the package in question:

https://login.salesforce.com/packaging/installPackage...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about Zendesk's integration and extension capabilities, the Marketplace, how to utilize its apps, and how to create a custom app using the ZAT. We also tackled two of the most complex integrations–JIRA and Salesforce.

In the next chapter, you will learn about advanced reporting options utilizing GoodData as well as Zendesk's new tool called bime.