Every day, customer service teams around the world rely upon Zendesk to quickly view and respond to customer questions and issues. It’s a mission critical platform used by over a hundred thousand businesses and a key tool to enable teams to provide great customer service. Zendesk also serves as a valuable store of customer service data, providing insight into common questions and issues.
However, often times Zendesk alone is not enough to resolve customer issues. A service rep may need to look up a piece of customer data, or change some information, like a shipping address or payment method. Or they may need to perform an action like canceling an order, refunding an item, or resetting a password. In all of these situations, customer reps rely on internal tools to perform these customer service actions, while using Zendesk to communicate with a customer.
In a previous blog post, we talked about how you can elevate your customer service experience by spinning up no-code internal tools. Internal enables you to create internal tools to perform customer service actions without the engineering effort usually required to develop in-house tools. With Internal and Zendesk, customer service teams have everything they need to quickly resolve customer issues without being dependent on engineering.
But what if we could make things even better by bringing in customer service data from Zendesk into Internal, where reps perform customer service actions? Reducing context switching would make customer service teams more efficient, in turn driving faster resolution of issues and ultimately happier customers.
Seamlessly weave Zendesk data into Internal
Internal’s Zendesk integration puts your customer service data together with the internal tools needed to resolve issues. With a few simple clicks, you can pull in your Zendesk data and display it alongside data from your other databases, and then create custom tools on top of that data. Your reps will be able to view all the data they need in a single place, allowing for a richer customer context as they resolve customer issues. A customer profile could be embedded with their most recent Zendesk service interactions, while also displaying their order history for cross-referencing.
It’s not just your customer service team that benefits. Engineering, product management, and operations are all often called upon to help diagnose customer issues and provide fixes. Internal provides a single place for those teams to view Zendesk data alongside data from your databases, making it easier to get a complete view of the issue and simplifying troubleshooting. Internal can also save those teams time on developing diagnostic tools or fixes, as a basic CRUD tool can be easily enabled for any connected data source.
Plus, product and engineering teams usually spend time analyzing customer support cases to identify new features. Integrating Internal with Zendesk makes it easier to connect the dots between your customer service data and data from your other databases, helping to spur the insights needed to brainstorm new and impactful features.
The easiest Zendesk integration ever
This is probably the easiest Zendesk integration you’ve ever tried. Simply enter in your Zendesk domain, your email address used to login to Zendesk and paste in an API token associated with that email. Then give your Zendesk instance a name for use in Internal and you’re ready to go.
Once you’ve connected to Zendesk, you can enrich any internal tool with Zendesk data, simply by going to a record and clicking on the “add relationship” button.
Let’s look at a quick example. Here’s a record detail for James Houston. The data is currently coming from a PostgreSQL database.
We’ll click on the gear icon and then create a relationship between Zendesk and the customer record in the PostgreSQL database by selecting a common attribute field that is shared between the datasets, such as email address.
Once the relationship has been established, select any fields from Zendesk that you want to embed in this PostgreSQL customer record and you’re done.
This particular example showcases a customer record view that combines data from Zendesk (Zendesk Tickets) with data from a database (Basic Info and Orders). It’s incredibly powerful to be able to see previous service interactions at a glance when engaging with a customer. Reps can click into a Zendesk ticket to get more details about each record and even open the specific ticket in Zendesk if needed.
Using Zendesk data in a Space
Another way to utilize your Zendesk data is to incorporate it into a Space. In the example above, we’ve created a Space for a Customer Lookup tool that pulls in Ticket data from Zendesk (top left), Customer data from a database (top right), and Orders information from a database (bottom left).
A customer service rep can click on a ticket in the Zendesk tickets table and this will automatically filter the Customers table to find the customer that made that request in Zendesk. If you then select a particular row in the Customers table, the Orders table automatically filters to only show records related to that customer. A customer rep can select an order in the Orders table and use the form in the bottom right to change the quantity and subscription plan for that order. By connecting Zendesk data with your database data, you’re able to quickly go from a Zendesk ticket to the relevant order and make the needed updates in just a few seconds.
This tool took 6 minutes to create — with zero code or SQL written. If you’d like to see how, come talk to us. Or simply sign up for our 14-day free trial and try it for yourself.
