Zendesk Destination

Destination Info

• Accepts Group, Identify, and Track calls
• Refer to it as Zendesk in the Integrations object

Components

• Server

Connection Modes

Device-mode	Cloud-mode
Web	Web
Mobile	Mobile
Server	Server

Zendesk is a premier, cloud-based customer service application. It was designed with one purpose in mind: to improve communication between a company and its customers. Their products allow businesses to be more reliable, flexible, and scalable. They help improve communication and make sense of massive amounts of data. Above all, they work together to build the best experience for your customers.

Getting Started

1. From the Segment web app, click Catalog.
2. Search for “Zendesk” in the Catalog, select it, and choose which of your sources to connect the destination to.
3. Enter your Zendesk domain (not including .zendesk.com) and click Connect. The Zendesk OAuth login opens in a new tab. Sign in with your Zendesk credentials to authenticate and allow the Segment integration.

Identify

If you’re not familiar with the Segment Specs, take a look to understand what the Identify method does. An example call would look like:

analytics.identify("97980cfea0067", {
  name: "Peter Gibbons",
  email: "peter@example.com",
  plan: "premium",
  logins: 5
});

When you call identify, Segment inserts or updates a user record in Zendesk and uses the user email in traits.email to match user records in Zendesk. If there are multiple users matching the email, then no updates are submitted. Note that you must provide a trait for either name or first_name and last_name in order for the identify call to send to Zendesk. If you provide a name, Segment parses this into the first_name and last_name fields. If you provide name, but are missing the last_name field, this will still send successfully to Zendesk.

Here’s an example:

{
  "action": "identify",
  "userId": "12345",
  "traits": {
    "name": "Pikachu",
    "email": "pikachu@pakemon.com",
    "timezone": "America/Los_Angeles",
    "organizationId": 6789,
    "phone": "763-555-2342"
  }
}

By default, Users in Zendesk have many standard attributes associated with a single User record. Segment, at this time, is mapping to a subset of these. If you attempt to send data to a Zendesk attribute that are not yet mapped, it will create a custom field for this (it will not update the existing attribute).

Here are the Zendesk User Attributes Segment maps to and their syntax.

Note on Name: If name is provided, Segment will parse firstName and lastName from this, or you can send firstName and lastNameseparately and they will be concatenated to name.

Removing Users from a Zendesk Organization Membership on Segment Identify

To remove a user from an organization, navigate to your Zendesk destination settings and click Enable Removing Users from Organizations . When this setting is enabled, Segment detects when you pass an identify events with traits.company.id where traits.company.remove: true, and then sends a request to the Zendesk API to remove the user from the organization. If you enable the setting in your Zendesk destination settings but do not pass the correct trait values, Segment defaults to the standard identify behavior, which creates or updates a user.

Here’s an example:

{
  "action": "identify",
  "userId": "12345",
  "traits": {
    "name": "Pikachu",
    "email": "pikachu@pokemon.com",
    "timezone": "America/Los_Angeles",
    "organizationId": 6789,
    "phone": "763-555-2342",
    "company": {
      "id": "6789",
      "remove": true
    }
  }
}

Zendesk Verification Email at User Creation

To limit identified users from receiving a verification email from Zendesk, simply enable the “Create Users as Verified” option in the Zendesk destination settings. Segment sends verified as either true or false for each request based on this setting (you cannot overwrite this on a per-request basis).

Zendesk Custom User Fields

You may map to custom user fields within Zendesk by passing your custom field key-value pair as a trait in the Identify call. When passing traits within the identify event, Segment will first try and map the trait to a known, existing field in Zendesk - either the canned standard fields described above or to a custom field (user_fields). Segment formats the field name from either camelCaseFormat or snake_case_format into snake_case_format. If you’re finding that your custom fields are not populating in Zendesk as you would expect check the name formatting with this in mind.

Track

If you’re not familiar with the Segment Specs, take a look to understand what the Track method does. An example call would look like:

analytics.track('Article Completed', {
  title: 'How to Create a Tracking Plan',
  course: 'Intro to Analytics',
});

When you make a Track call, Segment sends data about the user’s activity to Zendesk.

Segment only sends track events when the following two conditions are met:

1. The call is listed in the Events setting.
2. A userId is included.
   • Note: If the userId doesn’t match any existing users in Zendesk, the destination returns an error.

Mapping Users to an Email: To map a Segment track event to a Zendesk Sunshine event by email, add the user’s email address in the Track call as properties.email. This allows Zendesk to tie the event to the user. If there is no properties.email, Segment sends the userId as external_id. If the email is provided in the track call, a JavaScript call may look like the example below.

analytics.track('Article Completed', {
  title: 'How to Create a Tracking Plan',
  course: 'Intro to Analytics',
  properties: {
    email : 'user@example.com',
  }
});

Group

If you’re not familiar with the Segment Specs, take a look to understand what the Group method does. An example call would look like:

analytics.group("0e8c78ea9d97a7b8185e8632", {
  name: "Initech",
  industry: "Technology",
  employees: 329,
  plan: "enterprise",
  "total billed": 830
});

When you call group Segment inserts or update an organization in Zendesk and uses the groupId you include in the call to match organization records in Zendesk. If there are multiple organizations matching the name, then no updates are submitted.

Here’s an example:

{
  "action": "group",
  "groupId": "908172409",
  "userId": "6789",
  "traits": {
    "name": "LA Lakers",
    "url": "https://lakers.com",
    "deleted": false
  }
}

Every time you call group, Segment links the organization to the user making the request.

By default, Organizations in Zendesk have many standard attributes associated with a single Organization record. Segment, at this time, is mapping to a subset of these. If you attempt to send data to a Zendesk attribute that are not yet mapped, it will create a custom field for this (it will not update the existing attribute).

Here are the Zendesk Organization Attributes Segment maps to and their syntax.

Zendesk Custom Organization Fields

You may map to custom organization fields within Zendesk by passing your custom field key-value pair as a trait in the Group call. When passing traits within the group event, Segment will first try and map the trait to a known, existing field in Zendesk - either the canned standard fields described above or to a custom field (organization_fields). Segment formats the field name from either camelCaseFormat or snake_case_format into snake_case_format. If you’re finding that your custom fields are not populating in Zendesk as you would expect check the name formatting with this in mind.

Engage

You can send computed traits and audiences generated using Engage to this destination as a user property. To learn more about Engage, schedule a demo.

For user-property destinations, an identify call is sent to the destination for each user being added and removed. The property name is the snake_cased version of the audience name, with a true/false value to indicate membership. For example, when a user first completes an order in the last 30 days, Engage sends an Identify call with the property order_completed_last_30days: true. When the user no longer satisfies this condition (for example, it’s been more than 30 days since their last order), Engage sets that value to false.

When you first create an audience, Engage sends an Identify call for every user in that audience. Later audience syncs only send updates for users whose membership has changed since the last sync.

Settings

Segment lets you change these destination settings from the Segment app without having to touch any code.