Who Zendesk is
Zendesk is a customer service software company founded in Copenhagen in 2007 and headquartered in San Francisco. Its products cover ticketing, messaging and live chat, help centres, voice and AI agents, for teams from startups to large enterprises.
Its APIs, webhooks and apps let other systems read and update tickets and users. That openness is why it is one of the support desks our admin backoffice connects to.
What it does in your platform
Admin backoffice
Links every support ticket to the customer it is about. An agent goes from a Zendesk ticket to the customer's full view in the backoffice: accounts, cards, trades and cases on one screen, with every action logged.
How the connection works
The backoffice talks to Zendesk's REST API, and Zendesk reports ticket changes through signed webhooks. The API credentials and the signing secret stay in the platform's secrets.
Customers become users
Each platform customer is matched to a Zendesk user that carries the customer's ID as its external ID.
A ticket is opened
The customer writes in by email, chat or your help centre, and Zendesk files the ticket under that user.
Zendesk tells the platform
A webhook reports the new ticket, signed with HMAC-SHA256 over its timestamp and body, and the platform checks the signature before accepting it.
The ticket meets the customer
In the backoffice, the ticket sits on the customer's record, next to their accounts, cards, trades and cases.
The agent acts
Any change the agent makes for the customer follows their role's permissions, with a second person's approval for sensitive actions.
Everything is logged
Each action is recorded in the backoffice's audit log with who did it, when and from where.
Next to other providers
Zendesk is one of the support desks the backoffice connects to, next to Intercom and Freshdesk, and the link between tickets and customers works the same way whichever you use. Staff sign in to the backoffice itself with your company's single sign-on.
Conversations live in Zendesk; the backoffice holds the link between each ticket and the customer. Moving to another support desk later changes the connector, not the way your agents work in the backoffice.
When Zendesk fits best
A strong fit when
- Your support team already works in Zendesk and you want it to see the whole customer.
- You handle support across email, chat and a help centre and want one ticket queue.
- You want support tickets and backoffice actions to tell one story when a complaint is reviewed.
Also worth a look
- Intercom, when chat and an AI agent lead your support.
- Freshdesk, another helpdesk built around tickets and automation rules.
How we get you live
The contract
We help you get your Zendesk account and contract in place, or connect the Zendesk your team already uses.
The mapping
We set up with you how customers map to Zendesk users, which ticket events reach the backoffice, and which roles can see them.
The keys
The API credentials and the webhook signing secret go into your platform's secrets and nowhere else, so every update is proven to come from Zendesk.
A full test run
The whole loop, from a new ticket to the agent's action in the backoffice, runs against a test Zendesk instance before your agents switch over.
