Our Agillic Zendesk Integration allows you to easily connect your Customer Support Representatives to data accessible in Agillic as well as activate Agillic communication flows towards a customer directly from Zendesk UI. The integration makes it possible to view the customer's Person Data from Agillic, view their communication history for the last 3 months, create the customer as recipient in Agillic and even set up and use event triggers to trigger certain flows or actions: all from a Zendesk Support™ Ticket.
Agillic Zendesk Integration Demo
This article will cover the basic principles needed to be familiar with in order to understand, install, and utilise the Agillic Zendesk Integration.
In this article, you'll find information about:
- The four views available in the Agillic Zendesk App
- Necessary configurations before setup
- Step-by-step guidance to install the Agillic Zendesk App
- Potential errors, their meanings, and resolution
Feedback to the integration
Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any feedback on the Agillic Zendesk Integration, or what other software tools you’d like to see in the Agillic Marketplace! Send your thoughts to product.feedback@agillic.com.
The four views available in the Agillic Zendesk App
The Agillic Zendesk Integration allows you to easily connect your Customer Support Representatives to data accessible in Agillic with access to four additional views:
- The Recipient View
- The Event Trigger View
- The Communication History View
- The Recipient Creation View
The Recipient View
The Recipient View displays the configured Person Data fields for the customer. Person Data fields are allowing you to store Person Data for your customers. Person Data is data specific to each customer such as their first name, email address, date of birth, or favourite product. Person Data is only ever a single value. You can read more about data types in Agillic here.
Use Cases of the Recipient View
Within the recipient view your Customer Support Representatives will be able to see Person Data fields of your choice. This could be information as first- and last name, email, permission fields, and any other relevant information for support within your organisation. Within the input field, Person Data Field List it’s possible to add comma-separated Person Data fields of your choice. It’s possible to add as many fields as you want. Best practise would be to only add important fields to the view that provides your Customer Support Representative with relevant information. The process of adding Person Data fields to the recipient view is further described in the step guide below. If the recipient doesn't have any value within the given field, it will be displayed in the view as a single hyphen character.
The Recipient View in the Agillic Zendesk App
The Event Trigger View
The Event Trigger View provides an interface where up to 3 separate Agillic Events can be triggered, along with a description field for each, so your Customer Support Representative knows specifically what the event will trigger.
Events in Agillic allow you to trigger specific actions. These actions can be to either update Data fields or to execute flows, via side-effects. With Side-effects, you can set up actions which occur automatically when an event is activated.
Use Cases of the Event Trigger View
The primary use case of a side-effect on events is to execute a Flow, which is referred to as a triggered flow. The individual customer this event is triggered for directly from the Zendesk UI will go through a flow. Be aware that events can be configured to have a reset, depending on if you want the event to be triggered after one or multiple triggers, or reset after certain time or increment conditions are met.
An example of flows triggered could be double opt-in or opt-out communication flows. A double opt-in flow is where customers must confirm that their information is correct before completing the sign-up process. It’s commonly used for verifying the email address of the customer. Through the opt-in flow marketing permission fields for the individual customer are updated. It will be possible for your Customer Support Representatives to trigger both double-opt-in/out marketing permission flows directly from Zendesk. This can also be used to resend the verification email if customers claim not to have received it.
As an additional use case supported by triggered flows, you can enable customer representatives to trigger any desired type of communication: any information relevant for the customer or campaign emails in order to upsell specific products. Examples based on different industries could be:
- For businesses in retail it could be relevant to send an email including the top 10 selling products at the moment.
- For businesses in the finance sector it could be possible for the Customer Support Representatives to send the customer a mail regarding setting up a meeting with a financial advisor.
- For NGO’s it could be relevant to send information regarding relevant happenings or world news.
- For businesses in the travel industry the event trigger could be used to send the customer an email regarding travel restrictions or any additional information to the customer's trip.
- For subscription based businesses it could be relevant to directly from the Zendesk UI send the customer an invitation to download the product app.
Have in mind that all these examples would be an outcome of the conversation between your Customer Support Representative and the customer.
Should it be relevant to stop all communication to the customer for a given period of time, it’s possible to create an event trigger that does exactly that. The use case could be that your Customer Support Representative considers it relevant to stop all communication towards the customer while resolving a complicated issue. It would be a manual evaluation and process for the Customer Support Representative. It’s possible to set up a side effect to the event trigger that sets a Data field to a given date X days in the future. The Data field set will include the customer within a Target Group set up to contain all customers whose communication is not paused. This Target Group would then need to be applied to send out Target Groups in order to exclude paused customers from execution of flows. You can simplify this process by adding it to your Valid Recipients Target group, or a similar target group used as a base permission, such as what is used in Brands settings.
The Event Trigger View in the Agillic Zendesk App
The Communication History View
The Communication History View displays the past 3 months communication history for the customer. The details will include the channel type, communication name, time sent and any further activity on the client’s side such as whether email has been opened or not, clicked on or whether there has been a hard bounce. It will hereby be possible for the Customer Support Representative to see what exact communication the customer has received and if the customer has opened, read or clicked the communication.
Communication types shown within the view:
The Communication History View in the Agillic Zendesk App: Communication type Print
Communication activities shown within the view (and are only applied to selected communication types):
- Not Opened
- Opened
- Clicked
- Hard Bounced
- Blank (No activity in the channel type)
The Communication History View in the Agillic Zendesk App: Communication activity Clicked
The Recipient Creation View
The Recipient Creation View will only be visible if the customer isn't created as a recipient within your Agillic database yet. The view allows you to create a recipient in Agillic directly from Zendesk UI by clicking "Create recipient and send double opt-in". With the customer's consent, a recipient is created in your Agillic database based on the customer's email stated in Zendesk. There must be a double opt-in flow included in an event, in order to collect the necessary permissions from the customer.
The Recipient Creation View in the Agillic Zendesk App: Creating a new recipient in Agillic and sending the recipient through a double opt-in flow
Necessary configurations before setup
In order to implement and use the Agillic Zendesk Integration, your organisation must have:
An Agillic instance, with
- Access to create Agillic API Credentials.
- Access to the Agillic Data module.
- Access to the Agillic Flows module.
- An email field which is unique.
A Zendesk instance, with
- Permissions to install Marketplace applications.
- Permission to configure Zendesk Marketplace Applications.
It is recommended that an Agillic user cooperates with a Zendesk user to plan and install the App. This is to ensure the proper use cases, with the proper configurations are applied, so utilisation of the App can provide the most value.
Step-by-step guidance to install the Agillic Zendesk App
- Within Zendesk go to “Admin” and "Marketplace".
- Install the Agillic application.
- When the application is installed, go to “Manage” and click on the Agillic application in order to configure the settings:
- Provide a relevant title for the application.
- Fill in the “Base64 Encoded Token” field by following the instructions:
- Get the API key and secret from Agillic API Settings for Production, and generate a Base64 Encoded value using your preferred method:
- Use the Developers portal API Documentation to generate a Basic authorization:
- Fill in Username and Password from your Agillic API Settings collected in previous step. Press “Authorize”.
- When the Basic authorization has been authorized you press “Try it out” at the Recipients API beneath.
- Scroll down and press “Execute” on an API call.
- Within Responses you will now see the Authorization.
- Copy the Authorization header, do not include “Basic”. Paste the Authorization code within the “Base64 Encoded Token” field in the Application settings.
- Encode the value locally or use a preferred secure method.
- Use the Developers portal API Documentation to generate a Basic authorization:
- Get the API key and secret from Agillic API Settings for Production, and generate a Base64 Encoded value using your preferred method:
- Select “Enable Recipient Data View”, “Enable Event Trigger View”, “Enable Communication History View”, "Enable Recipient Creation View" depending on what views you want the application to show.
- Within “Email Person Data Field” you type in what unique Person Data field is used for Email in your Agillic instance. You can find this information on your instance within Settings -> System Settings -> Person Data.
Note: In order for the application to collect information about the customer from Agillic the Zendesk case must have an email field. The designated Agillic email field must be unique, as it is used to identify the recipient. - Within “Person Data Field List” you define what specific Person Data fields you want to display in the Recipient View. The list of Person Data fields needs to be comma separated.
- Within "Double Opt-in Event for Creation" you define the event for the double opt-in flow when creating the customer as recipient.
- When inserting an event, you firstly have to input the event name you want triggered on the first event button.
Note: Event triggers should be configured and fully tested within Agillic before they are added to the event trigger view in the application. - Hereafter you can add a description to further describe what the event does, i.e. send an email to gather permission. It is important that the description is clear and accessible to Service Representatives to ensure they use it as intended.
- Steps 6) and 7) can be repeated on the second and third set of event fields, if 3 events are desired.
- Ensure the correct role and group permissions for the application are set. Within this article you can get an overview of the different Zendesk Support user roles.
- Ensure your Customer Support team understands how to use this view within Zendesk and what information can be withdrawn from the views and what action can be taken.
Click "Change settings" in order to configure the settings for the Agillic Zendesk App
Installation of the Agillic Zendesk App - Title, Base64 Encoded Token, the four views and Person Data
Installation of the Agillic Zendesk App - Events
Potential errors, their meanings, and resolution
When using the integration in Zendesk different error messages may occur. Below you can read more about their meaning and how to resolve them.
Recipient Errors
If the customer's email is not registered in Agillic, an error message with “Recipient not found” will occur. No action is needed, but it will not be possible to view information regarding this recipient as the email field is used to identify the recipient.
Recipient Error: Recipient not found
Trigger Errors
When triggering an event an error message with Error Response Code: 404 might occur. This error message will mean that the event isn’t valid on the Agillic instance. When seeing this error message you need to forward this error message to your administrator for them to resolve the issue, by correcting the Agillic event name to the intended value.
Event Trigger Error: The event “dwelcome_event” is not valid in this Agillic instance.
Authentication Errors
Errors with an Error Response Code: 400 will mean that the email field isn't set as unique within your Agillic instance. In order to implement and use the Agillic Zendesk Integration you must have an email field which is unique. When seeing this Error Message you will need to forward this to your administrator for them to resolve the issue, by setting the email field as uniqued.
Authentication Error: Error Response Code: 400
Errors with an Error Response Code: 403 will mean that the Base64 encoded token is invalid. When seeing this Error Message you will need to forward this to your administrator for them to resolve the issue, by updating the “Base64 Encoded Token” configuration field with a valid value.
Authentication Error: Error Response Code: 403
Recipient Creation Errors
Errors with an Error Response Code: Configuration Error and Error Response Body: Event required to create recipient will mean that there isn't any event configured for the recipient creation. When Seeing this Errors Messages you will need to forward this to your administrator for them to resolve the issue, by setting up an event and necessary flow.
If you experience other errors than the ones mentioned above, please don’t hesitate to contact Agillic Support who can assist you in resolving this issue. Include details as steps to reproduce the error, screenshots of the error, and the time it occurred if possible.