Zendesk

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Introduction

Zendesk is a cloud-based customer service platform designed to help businesses manage customer interactions across various products and services. Its core feature is a ticketing system that organizes customer inquiries from multiple channels.

Within the Robility® platform, Zendesk enables the creation of automated workflows to streamline repetitive tasks, prioritize and manage tickets, and ensure timely responses. It simplifies ticket management and customer interaction using standardized and highly secure authentication methods.

Pre-requisites

Before using Zendesk with the Robility platform, users must first enable outbound connections with the Zendesk platform to create and retrieve the API required for authentication. Depending on the authentication type you select, you will need one of the following credentials:

Basic Authentication: Requires sending a username and password along with the Token URL with each API request. These credentials are encoded in Base64.
OAuth Password: Requires sending the Client ID, client secret, username, password, scope, and token URL with every API request.

Scope: The scope should be set to “Read and write.” These permissions must be enabled when creating and configuring Zendesk for automation through the API. This ensures that users can read and update tickets.

Zendesk access tokens can expire, depending on how they are configured. When using OAuth tokens for authentication with Zendesk’s API, the access token typically has a short lifespan (usually about an hour or more, similar to other OAuth 2.0 tokens). Users need to manually handle the token expiration. But if you use Zendesk’s API token authentication (instead of OAuth), the API token does not expire until it is revoked.

For more detailed information, click here to check out the documentation.

Connecting with Zendesk

Acquire Credentials: Ensure that you have obtained the necessary credentials required for connecting with Zendesk. This may include the Client ID, client secret, username, password, scope, and token URL, depending on the authentication method you are using (OAuth is recommended).

Integration: Integrate Zendesk within the Robility platform. The automation workflow development can only proceed once Zendesk is successfully integrated.

1. Navigate to your tenant and choose the desired project.
2. Click on the “App Integrations”.
3. Search and navigate to “Zendesk” from the list of pre-built connections available.
4. Click on it and choose the authentication type.
5. Enter the required credentials and click on “Connect”.
6. Once your credentials have been provided, the list will be added in the “Connections”.

Now, you will be able to automate the activities.

How to view the output?

Each Zendesk activity generates a specific datatype, often containing data like ticket details, comments, or user information. To ensure we can access this data, we need to properly view and retrieve its parameter. To view the output from Zendesk activities, follow these steps:

1. In your workflow, drag and drop the Write Log activity from the Activities panel.
2. In the Write Log activity’s “Input” property, enter the variable name that holds the activity’s output. For example, if the output is stored in a variable named “TicketDetails”, you would enter TicketDetails.
3. Press “CTRL + Spacebar ” to open the IntelliSense menu, which displays a list of available parameters and properties for the specified variable.
4. Choose the desired parameter from the list to include it in your output. For instance, to view the ticket ID, you might select ticketDetails.TicketID.
5. Execute your workflow. The specified parameters will be printed to the Output panel, allowing you to verify the details of the created ticket.

Zendesk

Introduction

Pre-requisites

Connecting with Zendesk

How to view the output?

Zendesk

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