Salesforce and Zendesk are two leaders in CRM systems. Zendesk is a cloud platform solving mainly used for Support functions. Salesforce is a CRM platform that covers the needs of different business functions in the company.
Sometimes a business needs to have support-related data in Salesforce or vice versa: sales or marketing-related data in Zendesk.
These two giant platforms’ integration is a way to business processes optimization and efficiency.
There are two ways to connect Zendesk and Salesforce: Zendesk Admin Center and easy code-free automated integration with Skyvia.
In this article, we examine both of them, explain their key features, and observe their main advantages and disadvantages.
Table of contents
- Benefits of Zendesk and Salesforce Integration
- Salesforce Zendesk Integration via Zendesk Admin Center
- Integration via Skyvia
- Conclusion
About Zendesk
Zendesk is a world-known CRM system for customer support, sales, and other customer communication services. With Zendesk, businesses can build a solid customer support system using chats, implement a customer portal, form a knowledge base, and use other available features for communicating with clients.
About Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the world’s largest and most popular CRM platforms.
It covers the needs of sales, commerce, marketing, and service business functions. Salesforce offers built-in opportunities for reporting, data visualization, and analytics.
Benefits of Zendesk and Salesforce Integration
Support and sales departments work closely together to ensure effective business operations. Information about customers and data about their requests to the support department should form a clear picture of how to retain existing customers and attract new ones.
Therefore, both departments should see a complete picture of customer-related information, purchases, deals, deal results data, and the speed of resolving clients issues.
Such services as Salesforce on the sales department side and Zendesk on the support side help to manage this information. Integration of these two services creates a holistic picture of the inter teams processes. Zendesk Salesforce integration enriches data in both solutions and enhances business efficiency.
Salesforce Zendesk Integration via Zendesk Admin Center
Let’s look at the integration offered by Zendesk. Use Zendesk Admin Center for integration with Salesforce.
This method requires performing some preparation activities:
- Check your Salesforce security settings.
To do this, go to Salesforce Setup -> Security (SETTINGS block in the left menu). Make sure the Lock sessions to the IP address from which they originated checkbox is not selected. - Create a separate record type in Salesforce for your Zendesk tickets.
It is not required, but useful to distinguish Zendesk ticket records if you have several record types in Salesforce. - Connect Zendesk to Salesforce.
Zendesk offers three types of integration: Ticket View, Data sync, and Support app.
Ticket view enables viewing Zendesk tickets from Salesforce’s Account, Contact, Lead, and Opportunity pages.
To use this method, match the fields, set up sorting and filtering, and view the ticket information in Salesforce tables.
Data Sync offers several scenarios for Zendesk Salesforce and Salesforce integration: syncing Salesforce Accounts to Zendesk Organization, Salesforce Contacts or Leads to Zendesk Users, and Zendesk Tickets to Salesforce.
The integration from Salesforce to Zendesk is quite simple in this case. You select the needed scenario, specify the filters and other integration options, map the fields and save your integration.
The Ticket sync scenario is more complicated than the other two.
You should do the following to use ticket sync:
- Create a new Record Type in Salesforce if needed.
- Install the ticket sync package in Zendesk Admin Center.
- Configure the Zendesk tickets to Salesforce cases sync.
Map the fields set filters, configure and activate Salesforce triggers if needed.
A more detailed manual on Zendesk ticket sync is available in Zendesk documentation.
You can go to Zendesk Marketplace and install the Salesforce app for integration. It allows viewing the information about Salesforce users in Zendesk tickets.
Zendesk Salesforce Native Integration Pros:
- It is a quick and easy way to integrate Zendesk and Salesforce.
- The ticket View scenario allows viewing data on the account, contact, lead, and opportunity pages in Salesforce without performing actions.
- This method supports triggers.
Zendesk Salesforce Native Integration Cons:
- The Zendesk for Salesforce integration is available if you use Salesforce edition: Performance, Unlimited, Enterprise, Developer Edition (or other editions with Salesforce API rights, such as Professional with the API add-on).
- To set up your integration, you must be a Zendesk Support administrator and Salesforce administrator.
- There are only a few scenarios and a limited number of tables you can integrate.
- Only one integration direction is available.
- Ticket view does not allow performing data-related tasks.
Integration via Skyvia
Skyvia offers another Zendesk Salesforce integration method.
Skyvia is a cloud platform that provides solutions for various data-related tasks without coding: data integration, cloud data backup, data management with SQL, CSV import/export, creating OData services, etc.
There are a lot of data integration scenarios available for implementation with Skyvia. You can find more details about Data Integration here.
In this article, we will describe the simple way of integrating Zendesk Tickets data to Salesforce Case table.
Prerequisites
You need to be registered in Skyvia to be able to implement the integration.
Create connections to Zendesk and Salesforce. Follow the links for detailed instructions on creating connections to the data sources.
You can also create the record type in Salesforce to keep the records created by Skyvia separately. More details on record type will follow.
Creating the Import Package
- Sign in with Skyvia, click +NEW and select Import from the Integration block.
- Click Data Source database or cloud app.
- Select your Zendesk connection as a Source and your Salesforce connection as a Target.
- You can optionally enable the other available package options and set Batch Size or select the Locale.
- Don’t forget to rename the package.
Creating the Package Task
1. After you select Source and target, click Add new on the right to open the Task Editor.
2. Select the Simple Task Editor mode. More details about available task editor modes are available here.
3. On the Source definition tab, select the Zendesk Ticket table. You can also add filters or select the related objects for import.
4. On the Target definition tab, select the Salesforce Case Table.
5. Select the action you are about to perform. In our case we select the Insert action.
6. Proceed to the Mapping definition tab to map the source and target fields.
The fields with the same names will be mapped automatically.
You can map the remaining fields manually using available mapping types.
For our case, we will import the tickets relating them to existing contacts in Salesforce. To do this, we will use mapping by lookup and retrieving the contacts from the Contacts table in Salesforce.
In the same way, you can relate the records to Salesforce’s existing account, another case, or others, depending on your scenario.
It is not mandatory to create a separate record type in Salesforce, but if you did it for your Zendesk tickets in Salesforce, you have to map the RecordTypeId value by constant. If you don’t know how to obtain the RecordTypeId value, refer to Salesforce documentation.
Complete the mapping and save the package task.
Running the Package and Observing the Results.
After the package task is saved, click Create the package and proceed to run it. The package will jump to a queue and then will be executed.
When the run is completed, you can see the package results on the Monitor and Log tabs on the package page in Skyvia.
Zendesk Salesforce Integration with Skyvia Pros:
- This method supports more possible integration scenarios than the native one.
- You can choose what objects to integrate and what operation to perform.
- You can perform integration in both directions.
- No specific skills are required.
Zendesk Salesforce Integration with Skyvia Cons:
- Triggers are not supported for now.
- You need some time and resources to set up the initial integration.
- It does not support real-time integration. However, you can set a package schedule to run automatically close to real-time.
Conclusion
Zendesk and Salesforce cover many business tasks for support and sales functions. These two systems integration is a way to optimize and improve both processes.
Zendesk offers several integration scenarios using the native tool. This method is quite simple, but only a few scenarios are available, and only specific tables can be integrated. In case you need triggers, then some coding skills would be helpful.
Skyvia offers several data integration methods. Data integration with Skyvia is flexible because you can implement almost any use case. Skyvia supports tens of data sources and allows performing various data-related tasks against all available tables. No additional software installation is required, and no technical skills are needed.
Do not hesitate and implement your use case, register in Skyvia for free right now.
