Zendesk
Made for support organizations who want to provide elevated, personalized care for customers in Slack.
Channeled's integration allows Customer Success teams to take care of customers in Slack while routing support tickets bi-directionally to a centralized helpdesk in Zendesk. Customers get a Slack-native experience without bots, and your team gets a unified operating system in Zendesk that helps them stay on track.
Enabling the integration
Connect your Zendesk Account
Use /channeled-integrations to see the integrations available in Channeled and select Zendesk.
Customize your sync settings
- Select Customize sync settings to tailor which messages from Slack are created as Zendesk tickets.
- Select Enable sync with specific Ticket fields to choose custom fields from Zendesk to be updated from Slack.
Syncing messages from Slack to Zendesk
- Tickets are created in Zendesk from customer Slack messages.
- You can customize how and when support tickets are created – either automatically for every message, or based on custom criteria (e.g, "only for customers post-onboarding!" or "only for messages marked as Escalated").
- Replies from Zendesk are synced natively back to Slack, along with internal comments for your own team. To customers, this feels like a native reply to them right in Slack.
- Tags, statuses, and owners sync from Zendesk to Slack (and vice-versa.) Your team in Slack can tag and collaborate with customers alongside your support team working from Zendesk.
Frequently asked questions
How is Channeled's integration different from Zendesk's native Slack app?
Zendesk's native Slack app allows teams to create tickets from Slack messages manually via a Slack message shortcut. Once the ticket is created, support agents can mark it solve it in Zendesk.
The Zendesk native Slack app's has a few differences from Channeled's integration, the primary difference being:
- In the Zendesk native Slack app, support agents actually can't communicate back to Slack from Zendesk; the only thing they can do in Zendesk is track the ticket.
- This can create more work for the support agent to hop back and forth into Slack to respond specifically to customers channels in Slack.
You may be a good fit for Zendesk's native Slack app if:
- Customer messages aren't actually coming from Slack channels; perhaps you have internal team members in Slack asking support questions on behalf of customers
- Customer support messages from Slack are highly infrequent and it is easy for support agents to hop back into Slack to update individual customer threads
You may be a good fit for Channeled's Zendesk integration if:
- Customer messages from Slack have consistent frequency and a certain mix of these are consistently more support-related
These notes on Zendesk's native Slack app were written in September 2022, send us a note if we should update them with newer information!
What if we don't want to sync all threads from customer Slack channels to Zendesk?
You can easily customize settings in Channeled to limit syncing only to customer messages in certain statuses, customers in certain stages, or customers in certain groups.
How are users and organizations in Zendesk handled via the integration?
When customers create Slack messages that are synced as tickets via the integration, we use existing emails and domains associated with their Slack users to sync with existing Zendesk Users and Organizations.
- If there are no existing Users in your Zendesk instance that map to the customer in Slack, we will create a new User. We'll associate this with an existing Organization if we can find a matching Organization domain.
- If there are no existing Organizations in Zendesk that map to the customer's Slack organization, we will create a new Organization.
How do merged tickets from Zendesk appear in Channeled?
When tickets are merged in Zendesk, agents can specifically opt into how the merged activity shows up. Simply de-select the option in Zendesk for Requester and CCs can see this comment, and the action of merging multiple Slack messages into one ticket will be hidden from end customers.
How does the integration handle custom fields we populate in Zendesk?
Yes! Channeled allows you to sync and integrate custom fields from Zendesk so that you can update these custom fields directly from Slack.
