Integrate with Zendesk

Support tickets in Zendesk contain a wealth of information you can use to prioritize the right features and build them in the right way:

• Questions & confusion during onboarding
• Pain points in today's product
• Un-met user needs
• Feature requests

With Productboard's newly enhanced Zendesk integration, your support agents can easily share relevant feedback with the product team by pushing select tickets straight to the Insights board.

Having these user insights on hand helps product managers during prioritization. It also serves as invaluable context for designers and developers, helping them build the right features in the right way.

Note: The Zendesk integration is available for all Zendesk plans except for Support Essential which does not include access to public apps & integrations.

In this article:

• Integration benefits
• Supported ticket attributes
• Setting up the integration
• Custom trigger conditions
• Excluding tags from the support tickets import

Integration benefits

• Trigger tickets to be pushed to Productboard by tag or custom triggers, or automatically push all tickets to Productboard.
• When a ticket is pushed into Productboard, any subsequent replies to the ticket will automatically be reflected in Productboard. If the associated Productboard note has been processed, it will automatically be sent back to Unprocessed.

Supported ticket attributes

Bring in these attributes as note fields:

• Ticket URL
• Ticket Title
• Requester name (user name)
• Requester email (user email)
• Requester organization name (company name)
• Tags (note tags)
• User who added the tag (Productboard note owner)

Setting up the integration

Note: This integration can be authorized from within Productboard itself.

To set up the integration, you’ll need to have an admin role in both Productboard and Zendesk.

1. In Productboard, under Integrations, add a new Zendesk integration.
2. Input the URL for your Zendesk workspace.
3. Authorize the integration with your Zendesk credentials.
4. Choose how you would like to pull conversations to Productboard:
   • • Pull all new tickets
     • Pull only new tickets with a certain tag
     • Pull all new tickets but move those with a certain tag to the Inbox
     • Custom trigger conditions (advanced)

Note: If you’re using IP restrictions for your Zendesk workspace, whitelist the following static IP addresses in Zendesk to have a smoother experience:

• 100.25.97.81
• 35.174.223.66
• 52.6.23.216

There is more about Zendesk IP restrictions in this Zendesk support article.

Custom trigger conditions

Looking to further automate the process of sending certain tickets to Productboard? Set up custom trigger conditions in Zendesk (e.g. push tickets containing a designated keyword).

To set up custom triggers in Zendesk, in Productboard:

1. Toggle the Settings option: Custom trigger condition.
2. Save and Authorize the integration.

In Zendesk:

1. Go to the Admin Center > Business rules > Triggers.
2. You'll see a trigger named Productboard - trigger, which is created by the integration.
   

   Tip: Make a copy of the Productboard-trigger, before making any changes to it. The duplicated trigger can remain deactivated and re-activated in the situation where the active trigger has to be deleted and removing the old integration is out of the question.

3. Click the trigger, and under Conditions, replace the placeholder condition with your own custom condition.
   

   

Only those tickets meeting the conditions you define will be pushed to Productboard.

To learn more about what types of trigger conditions Zendesk supports, see the Zendesk article Trigger Conditions and Actions.

Note: Avoid changing any other parameters in Trigger Settings, as this could make your Productboard integration work in unexpected ways. 🤖

Excluding tags from the support tickets import

By default, when feedback from a support ticket is imported, all tags associated with that ticket will import into your Insights board. If you prefer to leave out any additional tags not defined within your integration settings, feel free to follow the steps below:

1. Go to: Zendesk -> Admin Center -> Business Rules -> Triggers
2. Open the trigger with the name 'productboard - trigger,' created by the integration.
3. Modify the JSON body
4. Replace "tags": "{{ticket.tags}}" with "tags": "",

Tip: Don't let the tags clutter up and slow down your workspace! Consider bringing in only those tags that would be useful in Productboard. As a best practice, we recommend setting up a trigger in Zendesk that will remove unnecessary tags from the tickets being pulled into Productboard. This will keep your workspace free of unwanted tags, which can accumulate quickly and slow down your workspace. Triggers are very easy to set up. Should you have any questions, please reach out to your Zendesk admin or support for further help.

See also:

• How can I summarize a Zendesk ticket before creating a note on the Insights board?
• How can I prevent a Zendesk ticket from creating multiple notes on the Insights board?