External ID support for note-creating users

Productboard is designed to help you understand your customers and build for their needs. To help you achieve this, we are introducing new ways of connecting Productboard to sources of customer data.

We have now launched user external ID support for Intercom, Zendesk, and our public API. This means that users (individuals associated with notes) will be identifiable without an email address.

In this article:

• What is External ID, and why would I want to use it?
• How to add External IDs to Productboard

What is External ID, and why would I want to use it?

External IDs, often called User IDs, are unique user identifiers that won't change. You may wish to send these to Productboard instead of, or in combination with an email address.

• One reason to do this is that while the user's email address is subject to change in most apps, you can control the unique identifier that is sent to us, therefore maintaining a consistent user record in Productboard even if the user changes their email address.
• Additionally, you can use external IDs if you are very concerned with user privacy and do not want to send an email address to Productboard.
• You may not store email addresses in all of your tools. Therefore, bringing External IDs to Productboard will enable you to use other integrations that bring in customer data (e.g. ingesting Amplitude cohorts).

This External ID will likely be consistent across your applications. For example, a user would be identified by the same external ID in your database, CDP (e.g. Segment.io), support tool (e.g. Zendesk), and product analytics platform (e.g. Amplitude).

How to add External IDs to Productboard

If you use our native Zendesk or Intercom integrations, bringing in External IDs takes less than 2-minutes to set up.

To add External IDs from Zendesk or Intercom:

• In Productboard, in the top left, click on your workspace name and select Integrations ().
• Click on your chosen integration (Zendesk or Intercom).
• Check the box next to Import External ID.
• Click Save integration.

To add External IDs using Notes API:

If you are using our Notes API, we have added two new attributes to the existing endpoint. The first new attribute is External ID, the second is Company. If you only import external IDs (and not emails), you will need to manually import the company name.