5 Ways To Be GDPR Compliant in Zendesk Guide That You Didn't Know (#5 is a beast!)

Recent changes to the EU data protection marks a toll on companies activating within the Union. Zendesk makes it so difficult sometimes to be GDPR and PIPEDA compliant. Reason for this is because Zendesk’s main office is located in San Francisco. The US does not have such pressing data compliance laws as the EU does and it shows. I am sure Zendesk is working on a solution behind the scenes, but I cannot say when that is going to be ready for us to use.

In the meantime..

You want to know where your customers are writing to you from. You’d think that you can use your Zendesk Guide to easily ask unregistered users to tell you where they are from. Well, not so easy it seams.

Unfortunately Zendesk does not allow any changes to the registration form. However, not to worry, there are a few workarounds available(although imperfect) for existing functionality and there’s also a custom solution:

1. Zendesk Guide enabled languages

If you have enabled your languages in your help center, when an unregistered end user has selected a language in the help center, the support request submit form, like the rest of the help center, is set to that language. Then, when the end user submits a support request, the language is identified and their profile is flagged with the language.

You have to have multiple languages enabled in your Guide e.g English, Danish, Swedish etc

You also might want to think about sending the user to the appropriate language in the HC from where they are navigating to it. I.e if they find a link to the HC in your main website on the Danish version of it, they get sent to the Danish version of the HC ….hc/dk

2. Add a “country” field to your forms

Add a “country" and “province" field in your regular form so you can at least have the information when users reach out to you.

3. The right wording in the welcome email

In the welcome email wording, maybe indicate that you’d like to know their country and state/province and to expect you requesting that information in the form from point 2, maybe linking to the form directly. Or better yet, maybe you create a form specially dedicated for this purpose which you hide from the Zendesk Guide forms list.

4. SSO - single sign-on

If you already know the country of your end-user and you have it stored in your backend somewhere, you can use Single Sign-On to send that information across to Zendesk.

5. Custom code

Depending on how important this functionality is for you, we can definitely create a popup that shows up in the Guide after the user is logged in and we ask for their country and state/province and save it against their profile. We can use a cookie to not repeat the popup after user has completed the action. The level of effort for this is somewhere between 1-2 days of work so I’m not sure the costs justify the requirement. I’d have to check with the development team nonetheless.

Anyway, let me know if you have other ideas or if the costs justify the request and I’d be happy to help.

Or schedule a call with me from the below: