Zendesk App Demo: Connect Sales Database and Zendesk Sunshine
Introduction
This comes in the climate of data being spread out into many platforms and have too many blind spots about your clients to help them with their issue as fast as possible. and creating a complete profile for the client is super important.
Delivering a modern customer experience is difficult. Customers nowadays are using a lot of apps and channels, more than ever before when engaging with your business. Keeping track of all that data is a challenge because many traditional CRM platforms are left in the dark when it comes to keeping data sets organized and having a complete picture of their customers.
That’s because many businesses are stuck building apps on legacy CRM platforms that force developers to work with separated customer data, rigid data models, and proprietary developer frameworks from a different era of app development. Together, this can make it hard to truly understand who customers are and what they want, and deliver personalized experiences throughout the entire customer journey.
Use Case
Let’s imagine you have an online store and we sell photo cameras. On top of this we have a few reseller stores which we offer support for as well.
Clients submit tickets for cameras they bought on our store as well as cameras sold by our resellers. You need to be very well organized and offer support in the best manner possible so that your user base is happy and get world class support.
Let’s imagine a user that sends in a request from a reseller company. User is a recurring customer and has bought a new camera and their claim says the don’t know where it is, and their tracking number is not helping. Also, they’ve updated the firmware of a previously bought camera and can’t figure if it has updated or not. They’ve done their research and read through the knowledge base, but couldn’t find the answer to their inquiry.
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The sales DB integration and Zendesk App
For The Less techky
A ticket has come into Zendesk and the agent opens it. The app fires and searches for the ticket requester’s email in the external sales DB. It finds 2 orders for this client, one that is still Pending in delivery and one that has been completed. We see the order details, the products bought, the manufacturer, model, the mode serial number, where it was bought from, the date, pricing etc. This is all to facilitate the agent in offering better assistance to the client. Agents need to know as much as possible about the user in order to give a relevant contextual answer to the client. Information is power.
For the tech Savvy
The sales data base is sitting outside of Zendesk and in this case it’s a clients’ internal data base with an API. We need a middleware script so that the two systems can communicate with one another. Think of the middleware as a translator which can speak 2 languages, and without it, the two wouldn’t be able to understand each other. The middleware is installed on the client’s server with a minimum required Apache server setup.
Depending on preference, authenticating to Zendesk offers a few options:
Basic Authentication - Basic email_address:passwordAPI token - Basic email_address/token:api_tokenOAuth access token - Bearer oauth_access_token
In our case, we use API token authentication. Zendesk communicates with it via a “get” function. Whenever a ticket is opened in the browser tab, the app fires and calls the external DB API interrogating it for the relevant information about the user’s email address(or whatever fields are relevant: e.g user_id, external_id etc). It can also search for whatever field is relevant and is also found in Zendesk.
Level of effort: about 3 days of work if the DataBases' API is working well, and there is a documentation for it. It can also be less depending on authentication and if we need to interrogate less fields and other factors.
“Order Management” button
The purpose of these additional functionalities is to give a bit more overview to the agent. With this modal, agents can:
Track an order directly and see where it ended up
Create a return label should the client want to return their order
Ask for a refund
The above actions are all connected to external services. Those actions don’t have any effect in Zendesk. The reason they’re there is to keep as much much functionality onto one platform and not have your team navigate between different systems as this is bound to create human error.
Level of effort: 1 day of work.
“ADD to zendesk” button
This button’s purpose is to write the order data into the Zendesk Sunshine DataBase. This way, you can have all the data about this client reside into Zendesk. Is that a necessity? Maybe it is, but maybe it isn’t. You let me know.
Level of effort: 3h
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Zendesk Sunshine app
Zendesk Sunshine is the new open and flexible CRM platform native to AWS. You can connect all your customer data for complete context—wherever it lives—and give developers and admins the tools they need to build the best customer experiences.
In our client’s case, the agent can see the products logged against this user. They have quite a few cameras and product extensions (e.g tripods, batteries, lenses etc). The agent even has the possibility to access the User manual to check for product features that clients are having trouble with.
The search feature is a very powerful addition to the Zendesk Sunshine data base as agents can quickly search by product name or serial number to offer contextual assistance.
Agents can also follow the other tickets that the client has logged in and easily navigate through them.
“Add asset” BUtton
As the name suggests, the agent can easily add a product that the client has bought but maybe not registered yet. The data is stored inside Zendesk. If your systems communicate seamlessly with Zendesk, the data introduced by the agent can instantly become available across all platforms. Hence the sales people will also know this information which might be useful in making the next sales recommending to the client.
The agent can fill in the relevant data for the product that the client provides. They can add a serial number and a user manual. Pretty cool I’d say.
Level of effort: 3 days of work.
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Profiles app
Since customers are using more and more apps and getting in touch via so many different mediums, it has become increasingly harder to keep all data into one place. The profiles app integrates the different profiles a user might have: Slack, Facebook, Everyday, Shopify, reseller store profile and much more. The possibilities here are endless and depend on your setup.
Level of effort: 1 day of work.
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Events tracker app
Zendesk Sunshine provides an Events API to help you build a timeline of all your customers' interactions from any source. An event can be any programmatic event that your application or system can associate with a user. Examples include purchase transactions, website visits, articles viewed in the knowledge base or customer service interactions. It’s amazing.
In our example, the agent can see when the package arrived for the new camera, they can see the Return Request, when the return label was created by the logistics team. Agent can even see when the user viewed articles in the Zendesk Knowledge Base or Guide. They can also see when the client submitted new tickets.
Level of effort: 1 day of work.
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Recently viewed Knowledge base app
These are the articles that the user has last viewed. Imagine how much context an agent has when answering an inquiry if they even know what the user did in the Knowledge Base in Guide. The agent can pass relevant articles that the client has not had the patience to either find on their own or were not that visible. Not to mention how you can even set some articles to promoted based on what users browse and find answers to. The user has to be logged into the Guide for to be able to retrieve this data.
Level of effort: 1 day of work.