Zendesk

Connect your Zendesk account and your support team can work tickets without leaving the conversation:

• Ticket alerts post new tickets, status changes, public replies, priority changes and new assignees into the channels you pick.
• Ticket links pasted in a message show as a card with the subject, status, priority, requester and assignee.
• Create Zendesk ticket in any message’s menu turns that message into a ticket.

Everything Zendesk posts comes from the Zendesk app, so nobody’s account is borrowed.

Connect Zendesk

Only owners and admins can connect Zendesk, in Workspace settings → Integrations & apps → Integrations → Support.

1. Type your Zendesk address, for example northwind.zendesk.com.
2. Click Sign in with Zendesk and approve Freesbe in Zendesk. You come back to Freesbe with Zendesk connected.

Sign in as a Zendesk admin: Freesbe adds a webhook to your Zendesk account so it hears about ticket changes, and only admins can do that. If you sign in as an agent, ticket cards and Create Zendesk ticket work, but alerts stay off until an admin connects again.

Connect with an API token instead

If you’d rather not sign in, click Use an API token instead:

1. In Zendesk’s Admin Center, open Apps and integrations → Zendesk API, turn on Token access and click Add API token. Copy the token.
2. In Freesbe, type your Zendesk address, the email of the agent the token belongs to (an admin, for alerts) and paste the token.
3. Click Connect Zendesk.

Freesbe acts as that person in Zendesk: tickets it creates and notes it adds are theirs. The token is stored encrypted. To stop Freesbe using it, delete it in Zendesk or click Disconnect.

Ticket alerts

Once Zendesk is connected, click Add alert, pick:

• Post to channel: where the alerts go.
• Tickets from: All groups, or one Zendesk group. Send each group’s tickets to its own channel, for example Billing to #billing and Shipping to #shipping.
• Alerts to post:
  • New tickets: every new ticket, with its requester and priority.
  • Status changes: tickets solved, reopened, pending and on hold.
  • Public replies: replies customers and agents can see. Internal notes aren’t sent.
  • Priority changes: a ticket’s priority goes up or down.
  • Assignee changes: a ticket gets a new assignee.

Each alert’s ⋯ menu has Send a test alert, Edit, Turn off / Turn on and Delete. Send a test alert posts a sample ticket so you can see how alerts look.

Alerts can’t go to direct messages. In a private channel, only people in it see them.

Assign to me and Solve

Ticket cards have buttons:

• Assign to me makes you the ticket’s assignee. Your Freesbe email must belong to an agent in Zendesk.
• Solve marks the ticket solved and adds an internal note in Zendesk saying who solved it from Freesbe. The ticket needs an assignee first.
• Open in Zendesk opens the ticket.

The card changes to show who took the ticket or solved it, so the rest of the channel knows it’s handled.

Ticket links

Paste a link to a ticket in your Zendesk, like https://northwind.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/1038, and Freesbe adds a card under the message with the ticket’s subject, status, priority, requester and assignee. Links to requests in your help center work too. Up to three tickets are shown per message.

Only links to the connected Zendesk account show as cards; other links stay as they are.

Create a ticket from a message

Hover over any message, open ⋯ → Create Zendesk ticket, and fill in:

• Subject: starts with the first line of the message.
• Description: the message. Freesbe adds a line saying who created it from Freesbe.
• Requester: you, or the person who wrote the message.
• Priority and Type.

Click Create. The ticket is made in Zendesk, tagged freesbe, and a reply in the message’s thread says who created it with a link to the ticket.

Anyone in the workspace can create tickets this way. They’re made by the person who connected Zendesk, with the requester you picked.

Disconnect

Open the connection’s ⋯ menu → Disconnect. Alerts stop, ticket links show as plain links and Create Zendesk ticket leaves the message menu. Freesbe removes its webhook from your Zendesk account.

If the connection shows Connect again, Zendesk stopped accepting Freesbe’s sign-in, for example because the token was deleted or the person who connected left. Alerts, cards and Create Zendesk ticket pause until an admin connects again from the ⋯ menu.

For developers

Freesbe receives ticket changes from Zendesk at its own webhook address, signed by Zendesk. You don’t need to set anything up in Zendesk: connecting adds the webhook, and disconnecting removes it. See API and webhooks for building your own integrations.

Using Zoho Desk? See Zoho Desk.