Services Process for Automating Mapping in the Zendesk Connector

Related products: CS Data Management & Integrations

This post is for the Services Team and consolidates information that's been posted around the Community regarding automating Zendesk Mapping.





PLEASE NOTE: Access to the Gainsight Widget in Zendesk and also the Services needed to setup automated mapping IS NOT FREE. If you have a customer that is interested in either please confirm that these items have been included in their contract.





If you have confirmed that your customer has purchased the appropriate items, here are guidelines for setup:





Overview/Explanation


The Zendesk Connector was designed to be sold as a package of the Zendesk Widget and the Data Sync. Because of this, the mapping to associate a Zendesk Organization to a Salesforce Account was expected to happen manually within the Widget. We are able to sell the Widget separately from the Data Sync but we must be certain we have an alternate method of mapping Zendesk Orgs to SF AccountIDs. The setup of this alternate method of mapping requires a Services Package to be purchased (but the sync itself will be free). Contact Marie for current pricing.





Prerequisites for the Customer


In order to successfully setup an alternate method of mapping, the Customer should complete the following steps:


1. Verify that all Salesforce Accounts exist as Zendesk Organizations and there is a process in place to add new Zendesk Orgs as new Accounts are added.


2. Determine there is a process in place that maps the Zendesk Org ID to a Salesforce AccountID


3. Validate that the Customer can continuously provide the mapping between Zendesk Org ID and Salesforce AccountID to Gainsight (either in Salesforce or can send the mapping to the MDA)





Then Gainsight Services can set up the rules within our Rules Engine that will populate the OrgID -> AccountID mapping into the bridge table that holds the Zendesk Ticket Data within the MDA.





Useful Info for Prerequisites


Here are some common methods we have seen Customers use to achieve the prerequisite steps:


- Leverage the Zendesk Rest API and the Salesforce Rest API to ensure Zendesk Org and Salesforce Account creation stays in sync and the Zendesk OrgID is written onto the Salesforce Account Object


- If API work is not feasible, use a third-party connector to ensure Zendesk Org and Salesforce Account creation stays in sync and the Zendesk OrgID is written onto the Salesforce Account Object. We typically direct customers to Azuqua.


- If the Zendesk Org/SF Account process is established and automated, then the Customer just needs to send the mapping to Gainsight (either to Salesforce or to our MDA). In this scenario, it's best to piggyback on any existing dataflows the customer has to Salesforce or the MDA. 





Setup Process


1) Email Sidhu (sidhu@gainsight.com), Sunand (spadmanabhan@gainsight.com), and Jagadeesh (jsiripurapu@gainsight.com) and cc Marie (msahrmann@gainsight.com) to request the bridge table be exposed in the MDA for your customer. Include the OrgID, OrgName and any deadline in your email.


2) Once exposed, you must create the rules to populate the IDs into the bridge table (varies depending on the customer's setup).





Here are guidelines from engineering for populating the bridge table:




  1. Only Account ID is set as an identifier, so that we do not have more than one orgs mapped to an Account

  2. Map all the 5 fields, Account ID, Account Name, Organization ID, Organization Name and Sub Domain.

  3. Map "Sub Domain" with a custom value mapping and the value should be set to their zendesk subdomain. E.g if we setting this up for us, we will populate "gainsight" into the Sub Domain field since our zendeskurl is gainsight.zendesk.com
More info on how the Zendesk Org Creation process works in Zendesk:





For general info, the way Zendesk works is that you set up 'Zendesk Organizations' to represent a customer entity (the parallel concept to a SFDC Account/GS Customer). The way you setup a ZD Organization is you define all the domain names that should be associated to the Organization. So when a ticket is submitted it looks at the email of the Ticket requester and then associates the ticket to the Organization as you have defined it. As an example, to define Gainsight as an Organization in your Zendesk, you would say any email that contains '@gainisght.com' should associate to the Gainsight Organization. Any ticket that's submitted by someone whose email contains '@gainsight.com' would be automatically associated to Gainsight.
Hi Team,





We are planning to introduce the ability to map zendesk org and account id in the next release and wanted to share our thoughts regarding the same . 





Auto Mapping will help the support user to skip the process of manually linking an org and allow him to view Gainsight widget for the appropriate account based on the mapping.





The user will have two options - 





a. Manual CSV upload





The user will have to map the following fields and upload it via CSV -





   - Account Id


   - Account Name


   - Zendesk Org Id


   - Zendesk Org Name





b. Auto Mapping based on an object in SFDC and MDA





We have some of the customers who have already brought in some of the fields from Zendesk and added it in custom objects or fields in account/customer info objects.





For those customers , they will have the ability to set up the object and map the above mentioned fields(Account Id, Account Name, Org Id and Org Name). The auto mapping process will happen periodically the same time as the sync has been scheduled for the zendesk tickets.





A mock screen of how it would look like - 





Hope this helps.Let me know if you have any questions or want to discuss in detail regarding this.





Thanks


Abhishek S