Zendesk

Overdesk connects to Zendesk with an API token from your Admin Center. It reads your tickets, learns from your resolved tickets, macros and Help Center articles, and posts each draft on the ticket as an internal note for your agents to review.

Connect Zendesk

You need to be an owner or admin in Overdesk, and an admin in Zendesk to create the token.

1. In Zendesk, open Admin Center, then Apps and integrations, then APIs, then API tokens, and create a token.
2. In Overdesk, open Integrations and choose Zendesk.
3. Enter your Subdomain: the part before .zendesk.com, such as acme.
4. Enter the Admin email of the Zendesk account you created the token on.
5. Paste the API token and choose Connect.

Zendesk pairs the token with that email address, so a token typed against a different email fails as if the token itself were wrong. Once connected, the Zendesk page on Integrations shows your Zendesk address.

What joins your knowledge base

• Resolved tickets, through Sync past conversations, every night at 03:00.
• Macros, imported as saved replies alongside your tickets.
• Help Center articles, through Sync help desk docs, every night at 04:30. Only published articles are imported, and the sync uses the same credentials, so there is nothing more to set up. If your account has no Help Center, the Knowledge base page says so, and articles start syncing once you enable one.

Drafting also needs a docs site address. Your knowledge base lives in Zendesk Guide: activate Guide, make your Help Center public, and paste its address into Docs site URL(s) in Settings → Knowledge base. See Point Overdesk at your docs.

Where drafts appear

Every draft arrives on the ticket as an internal note, visible to your agents and never to the requester. Zendesk has no API for filling in an agent's reply box, so the unsent draft reply option in Where drafts go stays with Help Scout and FreeScout, and your team keeps receiving notes.

If you edit or discard a draft from its page in Overdesk, Overdesk adds a note to the ticket saying what changed.

Inboxes, views and escalation

• In Allowed inboxes, enter all to draft every group; with a second help desk connected, write Zendesk:all. A group number, such as Zendesk:82640, limits Overdesk's scheduled drafting runs to that group, but real-time updates from Zendesk carry no group number, so enter all if you want a new ticket drafted the moment it arrives.
• To scope reports and analyses to one saved view, set Default view ID (Zendesk only) in Settings → General. The number is in the address bar when you open the view.
• Escalation rules can assign a ticket to an agent or to a group, picked from a list Overdesk reads from your Zendesk account. See Escalation.
• When you turn on closing stale conversations, Overdesk sets those tickets to Solved.

Real-time updates

Zendesk generates the webhook signing secret and shows it to you. The steps are in Real-time updates with webhooks.

If the connection is refused

The form shows the reason next to the fields. A message starting "credentials rejected by Zendesk" is followed by Zendesk's own words; check the token and that the email is the one it was created on. A subdomain can hold only letters, digits and hyphens.

Disconnecting Zendesk deletes its credentials and everything it put into your knowledge base.