What does the integration do?
Once connected, Surfboard will pull historical data from Zendesk to:
Show your actual ticket count from Zendesk within Surfboard
Generate forecasts and staffing requirements
Track agent performance and attendance within Zendesk
For Zendesk, forecasting and performance reporting require two different connections due to differing data sources.
How to set-up forecasting via Zendesk
Step 1: Provide your Zendesk subdomain
To connect Surfboard to your Zendesk account, you'll need to provide us with your Zendesk subdomain. (Your subdomain is its unique identifier for your organisation in Zendesk.)
There are a couple of ways you can find this:
It’s usually included in your URL: https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com
You can also get a list of Zendesk subdomains that your email address is associated with from the Remind me page.
💬 Speak to us on Intercom and select 'Integration set-up help' to create a ticket.
Step 2: Connect Surfboard to Zendesk
Once we've let you know your subdomain is added, you'll be ready to connect.
The forecasting connection is made via API:
Login to Surfboard
Navigate to Settings > Connections
Click the button labelled 'Connect to Zendesk'
You’ll be taken to another screen to authorise your connection.
Set-up is complete!
What's next?
Surfboard will now download 12 months of historical ticket data from your Zendesk account. This process will take 24-48hrs to complete, depending on the volume of tickets in your account.
Step 3: Set-up your forecast with ticket groups
Once this is complete, you next need to map your Zendesk tickets to ticket groups.
A ticket group should represent the views, inboxes or queues your team work on in Zendesk, e.g. a tier 1 inbox, or a french language queue.
Navigate to Forecasts > Ticket groups.
Click the button labelled 'New ticket group'.
Name the ticket group. We recommend you use the same name you use in Zendesk.
The 'real-time' and 'non real-time' setting does not apply to Zendesk.
Select 'Zendesk' from the connections dropdown.
You can now filter the tickets you want to include in this ticket group in the 'filter tickets' section. You can choose to filter tickets by:
assignee_id – the name(s) of agents
channel – e.g. Facebook, web forms
created_at – enter a specific date
group_id – your groups within Zendesk
problem_id – a specific problem ID you use
requester_id – the name of a specific requester(s)
satisfaction_rating – a rating you use
status – e.g. open, pending, closed
tags - tags you use in Zendesk
view_id - the views you have created in Zendesk
On the right hand side of the page, you will see a preview of the number of tickets you received in the last 7 days that match your filters. You can use this to check against data in your Zendesk account to ensure you've set up the filters correctly.
Next, you need to enter the staffing parameters for this ticket group.
These inputs turn ticket volumes into a staffing requirement.Average conversation time: enter the average handle time for the entire conversation.
Concurrency: this is the average number of conversations agents work on at once. You can use the same number used in your routing rules here.
Shrinkage: the is the % of scheduled time that's lost while agent's work on this ticket group. If you're not sure what you're shrinkage is, 30% is quite average across the industry.
Finally, you need to enter the service level or SLA that you're trying to achieve.
This a target % of all tickets that should meet your first response time target.
Your ticket group will now be set up and ready to use to forecast, track coverage and agent performance.
How to set-up agent tracking via Zendesk
Step 1: Request a connection link
The performance connection is made via webhooks.
To create this connection, our team will need to send you a link.
💬 Speak to us on Intercom and select 'Integration set-up help' to create a ticket.
What's next?
Our team will generate a link and email it to you. You then need to authorise the new connection from Surfboard to Zendesk.
Once connected Surfboard will start tracking agent actions and behaviour in Zendesk. Data on their performance will be shown in the performance page.
Step 2: Link activities with ticket groups
In order to correctly mark agent activity as 'on-task' or 'off-task', you need to define which activities are 'service activities', i.e. agents should be working in Zendesk as this time.
Navigate to the day view of the schedule
Open the activities sidebar by clicking “Add activities”
Select the activity you want to link to a forecast and click the edit icon ✏️
Toggle 'link to a forecast' on and select the relevant ticket group(s) from the dropdown
Set-up is complete!
You can now monitor agent's Zendesk presence and activity in the real-time page and performance page.
FAQs
Why do I need two connections?
The system Surfboard uses to forecast only pulls the historical volume of tickets and basic metadata. The data is only updated once every 24hrs.
To track agent activity, more information is needed, such as the status changes of tickets and who it was assigned to. This data is updated every 2-5mins.