Zendesk Survey Integration with Customer Thermometer

Way back in 2013 the helpdesk manager of a very large business who were using Zendesk to manage their support tickets told us that he wanted to add the power and capabilities of the Customer Thermometer application to his Zendesk helpdesk process.

He was keen to add in Customer Thermometer customizable icons at the bottom of each of the “ticket response” emails they send to their customers and use our landing pages and comment capture capabilities. In addition, he wanted to be able to embed rating buttons at the bottom of his Zendesk tickets, rather than sending separate emails after tickets were solved, as this generated unnecessary outbound emails from his agents. These requirements led to the development of our Embedded Thermometers and many additional 3rd party application integrations.

What is Zendesk?

There can’t be many people working in customer service and support who have not heard of Zendesk. It is a cloud-based customer service and support ticketing and help desk solution used by over 200,000 organisations around the world. If you want to know who is using Zendesk and what they have to say about the system then take a look at these Zendesk Reviews.

How to Integrate Zendesk with Customer Thermometer

Integrating Zendesk and Customer Thermometer is super-simple! Full, detailed Zendesk integration instructions are provided from our user guide.

Here’s a summary of the key steps:

1. Create a new Embedded Thermometer and select ‘Zendesk’ as the Embedded Thermometer Type’.
2. Click the ‘Generate Embed Code’ button.
3. Add or edit the Zendesk placeholder fields.
4. Add Customer Thermometer icons to Zendesk Triggers.
5. Position your new Embedded Zendesk Thermometer within the email thread.
6. Finalise your landing pages by adding a comment field, logo, customized wording or whatever is needed.

That really is all there is to it! Our detailed instructions provide the guidance you need to make the required edits and settings within Zendesk which take only a few minutes to carry out.

Writing Back Responses into Zendesk

Zendesk Customer Thermometer integration enables survey ratings and comments to be written back directly into the Zendesk support thread as internal comments.

Setting up the write-back is as simple as setting up the Zendesk Embedded Thermometer. The Customer Thermometer Zendesk Write Back uses OAuth2, which makes it incredibly easy to set-up.

Here are the summarised steps:

1. Make certain you have named your embedded thermometer and defined a question that you want to ask.
2. Enter your Zendesk account name (your Zendesk subdomain).
3. Click the ‘Authenticate’ button (the Zendesk user must have Admin rights).
4. Authentication redirects to Zendesk where you need to confirm the authentication by clicking ‘Allow’.
5. The Customer Thermometer set-up screen will now show the Zendesk API token derived from Zendesk.

That’s all you need to do to see your Customer Thermometer survey ratings and comments from people surveyed directly from your Zendesk application.

Zendesk Satisfaction Ratings

Zendesk provides its own customer satisfaction rating system, but for many users this doesn’t fulfil their needs. By integrating Zendesk with Customer Thermometer , users can take full advantage of the many benefits that will help deliver insightful and actionable survey results.

Here are some of the key benefits:

• Define your own question, in your language or character set using your own tone of voice and style.
• Customize your survey response buttons.
• Trigger the presentation of rating buttons at any point in the support ticket process.
• Break away from simple ‘good’ or ‘bad’ options by providing 2, 3 or 4 buttons for customers to choose.
• Customise your ‘thank you’ page with your logo and content to make it engaging and prompt for additional comments if desired.
• Set up real-time alerts to any ‘red’ or ‘amber’ customer responses.
• Easily export lists of all customer comments.
• Add Customer Thermometer functionality to any Zendesk account level, including the Zendesk starter package.

Follow this link to learn how to make your Customer Thermometer survey results appear in Zendesk satisfaction reports.

Trigger an Email Thermometer Using Zendesk

While Embedded Thermometers work brilliantly from within Zendesk there are occasions where customers might be using plain text emails. This would mean that our wonderful, attractive icons would be replaced by less enticing URL strings. Remotely triggering email thermometers from Zendesk is an effective technique to deal with this situation.

There are various circumstances in which you might want to trigger an Email Thermometer. For example, you may want to send a specifically formatted and composed email that is sent from a particular email address. Or you may need your ‘ticket solved’ feedback email to be associated with different landing pages from those used in your Embedded Thermometer.

Here’s a summary of the steps involved:

1. Find your Customer Thermometer API key which is in your account settings.
2. Take a copy of the example syntax provided from our API documentation (notepad / text editor).
3. Replace the API key (apiKey=) with the one from your account.
4. Fill in the Zendesk variables as required (emailAddress, firstName etc.)
5. From your Customer Thermometer account locate the email thermometer template that you want to use.
6. In Customer Thermometer, click on ‘Manage Thermometers’ and either hover your mouse over the email thermometer template or click on it in order to see the URL.
7. Take the email thermometer ID number from the URL and add it to the ‘thermometerID=’ field.
8. Similarly, for the ‘listID=’ variable: In Customer Thermometer click on ‘Manage Lists’.
9. Hover your mouse over the relevant list and populate the ‘listID=’ field with the list ID number from the URL.
10. Again, for the ‘blastID=’ variable you need to create a blast and populate this field with the blast ID number.
11. Once all fields in the constructed URL have been correctly populated, take a copy of the URL and return to Zendesk.
12. Select ‘Extensions’ from the left hand menu and populate the URL target form:
    1. Give the URL target a title.
    2. Enter the constructed URL in the URL text box.
    3. Verify that the method is set to ‘Get’.
    4. The attribute name should be ‘blastID’.
    5. Nil username or password are required.
13. Once all text boxes are completed as required – click the ‘Submit’ button.
14. The next step is to setup the required trigger from within Zendesk.
15. Click on ‘Triggers’ from the left hand menu.
16. Since we want to trigger our Email Thermometer when the ticket is solved set the trigger to occur when the ticket status is changed to ‘solved’.
17. Under ‘Perform these actions’ set this to ‘Notify Target’ and select the URL target.
18. In the ‘Message’ text box enter the blastID – as was used in the URL construction.
19. Once all fields are populated as required click on the Zendesk ‘Submit’ button.
20. Test your automatically triggered Email Thermometer by closing a test support ticket and verifying the email message, responding to the survey and verifying that results are appearing as required in your Customer Thermometer dashboard.

Give Customer Thermometer a try in your customer programmes. Send yourself an example here: