You can use Zingtree decision trees to reduce your technical support team’s workload. Customers can either self-solve their issue, or a new ticket can be created automatically in Zendesk that includes all the information from the customer’s decision tree troubleshooting session. By making it easy to gather background information from the customer via the decision tree, your support team saves a lot of time by reducing back-and-forth messages.

Zingtree provides a free app for Zendesk to make it easy for your support agents to see the decision tree transcript. It looks like this inside of Zendesk:

Setup Overview

It’s easy to set this up – here’s a brief overview of the process. Continue reading for detailed steps.

1. Add a new Application to Zingtree for creating Zendesk Tickets.
2. Create a “Ticket Submitted” node which sends the new ticket info to Zendesk.
3. Create a “New Ticket” node to obtain the customer’s name, email, a ticket subject, description, and optional custom fields.
4. Make sure Zendesk is properly configured to allow external apps to create requests.
5. Optionally install the Zingtree app into Zendesk via the Zendesk App Marketplace.

Adding a new Application to Zingtree to create a Zendesk Ticket.

A Zingtree application can be called from any node. You’ll need to add the Zendesk New Ticket App first as follows:

1. Log into your Zingtree account.
2. Go to Apps & Integrations.
3. Select the Zendesk: New Ticket App.

   

4. Enter your Zendesk account email, API token and domain name. (Instructions are on the page.) If you are using multiple Ticket Forms, you can also add an optional Form ID.

   

5. Click Add Zendesk App to save the new App.

Note: You can create an API Token in Zendesk via Admin > Apps & Integrations > Zendesk API.

Setting a Brand

If you want to add a new ticket for a specific brand, use the brand subdomain as the Zendesk Domain. (You can see your brand subdomain in your Zendesk Setup, under Manage > Brands.) In this example, the brand subdomain is “astrodemo”):

Create a “Ticket Submitted” Node

When this node appears, a new ticket is added to Zendesk. This is the end result of pressing a “Submit Ticket” button inside the decision tree. You can create this node as follows:

1. Add a new Content Node to your tree.
2. Give the node a title, and any text you want to appear in the content area – like “Thanks for submitting a ticket” etc.
3. Go to the Apps & Webhooks section of the node.
4. Click Add App.
5. Select the Zendesk App you just created. You should see something like this:

   

Tip: The session transcript is added by default to the ticket description unless a Zingtree Session ID field is present. To disable transcripts, add notranscript to the Message Data area.

Now we’re ready to link a ticket entry page to this “Ticket Submitted” node.

Create a “New Ticket” node

When end-users navigate the troubleshooting decision tree, if they haven’t been able to resolve the issue, you can direct them to a node which collects data for the ticket. These variables must be named exactly as specified below so that Zingtree knows which fields to include in the new Zendesk ticket.

These variables are mandatory:

• zd_subject – The subject of the request.
• zd_description – The description for the request.
• zd_requester_name – The customer’s full name.
• zd_requester_email – The email of the customer.

These variables are optional:

• zd_type – The type of the request. (Defaults to “question”) – Possible values: “problem”, “incident”, “question” or “task”
• zd_priority – The priority of the request. (Defaults to “normal”) – Possible values: “urgent”, “high”, “normal”, “low”.

You can also add custom fields to your ticket form (see below for details).

To create a new ticket form in your decision tree:

1. Edit the node where you want the customer to submit the ticket.
2. Click the Data Entry Fields tab.
3. Add fields for zd_subject, zd_description, zd_requester_name and zd_requester_email at minimum.
4. Add zt_priority or zt_type optionally.
5. When you are done, your Data Entry Fields will look something like this:

   

6. Go to the Action Buttons section, and add a “Submit” button to go to your submit ticket page.

Bonus: When a ticket is created, the Zendesk ticket ID is returned as a variable named zt_ticket_id.

How to Include Custom Fields

Every field in your Zendesk Ticket from has a unique ID. So to include field #12345 in the ticket form, you would add a variable named like this: zd_custom_field_12345

You can locate the Field ID for your custom ticket fields in Zendesk as follows:

1. In Zendesk Admin go to Objects & Rules > Fields. The Ticket Fields screen appears:

   

2. Copy the Field ID (outlined in yellow above).

Zendesk Configuration

Your Zendesk setup will need to allow anonymous requests. To enable this,  the following Customer settings must be set in the Support admin interface:

• Enable “Anyone can submit tickets”
• Disable “Ask users to register”

You can do this via Admin > People > End users. Your setup should look like this:

Add the Zingtree Support App to Zendesk (recommended)

To make a deluxe experience for your support techs, we recommend adding the Zingtree Support app to your Zendesk. In Zendesk, go to Admin > Apps & Integrations > Zendesk Support Apps. Click the Marketplace button and search for “Zingtree”. Be sure to choose the Zingtree Support app:

• Zendesk App: Support
• Zingtree Agent Scripting App for Zendesk