How Zendesk works

Zendesk offers a RESTful API that you can use as a technical resource to send and receive data. The API allows you to make use of all of Zendesk’s features, like dynamically populating user info into your support tickets.

The Zendesk API actually consists of several different APIs that work together to help you create a complete customer profile and perform other tasks. Zendesk offers API client libraries for many of the most common platform languages, but you can also make direct HTTP requests. You will want to become familiar with Zendesk’s API methods so that you can choose an appropriate client library or collection method, and use that method to write custom tracking code into your application. As you implement Zendesk you should take care to carefully plan out the data you want to capture about your users, work out the details of how you are going to add in any other contextual user data from your other systems, and finally write code into your application to dynamically populate and send calls with user data into Zendesk. In most cases, a careful implementation of one of Zendesk’s API client libraries is a required step before you can do any serious automation with Zendesk and your application data.

You can also retrieve data from Zendesk to use in other tools, yielding a very valuable data set. However, a sensible ETL of the large data set from Zendesk is a complex process and by default requires you to build and maintain custom data pipelines to each other tool.

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