There’s no denying that Zendesk is a powerful and versatile customer service help desk.
But there are hundreds of Zendesk integrations that can help you boost the efficiency and quality of your customer service.
Let’s get our paws dirty and explore some innovative and inspirational examples.
What are Zendesk integrations?
Zendesk integrations are third-party tools, applications, or services that can be connected to Zendesk.
These integrations enhance the functionality of Zendesk by allowing it to sync data and work seamlessly with other software systems, improve workflows, and create a holistic customer service experience.
Here’s an illustration:
Say you’re going to a wedding next month. You find an off–the-rack dress that you love. It’s beautiful, but it’s not quite a perfect fit. In that moment, you have a choice: Make it work as-is, or have it tailored for a more custom, designed-for-you fit.
Investing a little bit of time and money with a tailor can turn your standard wardrobe into an absolute stunner.
And Zendesk integrations can do the same thing for your Zendesk instance. They’re a way to tailor Zendesk to fit your unique needs.
Zendesk offers a wide range of integrations that cover many aspects of customer support, communication, analytics, and more. Common types of integrations include:
- Quality assurance software that can help you build a picture of your support quality and improve it over time.
- CRM systems that provide a unified view of customer interactions, history, and preferences.
- Social media platform integrations for responding to customer feedback and inquiries on social channels.
- E-commerce integrations to track customer orders, shipments, and payments.
- Analytics and reporting tools that help you track and analyze customer service performance, ticket resolution times, and other key metrics.
- Survey and feedback tool integrations to collect customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction.
- Content management systems to enhance self-service options for customers.
- Automation and workflow tools to automate repetitive tasks and streamline processes within Zendesk.
Zendesk has more than 1500 apps available in the Zendesk App Marketplace. There’s something for everyone, and the biggest challenge is often identifying the right opportunities to leverage an integration in your team’s workflows.
This is a selection of some of the most popular and impactful Zendesk integrations available today:
- Klaus
- Stylo
- Help Center Analytics by Swifteq
- Thank You GPT
- Geckoboard
- Screen Recording by Birdie
- Proactive Bulk Tickets by Sparkly
- Zapier
Top Zendesk integration: Klaus
Klaus is an AI-powered quality management solution that automatically scores and analyzes 100% of your conversations with customers. The Klaus Zendesk integration essentially works like a plug-and-play system — it immediately evaluates your support quality and identifies areas for improvement.
One of the biggest challenges in developing a truly valuable QA process is that it can be time-consuming. Many support teams are limited in the number of cases they’re able to review manually, especially during periods of high volume. And if you want a truly consistent scoring system, you also need to invest time in QA calibration. None of which is useful if you don’t use those insights to develop dedicated support agent coaching and training.
Klaus manages all of that for you:
- It identifies coaching opportunities by tracking trends over time.
- It can analyze 100% of your interactions, so you don’t have to worry about dealing with small sample sizes or taking your customer support team away from high-priority tasks.
- It helps you pinpoint conversations that would benefit from a human review.
It’s a great Zendesk integration for companies that want to scale their QA program effortlessly to provide exceptional customer service.
Top Zendesk integration: Stylo
Stylo is an AI assistant that lives inside Zendesk, so your support agents can interact with it in every ticket.
Its purpose is to help your agents provide better responses faster by:
- Automatically generating responses to an existing ticket based on your knowledge base.
- Translating Zendesk tickets into or out of any language.
- Suggesting resources that might help, including previous tickets, knowledge base articles, or macros.
Those features are a good starting point in providing great service, but Stylo’s Zendesk integration goes even further.
Once you connect Zendesk and Stylo, it can also assign scores based on the content of the ticket, like a frustration, urgency, or delight score. These give you the extra context you need to triage Zendesk support tickets and make long-term improvements. You can:
- Identify which parts of your product lead to the highest levels of frustration.
- Prioritize impactful and urgent issues.
- Find your most enthusiastic customers and brand advocates based on their support interactions.
- Predict Net Promoter (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and use these predictions to create proactive and targeted campaigns to increase customer retention.
Stylo is a relatively simple tool that can dramatically level up your support.
Top Zendesk integration: Help Center Analytics by Swifteq
Swifteq offers a number of automation and assist apps for Zendesk, but the one that really shines is the Help Center Analytics app.
If you don’t have dedicated analytics resources as a support team, tracking the team’s performance of your help center (which is often viewed by thousands more people than the ones who create Zendesk tickets) can be a real challenge.
Google Analytics is often overwhelming, and Zendesk’s native reports don’t provide anywhere near as much information as you need to get actionable insights.
Help Center Analytics closes that gap. It’s a dedicated app for Zendesk Guide that helps you analyze and track knowledge base performance.
It can help you:
- Automatically calculate a series of metrics for your help center that aren’t easy to get with Zendesk’s native features: self-service score, helpfulness (as a percentage), and total and unique views by article, section, or category.
- Collect direct feedback from articles. Rather than sticking with Zendesk’s default binary rating, you can add a simple feedback form to find out how to improve your content.
- Track your customers’ journeys to understand what articles to improve. What do they do after reading an article? How many new Zendesk tickets do they create?
Zendesk integration: Thank You GPT
Sometimes, simple integrations that do one thing really well have a surprising impact on your team. Thank You GPT is one example of that.
Getting a “thank you” message from your customers after you solve an issue is always great. It can give you a sense of accomplishment and pride in a job well done.
But say you have a small team and you’re going through your peak season. The more effective your team is, the more of these replies you’re likely to receive. And in your Zendesk account, each of these simple replies re-opens the closed ticket and distracts your team from other customer issues.
Thank You GPT is an integration that reads reopened Zendesk tickets, identifies the ones that have a simple “thank you” response, and closes them for you. It can optionally reply to multiple tickets for you as well. It’s an easy way to carve out a little extra time for your team with no hassle and no time.
Zendesk integration: Geckoboard
Geckoboard is a data visualization and analytics tool. The Zendesk integration enables you to create custom real-time dashboards based on Zendesk customer data and share these either in a browser, via email, or in Slack.
It’s a great tool for monitoring and sharing live support KPIs throughout the day, which makes it particularly helpful for large customer service teams.
You can use it to:
- Spot bottlenecks before they become an issue. For example, if you have a significant number of unassigned or on-hold Zendesk tickets, it’s easy to see that on your dashboard.
- Celebrate achievements and motivate your team by setting goals for specific KPIs on a daily or weekly basis.
- Highlight great customer feedback by including CSAT comments and ratings in your dashboard.
There’s something about having a dashboard that brings a certain level of transparency, accountability, and direction to your team. Building dashboards with Geckoboard requires little to no analytics knowledge as well, so this is another integration that’s great if you don’t have in-house dedicated analytics resources for your support team.
Top Zendesk integration: Screen Recording by Birdie
Birdie is a dedicated screen recording and co-browsing tool for customer service.
Their Zendesk integration can be a really effective way to reduce the amount of time your team needs to invest in technical issues.
Maybe you have a relatively complex product and can explain things faster in the video. Or you want to lower the hurdle for customers who want to report bugs to you. Birdie is an especially valuable tool for teams that have to do a lot of troubleshooting.
Requesting a screen recording embeds a little “record” button directly in the ticket. Your customers never have to explain a technical issue through text, figure out how to create a screen recording themselves or look up how to send you console logs and error messages.
You can even include the option to record a video directly in your contact form!
Top Zendesk integration: Proactive Bulk Tickets by Sparkly
Sparkly is another company with a series of Zendesk apps to improve macros, create processes that are GDPR-compliant, and help e-commerce support teams in particular. Their most interesting app is Proactive Bulk Tickets which — you guessed it — lets you send outbound emails proactively.
Delivering proactive support is one of the best ways to level up the quality of your service and ensure that your support contributes to business growth.
This is a great integration for both customer success and customer support. Potential use cases might be:
- Informing your customers about upcoming maintenance or a service disruption that will impact them.
- Keeping customers up to date about order delays or stock shortages.
- Offer proactive onboarding support or recommendations for new customers.
- Periodically checking in with high-value customers to gather feedback and assess satisfaction levels.
- Letting your customers know when you’ve released a feature that they’ve requested or fixed a technical issue they reported.
Top Zendesk integration: Zapier
Zapier is all about automation, and good automations can have you working like a cat on caffeine.
It’s a no-code platform that lets you build custom workflows, connecting Zendesk to hundreds of other tools, like Google Sheets, Trello, Airtable, GitHub, and more.
An easy way to start working with Zapier is to look at your existing workflows and ask yourself some questions:
- Do you ever have to copy or export ticket content out of Zendesk platform into another tool or for another team?
- Do you ever manually update Zendesk tickets based on updates in other tools?
- Are there any notifications or alerts that would help you react faster to certain cases or customers?
- Are there any repetitive tasks or steps that your support agents go through when they’re providing discounts or managing an offboarding, for example?
- Are there other teams that would benefit from access to information that’s only accessible in Zendesk?
The biggest challenge with Zapier is developing the eye to see these opportunities for automation and implement them in a way that works for your team.
Zapier can let you get much closer to using Zendesk as the single hub of all information for your support agents, while still keeping your team well-connected across your company — all through great tools and automation.
Get maximum value by using Zendesk integrations
Zendesk has such a massive range of integrations and functionality that it can be overwhelming to know where to start. The overwhelm can make it hard to see the possibilities beyond a simple ticketing system.
If you’ve ever spent significant time browsing the countless integrations in the Zendesk Marketplace, and then closed your browser without implementing anything that helped your team, you aren’t alone.
Don’t let analysis paralysis stop you from making improvements for your team and customers though — get started quickly by leveraging one of the best Zendesk integrations from this list today.
Connect Zendesk account with Klaus to review and rate any kind of Zendesk conversations: chats, emails, phone calls. Automate QA reviews, track quality metrics, and collaborate with your team with ease.
Originally published in August 2019; last updated in November 2023.
