Zendesk Connect Destination

Getting Started

When you enable Zendesk Connect from the Segment web app:

• Your changes appear in the Segment CDN in about 45 minutes, and then Analytics.js starts asynchronously sending all your analytics data to Segment’s servers, and onwards to Connect.
• Your Zendesk Connect real-time feed starts showing visitor data.

If you plan on having both a production and development environment, make sure you enter your Connect API keys into the corresponding Segment sources.

Connect is supported on the client-side, server-side and on mobile.

Identify

Connect needs to identify users and their data to track who we should message. Segment will pass your UserID and any traits that you store on that user to Connect. (Note: Segment refers to user data as “traits”; Connect refers to user data as “attributes”.)

analytics.identify({
  userId: '019mr8mf4r',
  traits: {
    name: 'Michael Bolton',
    email: 'mbolton@example.com',
    phone: '1234567890',
  },
  context: {
    device: {
      type: "ios",
      token: 'XXXYYYZZZ'
}}});

Segment traits correspond to specific top level attributes within Connect. These attributes are used to send and customize messages on various channels:

• name maps to Connect’s first_name and last_name attributes recommended for targeted copy.
• email maps to Connect’s email attribute required for email campaigns
• phone maps to Connect’s phone_number attribute for sms & voice campaigns
• context.device.token maps to Connect’s apns or fcm attribute for iOS and Android Push.
• timezone maps to Connect’s timezone attribute recommended to use Connect’s time of day message delivery feature (note - Connect only accepts Olson name values) These are automatically collected if you’re using Segment’s mobile SDKs.

Alias

Connect allows aliasing, which enables you to join an anonymous pre-signup ID with a post-signup userID. When you send an identify call that has an anonymous user, that user will be created using the anonymous id you supply in the identify call. Later, when you want to update this anonymous user’s id to their actual id, you can do so by using Segment’s alias method. The following is an example alias call from Segment’s Analytics.js library:

analytics.alias('019mr8mf4r');

Track

Events and their properties are used to trigger and customize message campaigns within Connect:

analytics.track('Signed Up', {
  plan: 'Startup',
  source: 'Analytics Academy'
});

Connect’s campaign filters allow you to target specific segments of users based on events, event properties, and attributes. Having specific events and attributes allow you to better target your audiences with custom messaging:

Once a user is sent a message, you will often want to measure whether or not they reach a specific goal. Events are used to calculate if users reach these goals:

Features

Test your Destination within Connect

Connect shows all received events on the Connect Settings > Events page. Searching for your Segment events will show if it has been received in the last 24 hours and how many times.

If your Segment events do not appear, they have not yet been received by Connect.

Build your First Campaign

Now that everything is hooked up, you can start messaging your users! Check out the following guides at Connect:

1. Getting started with Connect
2. Understanding events in Connect
3. Create a trigger based campaign

Personas

You can send computed traits and audiences generated using Segment Personas to this destination as a user property. To learn more about Personas, contact us for a demo.

For user-property destinations, an identify call is sent to the destination for each user being added and removed. The property name is the snake_cased version of the audience name, with a true/false value to indicate membership. For example, when a user first completes an order in the last 30 days, Personas sends an Identify call with the property order_completed_last_30days: true. When the user no longer satisfies this condition (for example, it’s been more than 30 days since their last order), Personas sets that value to false.

When you first create an audience, Personas sends an Identify call for every user in that audience. Later audience syncs only send updates for users whose membership has changed since the last sync.

Supported Sources and Connection Modes

Before you start, make sure Zendesk Connect supports the source type and connection mode you’ve chosen to implement. You can learn more about connection modes here.

Segment offers an optional Device-based Connection Mode for Mobile data going to Zendesk Connect, so that you can use Zendesk Connect features that collect data directly from the mobile device. To do this, you must package the Segment-Zendesk Connect mobile SDK with the Segment mobile library.

Settings

Segment lets you change these destination settings from the Segment app without having to touch any code.

Private Key

You can find your Private Key on the Connect Settings > Environments page. It should be 32 characters long, and look something like this: f4f15f2f004fa0bd2140b4db93cbb538.

Public Key

You can find your Public Key on the Connect Settings > Environments page.

Adding Zendesk Connect to the integrations object

To add Zendesk Connect to the integrations JSON object (for example, to filter data from a specific source), use one of the following valid names for this integration:

• Outbound

• Zendesk Connect