Announcing the Zendesk integration for Exalate

We all know there is no need to copy Jira issues by hand anymore. And now that you understand the power of automatic synchronization, you might have found yourself wishing you could use synchronization in every other aspect of your pipeline

Well, I’ve got an exciting announcement for you all today: we’ve just released a new Zendesk integration for Exalate!

What is Zendesk?

Zendesk is a leader in customer service and engagement platforms. They provide automated solutions like chatbots, omnichannel customer support, self-service support, and much more.

Customers can submit tickets to your customer service team via Zendesk solutions integrated on your business website.

And for B2B teams, their platform also comes with customer relationship management (CRM) tools.

The Zendesk-Exalate Integration

If you’re already using Zendesk – or if this update has made you tempted to try it out – you’ll benefit from this new Exalate integration.

With Exalate, you can now synchronize your Zendesk tickets with Jira, GitHub, or HP QC/ALM – and many more to come with future updates.

The synchronization recreates all the necessary information that’s been filled out on your ticket. This includes comments, titles, descriptions, and anything else your customers input on their tickets.

You can configure the exact rules of synchronization by setting up specific triggers.

Triggers enable you to filter through which tickets get synchronized to the other side (to Jira, GitHub, etc), and which don’t. This is helpful to avoid cluttering your pipeline with irrelevant tickets.

For example, you could set up a trigger that synchronizes tickets to your Jira developer project, but only if these tickets have an ‘open’ status. This way, tickets that have already been taken care of won’t end up needlessly piling up in your Jira.

Use Case For the Zendesk-Exalate Plugin

Let’s walk through a possible use case of the Exalate integration for Zendesk.

If you have a development team working on a separate Jira or GitHub project from your customer service team – which is likely the case – this Exalate feature is for you.

On one end, you have the customer service desk receiving live chats. And on the other end, you receiving tickets from Zendesk tools. Traditionally, customer service agents would receive a ticket and email the information to your developer team. From there, the dev team would need to manually create a bug report in Jira and add this to their backlog.

However, your developers are busy and don’t need the extra weight of needing to input data manually.

Instead, you can set up a connection with Exalate within your Zendesk application.

Once this connection has been established, you can set up the necessary triggers that will automatically detect new tickets incoming from your customer service desk.

From this point on, you no longer need to manually input the tickets into your dev team’s Jira project.

And once the dev team updates information on their Jira instance, this information will synchronize to the other side as well. The synchronization is automatic and two-way.

This means your customer service desk will automatically be aware of any updates on the related issue, thus streamlining communication with the customers.

Why Choose Exalate Instead of the Free Zendesk-to-Jira Connector

Exalate is not the first solution to offer Zendesk-to-Jira synchronization. However, the pre-existing free plugin does have its shortcomings that Exalate can fix.

The free Zendesk-to-Jira connector only supports the default Jira configuration. It can not accommodate customer defect fields and rules. Unlike Jira, which is highly customizable, this solution is not.

On the other hand, the Zendesk-Exalate integration provides a more complete solution that can accommodate any type of workflow.

And it goes way beyond Jira. Exalate supports different platforms in one simple solution.

You can also create a connection between a single Jira project and multiple Zendesk instances, or the other way around.

And to top it all off, Exalate provides rock-solid support. So if you get confused in the process, no need to spend hours figuring it out on your own!