Integrating Zendesk into Cisco Finesse

Transcription

1 White Paper Integrating Zendesk into Cisco Finesse White Paper 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 1 of 10

2 Providing an integrated customer service experience combining the Cisco Finesse agent desktop with the Zendesk service solution arms your agents with a powerful omnichannel support and ticket management tool to best service customer engagements. This paper will: Provide a general overview of Zendesk and Cisco Finesse Define three Zendesk integration alternatives within Cisco Finesse Provide links to the Cisco Developer website that hosts sample gadget code Provide links to the Zendesk site that hosts the Zendesk API s 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 2 of 10

3 Contents About Zendesk... 4 About Cisco Finesse Desktop... 4 Benefits of Integrating the Zendesk Support Tool within the Finesse Desktop... 4 Prerequisites... 4 Three Zendesk Integration Alternatives within Cisco Finesse Embed Zendesk Interface into Finesse as a Simple Gadget Use the Zendesk Core API s to Allow for Ticket Creation within Finesse Populate Call Variables and Automatically Insert into Them as Necessary into Zendesk Requests... 8 Closing Thoughts... 9 References Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 3 of 10

4 About Zendesk Zendesk, Inc. is a software development company based in San Francisco, California. The company provides a cloud-based customer service platform, also called Zendesk, that includes ticketing, self-service options, and customer support features. With more than 64,000 paid customer accounts, Zendesk s products are used by organizations in 150 countries and territories to provide support in more than 40 languages. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in San Francisco, Zendesk has operations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. About Cisco Finesse Desktop The Cisco Finesse Desktop is the agent-facing front end to Cisco s Customer Care solutions. Through their desktop, their phone or both, customer care representatives control their work status which is used by the router, reporting engine and supervisors to manage contact requests and real-time performance indicators. Benefits of Integrating the Zendesk Support Tool within the Finesse Desktop Finesse is extensible, supporting plug-ins called gadgets to embed other applications in a unified desktop. Agents can switch between multiple business applications while centrally managing their work status for routing and reporting. Creating an integrated Finesse and Zendesk solution: Provides centralized state management for Cisco s customer care solutions, Zendesk and potentially other third-party or custom applications. Takes advantage of Cisco s scripted treatment and precision routing engines. Uses predictive analytics to manage average wait time and meet service level agreements with adaptive and precision routing scripts. Eliminates the need to bounce between browser tabs to access both Zendesk and the Finesse agent desktop. Screens will pop into the Finesse desktop as the call is delivered, providing the relevant information needed to further enable excellent customer service. Provides for a single cockpit view for the agent to receive the contact, view their customer details, and interact with Zendesk case tool. Reduces call resolution time and allows for increased calls per hour per agent. Prerequisites This documents assumes that the reader understands the basics of: Zendesk support tool Cisco Contact Center Cisco Finesse HTML Java (sample code provided is in Java, but could be implemented in any language in which the reader is comfortable.) 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 4 of 10

5 Be sure you have access to the Zendesk cloud and that you have a user id. (Any customer who has purchased Zendesk will have a Zendesk account. You will have yourcompany.zendesk.com as a login for example.) Three Zendesk Integration Alternatives within Cisco Finesse 1. Embed the Zendesk interface into Finesse as a simple gadget 2. Use the Zendesk core API s to allow for ticket creation within Finesse 3. As a call comes in, populate call variables and automatically insert them as necessary into Zendesk requests to pop the correct customer data onto the agent desktop 1. Embed Zendesk Interface into Finesse as a Simple Gadget This first integration option allows you to integrate the full Zendesk interface into Finesse as a simple gadget. There are lots of samples in that show how a web based application (such as the Zendesk interface) can be presented inside an iframe within Finesse. The code provided within the sample gadgets there is pretty straightforward, and there are examples within those samples that will show you how to properly implement them. *** You can use this reference code linked here as Embedded WebApp Sample Gadget to embed your Zendesk portal into Finesse. *** This basically just shows you how to load the Zendesk user interface into Finesse. The really interesting part comes in step 3 as we use the Zendesk API s, call variables and Finesse s ability to invoke API s on an as needed basis, such as when a call comes in for the agent. When an agent is not serving the customer, the agent could access the tickets that they are assigned from within Cisco Finesse. This provides the agent a single user interface to access various applications Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 5 of 10

6 2. Use the Zendesk Core API s to Allow for Ticket Creation within Finesse Zendesk provides and updates a list of core API s that will allow 3 rd party vendors and applications (such as Cisco Finesse) to interface into their cloud-based case creation tool. You can invoke any of the API s listed in the Zendesk core API document. You must be able to send requests to these API s by referencing the sample java code. This second integration option shows how you can initiate a new ticket from within any other Finesse gadget. For ticket creation, you will use the Zendesk gadget to send an HTTP request to 1 }.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets.json API to create a new ticket. Note: A subdomain is created by Zendesk when you purchase Zendesk services. For example, if company abc signs up with Zendesk, they will be given a subdomain like to access their data. The information needed for ticket creation (eg. name, of the customer, title of the ticket, description etc.) can be provided by call variables in Finesse, which will be passed to the Zendesk ticket creation API within the request. Ultimately, an API request is sent to api/v2/tickets.json in the Zendesk cloud, thereby creating a ticket with the information provided by the agent during the call with a customer. But How Do We Build the API Request? Here we have a sample gadget showing a button to create a new Zendesk ticket. The gadget is defined within the Finesse default layout or within a Team layout if this is specific to certain Teams Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 6 of 10

7 Then the XML file references an HTML file. The example HTML code below shows how the request is sent to the Zendesk gadget code when the button is clicked. So when we click on the button, it sends a request to the Zendesk gadget code. It s saying that the action is to create, and you can give any number of parameters (via call variables) that you want to include, such as: name, , case title, etc. Creating a ticket is as simple as creating a web request to the cloud-based Zendesk site with a specific json. By leveraging the sample code snippet below, you can add a button or link in your Zendesk gadget to create a case. Upon clicking this button or link, the java script (above) sends a HTTP request to the Zendesk gadget code (code snippet shown below). public void createticket() { //This function needs information of your Zendesk host (subdomain.zendesk.com), user id and password. String surl = " + m_szendeskhost + "/api/v2/tickets.json"; URL url = new URL(sUrl); HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openconnection(); CertMgr.relaxHostChecking(connection); connection.setrequestmethod("post"); connection.setdooutput(true); connection.setdoinput(true); connection.setrequestproperty("content-type", "application/json"); 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 7 of 10

8 } connection.setrequestproperty("charset", "utf-8"); connection.setrequestproperty("accept", "application/json"); String sauthstr = m_suserid + ":" + m_spasswd; sauthstr = Base64.encodeBase64String(sAuthStr.getBytes()); connection.setrequestproperty("authorization", "Basic " + sauthstr); String requestbody = getticketjson(); connection.setrequestproperty("content-length", String.valueOf(requestBody)); DataOutputStream wr = new DataOutputStream(connection.getOutputStream ()); wr.write(requestbody.getbytes()); wr.flush(); wr.close(); connection.connect(); int respcode = connection.getresponsecode(); You must first load the Zendesk gadget onto a webserver, leveraging the sample code snippet below, which will ultimately place a request to the create-ticket API at Zendesk. Note: To pass call variables to the Zendesk gadget, your request should contain call variable mappings similar to the example below: The variables can perhaps come from IVR interactions where the user puts in his/her account number, and from that account number you could access a database to extract the users name, their address etc. as call variables. The agent can also pass additional information, such as ticket description, where the information is directly fed by the agent into the gadget (via a text box, pull down selection, etc.). At this moment, we invoke the Zendesk gadget with the variables automatically inserted and we get a response. 3. Populate Call Variables and Automatically Insert into Them as Necessary into Zendesk Requests This third integration option will show what to configure to populate the Zendesk interface within Finesse with customer case information retrieved from the Zendesk cloud, if this customer has already been defined within the system and has open cases. When a call comes into the contact center, we will use information provided during the call (such as an ANI number, a customer account number, or other) to do a database lookup and then populate call variables based on the information provided and the database lookup. We ll then pass the variable information along to the Zendesk gadget. Then the Zendesk gadget sends the request to the Zendesk Voice Integration API which loads the appropriate information to the user Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 8 of 10

9 This whitepaper shows two usages of voice integration API s: Open a user's profile in an agent's browser: (/api/v2/channels/voice/agents/{agent_id}/users/{user_id}/display.json) Open a ticket in an agent's browser: (/api/v2/channels/voice/agents/{agent_id}/tickets/{ticket_id}/display.json) In this case, when a call comes in the Cisco Finesse gadget, we will use the Zendesk voice integration API to open the customer information and ticket information. This ensures that the agent has all the information about the customer and also gives insight into the context of what case the customer is calling about. Similar to how we had code for create ticket, refer to the sample code and follow the viewticket and viewcustomer functions to get a detailed understanding of how to use the voice integration API. So the flow is similar to what we saw with the ticket create API: Retrieve the call variables Pass them to your Zendesk gadget The Zendesk gadget forms the json file (simple structure string variable) The Zendesk gadget then sends that request along to Zendesk to the appropriate API for a response Note: Be sure you have access to the Zendesk cloud and that you have a user id. Any customer who has purchased Zendesk will have a Zendesk account. You will have yourcompany.zendesk.com as a login for example You could integrate your corporate login to the Zendesk login. You have to create your repository of agents, with userid s for each agent. Zendesk exposes API s to enable single-sign on. You can leverage the capabilities of single-sign on without having the user to have to worry about logging into two places. Integration of single sign-on is outside the scope of this document. Closing Thoughts As you can see, integrating the Zendesk interface within Finesse and attaching call variables to the content posts and request is as easy as 1, 2, 3. The net result will be a more fully integrated omni-channel customer service, ticket creation and ticket retrieval experience for your customer service representatives, helping them service your customers more quickly and efficiently. References Sample code Zendesk core API Zendesk voice integration API Cisco Finesse Finesse sample gadgets 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 9 of 10

10 Printed in USA C / Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 10 of 10