If you are using Zendesk as a customer support tool, it is probably a major product feedback channel for your company.

To help you keep track of this valuable customer feedback and merge it with your other feedback channels, we have built an integration that lets support agents push relevant Zendesk tickets directly into your Harvestr inbox, and even categorize feedback right from Zendesk.

How does the integration work?

To use our Zendesk integration, you need:

Once the integration is set up and authorized by one of your company's Zendesk admins, any Zendesk agent can use the app without needing a Harvestr account.

Requirements: you must have administrator permissions in Zendesk Support to set up the integration.

Find and install the Harvestr app from the Zendesk apps marketplace.

The installation page in Zendesk will ask for an "Authentication token".

In your Harvestr integration settings, open the Zendesk section, generate a Harvestr API key, and copy it.

Jump back to the Harvestr app installation settings in Zendesk (always accessible at Admin → Apps → Manage → Harvestr → App configuration). Paste the API key into the "Authentication token" field.

Note: if you want to restrict access to just administrators or just agents, click Enable Role Restrictions before installing and choose the users.

Press the install button. Harvestr will appear in your "Currently installed" apps in Zendesk, marked as "Enabled".

After installing the widget in Zendesk, go back to the integration's settings in Harvestr to finish the installation.

At step 4, enter your Zendesk support base URL and click Next. This opens an OAuth window where you need to authorize Harvestr to connect to your Zendesk account.

Your support team can now use the Harvestr integration in Zendesk.

Open a Zendesk ticket, click the Apps button in the upper-right corner, and the Harvestr widget appears. If not, click the Refresh button above.

When a support rep receives a ticket from a customer that's interesting for the product team — like a feature request — they click the Send to Harvestr button to push the whole ticket to Harvestr.

You get the ticket in your Harvestr inbox with all the messages, plus the identity and email of the Zendesk requester if they're available.

If the feedback is related to a topic that already exists in your Harvestr account, support reps can link the conversation to an existing discovery.

Clicking Link to discovery opens the list of Components and Discoveries in your Harvestr organization. The rep searches and selects the right Discovery.

The conversation is sent straight to the Archived folder of your Harvestr inbox, already linked to the right Discovery.

When you send a Zendesk ticket to Harvestr, the entire ticket comes across — including the back-and-forth between your support agent and the customer. That's useful for context, but it's a lot for a PM to read if all they need is the underlying product feedback.

A small habit fixes this: before sending the ticket, add an internal note that summarizes the feedback in two or three sentences.

The internal note travels with the ticket, so when the PM opens the feedback in Harvestr they see your summary at the top, with the full conversation underneath if they need to dig in.

Original ticket: a long back-and-forth about CSV exports timing out for a customer with large datasets.

Internal note summary before sending:

The PM now has everything they need in two sentences. The full conversation is one click away if they want details.

In Harvestr, you get all these tickets in your inbox alongside feedback from every other tool you've connected.

For each Zendesk ticket sent to Harvestr, we import all the messages and users that belong to that ticket. You also get a button with the Zendesk logo at the top of the feedback that links to the ticket in Zendesk — handy if you need more context.

From there, you can capture product insights from these Zendesk tickets and link them to discoveries you're working on in Harvestr.

In Harvestr, you can set notifications that will be sent to Zendesk as internal notes to let support agents know about the status of the feedback they sent to Harvestr. To set these up, go to your Zendesk integration settings in Harvestr and activate the notifications you want.

Three types of notifications can be sent back to Zendesk:

For each notification, you can also choose to create a follow-up ticket if the ticket has been closed, by selecting the "Reopen if closed" option.

With these notifications, you can easily close the loop with your customers when a feature they are interested in has been released.

All the messages and notes of a ticket (from your users and teammates) are sent to Harvestr.

If you don't see escalated tickets in your Harvestr inbox, try to refresh it.

You can only have a single version of a given Zendesk ticket in your Harvestr account. A ticket cannot be sent again to Harvestr unless you delete the previous version forever from your Harvestr bin.

If a ticket is sent to Harvestr and new messages are added to the ticket in Zendesk afterwards, those messages are automatically synchronized in Harvestr.

If the synchronization stops working, try the following steps: