Syncing Articles from Zendesk Knowledge Base to Salesforce Knowledge – A Success Story

Customers need excellent support with minimal human interaction. That’s why they prefer self-service.

And to keep customers hooked to your product, you need to give them an easily accessible and all-encompassing collection of FAQs – a knowledge base.

Most organizations use a comprehensive knowledge base, out of which Zendesk knowledge base and Salesforce Knowledge are two of the most common platforms for organizing knowledge, empowering customers and support agents with relevant information, and delivering a great customer experience.

You could be doing either one of the following:

• Using Salesforce Knowledge as a centralized knowledge-base and, simultaneously, a Zendesk knowledge-base.
• Using a Zendesk knowledge-base but wishing to move to Salesforce Knowledge.

And if you find yourself in these two situations, you might require an integration connector that enables hassle-free syncing of data from Zendesk knowledge base to Salesforce Knowledge.

You might think, why go for a connector over manually transferring data from Zendesk to Salesforce?

Well, the manual process to move data from one platform to another is complex and time-consuming. And the timeline of this move can be anywhere between a few weeks to a few months (depending on the amount of data you have in place). Additionally, data migration should be done with utmost precision so that the historical data isn’t lost and is mapped accurately.

We understand the importance of a seamless data sync and the necessity to cut down on migration time. And that’s why our experts have created the Zendesk Knowledge-Base and Salesforce Knowledge Connector.

Let’s take a look at how this connector enabled seamless syncing of knowledge articles from Zendesk KB to Salesforce for a leading US-based cloud contact center software provider.

How it Began

The customer was using Zendesk as their knowledge base. However, as their business began to grow at a full-throttle speed, the need for a more dynamic customer community arose. They believed that Salesforce Community Cloud fit the bill. Thus, they built a community on it and enabled Salesforce Knowledge.

Their teams, however, were more comfortable using Zendesk as their knowledge base, so they decided to retain it and wanted to sync the data from Zendesk KB to Salesforce Knowledge.

But making the move for their historical data from the Zendesk knowledge base to Salesforce Knowledge was complex because of the different data structures of both platforms.

So, they were looking for adept Salesforce consultants who could ensure a smooth data sync from Zendesk KB to Salesforce Knowledge.

What We Did

After the customer saw this connector in action, they decided to go with it.

We deployed the Zendesk and Salesforce Knowledge connector into the systems and enabled the integration.

After this, we did a one-time data migration for moving data from the Zendesk knowledge base to Salesforce Knowledge.

With the connector enabled, the challenge of the different data structures of Zendesk and Salesforce was resolved since the data mapping rules were configured in the connector.

Some technical hiccups that came our way while moving data from Zendesk KB to Salesforce were:

• Syncing of labels
• WISTIA video links in their knowledge articles that were not supported by Salesforce

We resolved the label sync challenge from the backend and used iFrame to convert the WISTIA video links into Salesforce-compliant ones.

The connector empowered their teams with the following:

• Real-time and auto-syncing of knowledge articles from Zendesk to Salesforce
• Scheduled syncing based on a defined time (daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly)
• Easy pre-defined mapping of article categories from Zendesk to Salesforce
• Hassle-free data management without any breakages

An updated and robust knowledge base can help you increase customer satisfaction and retention rates, which will, in turn, increase your profits.

For a detailed look into the solutions and its outcome, check out this case study.

Wish to seamlessly sync articles from Zendesk KB to Salesforce Knowledge? Let’s talk.