Zendesk

Zendesk is the support side of every customer relationship. Connecting it gives Sonora visibility into ticket volume, response times, sentiment trends, escalation patterns, and the actual content of support conversations. Those signals feed health scoring, eCSAT, and the support-related actions your CSMs see every morning.

Authentication uses an admin email plus a Zendesk-issued API token. The token is read-only.

What syncs

Object	Notes
Tickets	Subject, status, priority, type, custom fields
Comments	Internal notes and public replies (toggle in setup)
Users	End users (customers) and agents (your team)
Organizations	Map to Sonora customers via configured matching
Tags	Used as filters in chat and Canvas

Prerequisites

• Zendesk admin role
• Token authentication enabled in your Zendesk instance

Setup

1. Generate an API token

1. In Zendesk: Admin Center → Apps and integrations → APIs → Zendesk API.
2. On the Settings tab, enable Token Access if it isn’t already.
3. Click Add API token, label it “Sonora Integration”, and click Create.
4. Copy the token — Zendesk will not show it again.

2. Connect in Sonora

1. Settings → Integrations → Zendesk → Connect.
2. Fill in:
   • Subdomain — the prefix in your Zendesk URL (e.g., acme for acme.zendesk.com)
   • Admin Email — the email of the admin user the token is associated with
   • API Token — the token you just generated
3. Decide whether to Import ticket comments. Most teams leave this on; turn it off if you want only metadata for cost or compliance reasons.
4. Save.

The first import covers your active tickets and recent history. Sonora pulls updates incrementally after that.

Customer matching

Sonora matches Zendesk organizations to customers via name and domain. Configure organization matching from the Zendesk card after the initial sync — for B2B accounts where multiple end users share an organization, mapping the org once propagates to every related ticket.

Disconnect

From Settings → Integrations, click Disconnect on the Zendesk card. Revoke the token in Admin Center → APIs → Zendesk API to fully cut access.

Troubleshooting

“Couldn’t authenticate” — The most common cause is an admin email that doesn’t match the user the token belongs to. Tokens are scoped to the user that created them; the email field has to be that user’s email.

Ticket comments missing — Confirm “Import ticket comments” is enabled in the Zendesk card configuration.

Some tickets aren’t syncing — Zendesk’s group and brand restrictions can limit what an admin sees. If your admin account is restricted to one brand, create a token under an unrestricted account or scope the integration to the brand you want.

Rate limiting — Sonora respects Zendesk’s API limits and pauses automatically when a window is exhausted. Initial backfills for instances with millions of tickets may take several hours.