Nicereply Blog

As you might have noticed, Nicereply has a simple yet powerful way to integrate with virtually any helpdesk system. To have a clear view on how to make this work, we are about to demonstrate a way to connect it with Zendesk, one of the most popular helpdesk systems around.

Since the best way to wrap your head around it is by providing an example, let’s say we run a hypothetical company that cares about their customers, uses Zendesk and wants to use Nicereply for getting customer feedback on it’s agents.

• Our company is called Fat Cat, ltd.
• We have two user agents, John Garfield and Betty Kitty.
• We already have a Zendesk account at http://fatcat.zendesk.com
• We’ve already signed up for Nicereply and created accounts for both our agents.

Setting up Nicereply

First we have to edit user IDs of our agents to match those at Zendesk. We do this by copying the ID part of URL at John Garfield’s Zendesk profile to field ‘Username’ at Nicereply profile in Settings -> Edit Person. We repeat this with Betty Kitty.

Next, we have to activate the Ticket Link feature (Settings -> Ticket link) to link every rating to a ticket at Zendesk. We put our zendesk ticket URL into “Ticket system URL” field, in this case http://fatcat.zendesk.com/tickets/<TICKET_ID>.

Setting up Zendesk

Now comes the Zendesk part. There are more ways to achieve the rating link to appear in your support emails, we’ll do it by editing the triggers ( Manage -> Triggers & email notificaitons ). This way you can choose whether your customers will be able to rate only solved ticket, every comment someone adds, or whatever else if you have a custom trigger in place. We choose the default “Notify requester of comment update”.

Good thing for us, Zendesk provides a nice way to add variables (they call it placeholders) to every email notification for customers. This means it’s quite easy for us to construct a proper and working rating link. The only thing we have to do now is add this to the trigger email body when editing the trigger:

Please, rate my reply here:
http://nicereply.com/fat-cat/{{current_user.id}}/{{ticket.id}}

And that’s it!

We have now successfully connected Nicereply and Zendesk. Your customers will now be able to rate your helpdesk emails and you’ll have the ability to easily evaluate performance of your helpdesk team AND see which ticket each rating relates to.

And by the way, we’re also planning to create a Nicereply widget for Zendesk, let us know what would you like it to do.