Sync CRM Contacts to Zendesk Users

In the Ultimate edition of the integration, you are able to sync CRM contacts as Zendesk users. When enabled, this is an always-on one-way sync. When a contact is created or updated in your CRM, the changes will be put in a queue to be processed by the scheduler.  The scheduler runs every 5 minutes to send new records to Zendesk.

Currently, only the email address, phone number, and name are synced to Zendesk. 

The sync is not enabled by default when you are using the Ultimate edition (as of version 2.7.9), but instructions for turning it on are below:

1. From within your CRM, navigate to the Admin page.
2. Under System, click Scheduler.
3. Click the FanaticalZendesk scheduler.
4. In the top left, click Edit.
5. Change the Status drop-down from Inactive to Active.
6. Click Save.

Once the scheduler is turned on, all new contacts in Sugar will be synced to Zendesk.  However, depending on how many users you have in Zendesk, you may want to run an initial sync of all CRM contacts to Zendesk.  When doing so, you'll likely fall into one of the two scenarios. 

Please click your scenario to find best practices for syncing in order to avoid having duplicate users in Zendesk.

Scenario 1: I've been using Zendesk for a while and most of my customers are already in Zendesk

Scenario 2: I'm new to Zendesk, and I have no or very few users in Zendesk

Other things you can do:

Only sync contacts from a specific Sugar team

I want to turn off CRM contact syncing

If you've been using Zendesk for a while and many of your customers are already in Zendesk:

If many of your customers are already in Zendesk, you will need to do an initial CSV import of your CRM contacts to Zendesk as users. This process will map/import the CRM Contact Record ID to the Zendesk User External ID field so that future updates from CRM will update the proper Zendesk user account.

1. To generate the export, go to your CRM and create a Rows & Column Report based on the Contacts module (if your CRM does not have reports, you can run a direct database query to generate this). You do not need to add any filters (unless you only want to add a subset of CRM contacts to Zendesk). Display the email address (under the Email Address module) and ID fields. Then Save and Run the report.
2. Click to Export and download the CSV. It should look something like this:
3. Open the CSV file in Excel or a text editor and change the header row to the following: email,external_id
4. Go to Zendesk > Settings > People. On the right side of the page, click Bulk User Import. You can read more about the importer and other things it can accomplish here. (Note:  The Zendesk importer can only import 1999 users at a time. So if you have more than 2000 lines in your file, you will need to break the file into multiple files in order for the Zendesk import to work.)
5. Under the Select CSV file section, upload and import your file. If you have multiple files to run, do them all here. (Note: You can only have two simultaneous imports going at once so you may need to wait until one completes to start the next if you're importing multiple files.)
6. After doing this, follow the next steps below the If you are NEW to Zendesk section.

 

If you are NEW to Zendesk and there are NO Zendesk Users in the system:

By default when you first install the integration, CRM contacts will only be synced as individual records are created or updated in CRM. As this happens, the records are queued for syncing, and when the CRM scheduler runs they'll be added over in Zendesk. If you need to sync existing Sugar contracts to Zendesk as users, follow the instructions here.

If you want to only sync contacts from a specific Sugar Team:

If you only want contacts from a certain Sugar team to sync over to Zendesk, please do the following:

1. Find the ID of the team you want to sync. You can do this by going to Sugar > Admin > Team Management. Click on the team name you want to sync. Look in the URL bar, you will see a long string, something like this:
   https://yourinstance.demo.sugarcrm.com/#bwc/index.php?module=Teams&offset=4&stamp=1517247899051855700&return_module=Teams&action=DetailView&record=c0eb9b7e-ba6d-11e7-8100-02b6c8b587a1
2. Look for the part that says "record=", the long string after it is the Team ID we're looking for. In my example above it is: c0eb9b7e-ba6d-11e7-8100-02b6c8b587a1 (it will be different for you)
3. Copy the Team ID. We will use it in the next step:

If you're using Sugar 7 or above:

Open your browser's console (right click and click "Inspect" or follow these steps) and paste the following in your browser's developer console:

(Be sure to replace {TEAMID} with your team id. Ex. c0eb9b7e-ba6d-11e7-8100-02b6c8b587a1)

SUGAR.App.api.call('get',SUGAR.App.api.buildURL('FanaticalZendesk/setting/sync_by_team/{TEAMID}'),{},{})

Sugar 6 or SuiteCRM:

Go to your database and run the following query:

(Be sure to replace {TEAMID} with your team id. Ex. c0eb9b7e-ba6d-11e7-8100-02b6c8b587a1)

UPDATE config SET value={TEAMID} WHERE name='sync_by_team' AND category='fanaticalzendesk';