Support (Zendesk)

💼 Business Context

• Support agents resolve tickets faster and with better judgment (e.g., escalation priority) when they immediately see a customer's tier and relationship context, without pivoting to another tool mid-conversation
• Reduces average handle time and improves first-contact resolution for high-value customers
• Owned by Customer Support Operations / Platform Engineering

🔌 Technical Overview

A hybrid approach: a scheduled Reverse ETL job (Docker container on Azure Container Apps Jobs) bulk-syncs baseline profile fields into Zendesk custom user fields via its Bulk API, while a lighter real-time path — reusing the Journeys & Automation webhook dispatcher — pushes the small set of fields needed for a Zendesk sidebar app to show live context (current LTV band, open household tickets) at ticket-open time, since support interactions are more time-sensitive than a typical CRM sync.

💾 Zendesk Sidebar Context

GET /zendesk-sidebar/context?customer_key=cust_004821

{
  "lifecycle_stage": "active",
  "ltv_band": "gold",
  "open_household_tickets": 1,
  "churn_risk": 0.12
}

🔗 Integration Points

• Business Systems (Data Sources) — Zendesk as an original ticket-data source, distinct from this reverse sync
• Journeys & Automation's webhook dispatcher — reused for the real-time sidebar context path
• Relationships (Identity & Profile Service) — household ticket context surfaced in the sidebar
• Profile API — underlying data source for both the bulk and real-time paths

🧰 Services Consumed

• Owning microservice — Cxos.Connectors.Zendesk (write path) (see the Full Application Service Map)
• No dedicated database — stateless connector (see Platform Connectors above)

⚠️ Non-Functional Considerations

• Scale: bulk sync covers the full customer base on a schedule; real-time sidebar calls scale with concurrent open tickets, a much smaller number
• Latency: bulk fields refresh hourly; sidebar context loads within the ticket-open critical path, targeting under 300ms
• Reliability: sidebar app falls back to the last bulk-synced value if the real-time context call fails, rather than showing a blank panel
• Security/Privacy: support agents see only fields approved for support-context display — sensitive fields like raw payment data are never included in this sync

🎯 Enterprise Example

A gold-tier customer calls in about a billing issue. Before the agent finishes the greeting, the Zendesk sidebar already shows their tier, churn risk, and a note that another household member has an open ticket — context that used to require three separate lookups across different systems.