To set Fin up to handle Zendesk tickets, the first thing you need to do is import knowledge. Go to Channels > Zendesk tickets and select Add knowledge.

You can import knowledge by:

Next, customize how Fin responds to customers and hands off to your team when it’s unable to resolve a ticket by clicking on Answer and hand-off.

At the end of all paths (except for That helped ), Fin will unassign itself from the ticket and apply the “routed-to-the-team” tag.

You can tailor the experience further by:

Once you’ve finished tailoring the hand-off to your team, click Save.

Next, connect to Zendesk by entering your:

You can generate a new API token from your Zendesk Admin Center › Apps & Integrations › Zendesk API.

Then select Connect to the Zendesk API. This will only enable Fin for testing without affecting your live environment.

After connecting to the Zendesk API, select an identity for the AI agent on Zendesk. Fin will reply as this agent when a ticket is assigned to it in Zendesk. We suggest creating a new agent for it and making it explicit that it's an AI agent, rather than a human.

You can create a new agent from Zendesk Admin Center › People › Team members. You can use your own email address by appending “+fin” to the name (e.g. beth+fin@examply.io). You need to use a real email address because you'll need to verify the email address in Zendesk. Make sure to select “Agent” as the role since this account needs to be able to reply to tickets.

Once you've created a new agent account and verified it, you can select it under “AI Agent identity” in Channels > Zendesk tickets.

By default when you set Fin live, this will create a new trigger in Zendesk that automatically assigns all new tickets to Fin AI Agent (which triggers Fin to reply).

If you want to have more control, you can disable or edit this trigger in the “Auto assign tickets” section. You can also create your own custom triggers in Zendesk that assign tickets to Fin on any condition you choose.

After adding knowledge, connecting to Zendesk, and selecting an identity for AI Agent, you’ll be able to test Fin.

Send an email to the given email address with the subject line “Fin test” to see how Fin responds and ensure hand-offs to your team are working as expected.

Now you’re ready to set Fin live for your customers. Go to Channels > Zendesk tickets and select Turn Fin on.

When a customer sends an email or submits a form, this creates a ticket in Zendesk. Using Zendesk Triggers, you have full control over which tickets are automatically assigned to Fin.

For any conversation that gets assigned to Fin, it'll apply the fin-involved tag.

If Fin has relevant knowledge available to answer, Fin will respond and cite the sources it used, mark the ticket as solved, and apply the following tags:

If the question is ambiguous, Fin will ask clarifying questions and mark the ticket as pending. If the customer doesn't respond in 3 minutes, Fin will pass it to the team.

If Fin can’t find any relevant information in your knowledge to answer the question, it'll hand-off the ticket to the team by unassigning itself and marking the ticket as open.

Customers can ask follow-up questions and Fin will follow the same process.

If the customer says that it helped, the “fin-soft-resolution” tag will be removed and “fin-hard-resolution” applied.

If the customer asks to talk to the team, Fin will unassign itself from the ticket, remove the “fin-resolved” and “fin-soft/hard-resolution” tags and apply the “fin-routed-to-team” tag. Using this tag you can create additional Zendesk Triggers to route the ticket further.

The integration works by synchronizing Zendesk tickets to Intercom conversations. A ticket gets synced when it's assigned to a specified agent in Zendesk (e.g. Fin AI Agent). You can use Zendesk triggers to automatically assign tickets to Fin based on certain conditions.

By default the only user data attributes that get synced are name and email, but you can enable more attributes to be synced and further personalize the customer experience.

When a ticket is synced to Intercom, a customizable workflow will be triggered which lets Fin respond. Fin's response will get synced back to Zendesk.

The Zendesk API key provided to Intercom is stored as an encrypted record inside Intercom. This explains how the API token will used when integrating Fin with Zendesk.

During configuration, you must choose an admin or agent for Fin to reply as. This will use the Users API to list Agents and Admins from your Zendesk workspace for you to choose from.

Five new Zendesk Triggers are created using the Zendesk Triggers API:

When running the integration, Intercom uses the API token for the following:

A request is made to the Zendesk Tickets API for every new update to a Ticket assigned to Fin in Zendesk. This allows the ticket to be mirrored correctly in an Intercom conversation.

Fin will try to update the ticket in Zendesk with a conditional update. This means if another automation in your system (e.g. another Zendesk Trigger) has updated the ticket concurrently, Fin will respect the changes that were made and try to apply it’s own updates after a short delay.

Intercom usage of the API is limited to 50 requests per minute. This represents 50% of Zendesk’s minimum API usage allowance. This limit will soon be configurable by you. Requests over this limit are retried after a delay.