How to integrate Zendesk with Jira? 2 proven methods

Discover how to integrate Zendesk with Jira and improve customer experience.

‘The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.’ – Jeff Bezos

What the founder of Amazon said is true – customers strive for quick, efficient, and convenient customer support, and phone calls are not it. This is why it is crucial to introduce platforms like Zendesk – where your agents can contact your clients via tickets, and customers are able to discuss their issues in the open and solve each other's problems. However, simply using Zendesk is not enough.

If you are running a wide project, providing the best customer support might be connected with directing the tickets to technical teams. Whether it is a bug report or a problem with a user’s account, some issues require contacting your project management team. However, the workflow in project management is quite different from the one in customer support. Developers use separate tools to streamline their workflows, such as Jira. Therefore, if you desire to achieve a smooth and quick workflow it is best to sync the tools used by both teams. In this article, we will focus on integrating two particular platforms: Zendesk and Jira. Read on to learn how to integrate Zendesk with Jira.  

Integrating Jira with Zendesk – why should you do it?

Being able to access both your process management and your customer support in one place comes with a plethora of benefits. After all, organizations need an integration solution to accelerate their workflows and thus achieve better results. So, what are the benefits of integrating Zendesk with Jira? We will explain that below.

• Improved efficiency

Integrating Zendesk to Jira allows your company to save time. Using these two platforms separately means copy-pasting data manually and is time-consuming. If you combine them, on the other hand, the information flow will be seamless, and more effective. It has been proven that companies with a quicker workflow outperform their competitors, thus this is a major advantage.

• Better collaboration

The service desk and the development team need to work together – the former are able to acquire information from the clients, while the latter prepare solutions based on it. Integrating data between Jira and Zendesk is, therefore, crucial – the development teams will receive the exact data provided by the customers, with no information being omitted. This is vital when working in big teams which solve hundreds of tickets each day – exchanging data manually would slow down the processes significantly.

• Clear insight for evaluation

Integrating Zendesk to Jira means that you will be able to overlook the processes connected with customer support. As a consequence, it should be easy to spot workflow elements that need to be changed or modified because they take too much time, or require additional steps which could be avoided otherwise. With this knowledge, you can polish your internal customer support problem-solving procedures to achieve the most time- and cost-effective solutions.

How to integrate Zendesk with Jira? – doing it manually

Jira-Zendesk integration requires completing several steps. These include:

• Preparing for the integration

Before you start your Zendesk to Jira integration process, you need to make sure that you comply with the requirements for successful integration. What you need to do is:

• Have administrator permissions in both Zendesk and Jira.
• Have full permission to create and update projects.
• Be in Jira administrators and Jira software users group.
• Have Atlassian add-ons enabled (It should be so by default).
• Have third-party cookies enabled.

Only after ensuring that the following requirements are met,  you can proceed to the next steps.

• Integrating Zendesk to Jira

1. Click Apps in the Jira menu.

2. Select Marketplace apps.

3. Locate and click Zendesk Support for Jira.

4. Click Get app.

5. Install it.

6. When you see the notification, select Configure.

7. Select your Zendesk subdomain.

8. Authenticate.

9. A window will appear – log in to your Zendesk account.

10. Configure the information that you want to see in your Jira issues.

• Restricting access to the Jira Cloud app

In some cases, you might want to limit the kind of users who can access your Jira Cloud app. You might do this in Zendesk. You need to localize the Jira Cloud app in the Apps and Integrations menu and change the settings. There, in the Installation menu, you will be able to enable role restrictions.

How to integrate Zendesk with Jira? – automated alternative

While integrating Jira with Zendesk manually might seem quite easy, it has one major disadvantage – it requires coding. This means that project managers need to involve IT teams to set up and modify data integration. However, this increases the costs of the whole project and consumes the time that IT technicians could spend on other activities. There is, however, a solution to this issue.

You do not have to integrate Jira with Zendesk manually. The Intelligent automation platform is capable of a seamless Zendesk Jira Integration. This platform does not require coding – data integration is set through trigger-based events.

Thus, you can easily configure numerous aspects of your integration with it, such as:

• Frequency of integration – Choose how often you want to integrate data between these two platforms.
• No-code configuration - Use a pre-built connector to accelerate the delivery of your solutions and scale through configuration techniques.
•  Process Automation – Set up and control automation to complete repetitive tasks, scale the execution of operations and save the developer’s time.

Apart from making Zendesk to Jira integration effortless, introducing an intelligent automation platform can enhance the efficiency of your whole business – even the non-customer-service-related repetitive tasks, such as sending e-mails within the organization, will be done automatically, and your data analysis will improve. There are numerous advantages of using such platforms – read our article on what is intelligent automation to learn more.

Zendesk to Jira integration – use cases

Since now you know, how to integrate Zendesk and Jira, let us take a look at the popular use cases of this combination. The former is chiefly used for customer service and support, so these will resolve around this area of your business.

• Improving customer experience

When building your customer support, one of the goals is to create the finest experience for your clients. The main aim to do that is by making the process quick and effective. 

The customer support team uses Zendesk to create tickets, based on their interactions with customers. These tickets including details of issues and bugs should be quickly sent to Jira to let developers see them and start fixing them. 

Put It Forward's intelligent automation platform helps automatically transfer these issues from Zendesk to Jira under the conditions you need. The developers can look at issues in Jira, mark them as ‘resolved’, and send them back to Zendesk. The customer service team can then provide the customers with a resolution to their problems.

Integrating Jira and Zendesk will let you achieve that – better communication means quicker, more accurate solutions, thus happier customers.

• Accelerating sales and onboarding processes

Sales teams work with customers to set up contracts. During this process, they need to collect and manage a variety of data, stored in Zendesk. As the sale is made, the data needs to be pushed to Jira. 

Jira to Zendesk integration can do this automatically, filtering the data and transferring what’s needed to Jira tickets. So the customer service team can use these tickets to help set the new customers up with their accounts.

• Analyzing your customer service agents’ performance

Creating directories and analyzing the data collected in both Zendesk and Jira is often used to evaluate your customer support agents. You will be able to spot, which of your employees ask the customers accurate questions and maintain a smooth information flow. 

It will also be possible to observe which developers are most dedicated and efficient at problem-solving. This will let you introduce training and approach each of your employees individually. After all, it’s important for the atmosphere to reward the model workers and improve the skills of those less proficient.

• Streamlining workflows

An integration of Jira and Zendesk is often used by project managers to organize processes more effectively. Setting up deadlines or assigning tasks for both teams working on a ticket is much easier and quicker when done in one place. What is more, it allows for better evaluation of the workflow, thus eliminating any inefficient practices.

Key takeaways on how and why to integrate Jira and Zendesk

Integrating Zendesk and Jira is crucial for better customer experience. It makes the customer support processes seamless and increases the level of collaboration between the development and customer service teams. You can integrate these apps in two ways – either manually in Jira or by using the intelligent automation platform. Combining them will let you achieve better results in customer experience through quicker processes, more self-troubleshooting guides, and higher employee satisfaction and qualification.