Zendesk Integration

Connect ProductBridge to Zendesk to automatically capture feedback from support tickets and let your agents submit feedback directly from the Zendesk sidebar app.

Overview

The Zendesk integration connects your Zendesk workspace to ProductBridge so you can capture product feedback the moment it surfaces in support — without leaving Zendesk. Once installed, the ProductBridge app appears inside Zendesk as a sidebar app, and every ticket which is recently created with status is analyzed by AI to extract feature requests, bug reports, and pain points automatically.

There are two ways feedback flows from Zendesk into ProductBridge:

Sidebar App — Support agents search existing feedback, vote on posts, or create new feedback posts directly from any Zendesk ticket — no context switching required.
Automatic Ticket Analysis — When a ticket is created with any status, ProductBridge receives a webhook event, fetches the full conversation, and runs it through an AI pipeline. Tickets that contain product feedback automatically become posts.

Prerequisites

A Zendesk account with Admin access
A ProductBridge organization with at least one feedback board configured
A Zendesk OAuth access token (personal API token or full OAuth app)

Connect Zendesk

Open the Admin Dashboard

Enter Your Credentials and Connect

On the Zendesk integration page, enter your Zendesk subdomain (e.g., yourcompany for yourcompany.zendesk.com) and your OAuth access token, then click Connect.

ProductBridge validates the token by fetching your Zendesk account settings before proceeding.

If your access token supports the offline_access scope, also provide the refresh token and expiry value so ProductBridge can renew the token automatically before it expires.

Authorize in Zendesk

ProductBridge connects to Zendesk using your credentials and automatically sets up:

Click on allow, it will do following events

A "ProductBridge Feedback" webhook subscribed to all ticket events
A Zendesk trigger that fires on ticket Create and Change events
The ProductBridge sidebar app installed into your Zendesk workspace

Confirm Connection

After setup completes, the integration status updates to Connected, and the page displays your Zendesk subdomain, account name, and the registered webhook and trigger IDs.

ProductBridge immediately begins a 30-day backfill of your solved and closed tickets in the background.

What Happens After Install

Immediately after connection, ProductBridge:

Encrypts and stores your access token and credentials
Creates a "ProductBridge Feedback" webhook in Zendesk subscribed to all conditional ticket events
Registers a Zendesk trigger that fires on ticket Create and Change events, delivering ticket ID, subject, status, priority, tags, and requester info
Installs the ProductBridge sidebar app in your Zendesk workspace, visible in every ticket's details panel
Queues a 30-day backfill of solved and closed tickets for AI analysis

Submit Feedback from Zendesk

After installation, your team can capture feedback in two ways.

When the ProductBridge app is installed, it appears in the ticket details panel (right sidebar) of every Zendesk ticket. Agents can search existing feedback, vote on posts, create new posts, and link tickets — all without leaving Zendesk.

How it works:

Open a Ticket in Zendesk

Navigate to any ticket in your Zendesk Inbox. The ProductBridge sidebar app appears in the right panel showing your 10 most recent feedback posts

Search Existing Feedback

Use the search bar to check whether the user's input already matches a known feedback item. Type a keyword and ProductBridge returns the closest matching posts.

Upvote or Create New

If an existing post matches, click it to view the details and add a vote. If the feedback is new, click Create New Post.

Fill the Feedback Form

Select a target board, enter a title, and add a description. The form is pre-filled with customer context from the active Zendesk ticket so authorship and source metadata are linked automatically.

Submit

Click Submit. The post is created instantly, tagged and auto-approved since a teammate created it.

Agents can also link an existing feedback post to the current ticket directly from the sidebar without creating a new post — useful when a customer mentions something already tracked.

when link a ticket to an already existed feedback post, it will be linked and shown on the feedback post detail

2. Automatic Ticket Analysis

When a ticket is created or updated in Zendesk, ProductBridge receives a webhook event. It fetches the full ticket — including all comments and requester information — and runs it through the AI pipeline to determine whether the ticket contains actionable product feedback.

Tickets with product feedback (feature requests, bug reports, UX complaints, performance issues, integration requests) automatically become feedback posts. Routine support resolutions — password resets, billing inquiries, account questions — are silently discarded.

Agents can also create feedback posts manually from the Zendesk sidebar app without going through the AI pipeline — the post is created instantly with the title and description they provide..

Automatic analysis runs on every solved and closed ticket. There are no capture modes or ticket filters — all solved and closed tickets are analyzed uniformly.

Backfill

When you first connect Zendesk, ProductBridge automatically backfills tickets from the last 30 days. Each solved or closed ticket from that window is queued for AI analysis and becomes a feedback post if it contains feedback.

You can see backfill progress in the integration settings page.

Backfill runs in the background and can take from a few minutes to several hours depending on ticket volume. New tickets from the moment of connection onward are processed in near real time via webhooks.

How Feedback Is Processed

All Zendesk feedback — whether from the sidebar app or automatic ticket analysis — flows through ProductBridge's AI pipeline:

Stage	What Happens
Normalize	Ticket subject, description, public comments, requester info, tags, priority, satisfaction rating, and channel (email/web/phone/chat/API) are combined into a structured format
Detect	LLM determines if the ticket contains product feedback. Confidence rises for low satisfaction ratings, escalated priority, feature-request/bug tags, and multi-comment discussions. Skipped for sidebar app submissions — confidence is auto-set to 0.95
Extract	LLM extracts title, description, sentiment, priority, feature area, pain points, and customer context (technical level, user role, company tier)
Deduplicate	Semantic search (Voyage AI + Qdrant) checks for similar existing posts. If similarity ≥ 0.85, votes on the existing post instead of creating a duplicate
Organize	LLM assigns the right board, category, and tags

Zendesk feedback is tagged with source: zendesk and source_type: integration (or source_type: manual for sidebar submissions). The original Zendesk ticket URL is stored in the post's metadata so you can jump from a feedback post back to the source conversation.

Priority escalation factors specific to Zendesk:

Satisfaction rating of "bad" or low score boosts priority
High or urgent ticket priority maps to elevated feedback priority
Enterprise organization or paid customer tier adds priority weight
Bug reports and performance issues are bumped one tier

Security

The Zendesk integration verifies every incoming webhook using HMAC-SHA256 signatures. Each request from Zendesk includes:

X-Zendesk-Webhook-Signature — Cryptographic signature
X-Zendesk-Webhook-Signature-Timestamp — Unix timestamp

ProductBridge validates the signature by computing HMAC-SHA256 over the timestamp and raw request body, then comparing against the header value using constant-time comparison. Any request that fails signature verification is rejected before processing.

Access tokens, refresh tokens, and subdomain credentials are all encrypted at rest using Fernet symmetric encryption with a server-managed key. If a refresh token is available, ProductBridge proactively refreshes the access token 5 minutes before expiry so the integration never silently breaks due to token expiration.

Limitations

No historical backfill beyond 30 days — Backfill only covers the 30 days before connection. Older tickets cannot be imported retroactively
Public comments only — Internal notes and private comments are not included in AI analysis
Side conversations not supported — Side conversations within tickets are not captured
One Zendesk account per organization — Connect a different ProductBridge organization for each Zendesk account
Forum and community posts not captured — Only support tickets are analyzed; Zendesk Guide posts and community content are not processed
Backfill will be done — Only at first time of connect, we do backfill from past 30 days of tickets with status solved and closed

Disconnect

To disconnect Zendesk, navigate to Settings > Integrations > Zendesk and click Disconnect. ProductBridge:

Deletes the Zendesk trigger registered during setup
Deletes the "ProductBridge Feedback" webhook from Zendesk
Uninstalls the ProductBridge sidebar app from your Zendesk workspace
Marks the integration as disconnected
Stops processing incoming webhook events

Existing feedback posts remain in ProductBridge — only the live connection is removed.

Sidebar app not appearing — Verify the integration shows as Connected in ProductBridge settings. Reload the Zendesk page. If the app is still missing, disconnect and reconnect to reinstall it.
Tickets not creating feedback — Not every ticket contains product feedback. The AI pipeline only creates posts when it detects actionable product input with sufficient confidence. Check the integration logs in Settings > Integrations > Zendesk > Activity to see which tickets were processed and why each was accepted or discarded.
Duplicate feedback — ProductBridge deduplicates automatically using semantic similarity search. If a similar post already exists, the new ticket adds a vote to the existing post rather than creating a duplicate.
Webhook signature errors — If you see signature verification failures in logs, the signing secret stored by ProductBridge may have rotated. Disconnect and reconnect the integration to refresh the secret.
Missing user data — Requester details without an email in Zendesk are imported as anonymous. Ensure your Zendesk contacts have email addresses for full user linking.
Backfill taking a long time — Backfill volume depends on how many tickets were solved or closed in the last 30 days. It runs as a background job and new tickets are processed in real time independently.
Token expiry errors — If you provided a refresh token, ProductBridge renews the access token automatically. If you did not provide a refresh token, reconnect with a fresh access token. Using the offline_access OAuth scope prevents this issue.
Re-authorize — If the connection stops working, revoke and reconnect from Settings > Integrations > Zendesk. This refreshes credentials, re-registers the webhook and trigger, and reinstalls the sidebar app.

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