Zendesk has become the customer service platform of choice for thousands of organizations, from startups to enterprises. With this centrality comes responsibility: Zendesk instances accumulate years of customer interactions containing names, email addresses, phone numbers, account details, payment information, and sensitive circumstances. Every support ticket, chat conversation, and email thread contributes to this growing repository of personal information requiring protection.
Our Zendesk integration enables automated, systematic redaction across your entire Zendesk instance. Whether you need real-time processing as tickets arrive, batch cleanup of historical data, or selective redaction before analytics export, the integration handles the complexity while respecting Zendesk's data model and workflow patterns.
Integration Architecture
The Zendesk integration uses multiple connection methods for flexible deployment:
Webhook Integration: Zendesk triggers can send webhooks on ticket events (create, update, status change). Our processing endpoint receives the webhook, retrieves ticket content via API, processes for PII, and updates the ticket with redacted content. This enables event-driven, automatic processing.
Zendesk App: Our Marketplace app provides an agent-side interface for on-demand redaction. Agents can trigger processing for specific tickets, preview redactions, and control redaction options—useful for selective processing or handling edge cases.
Batch API Processing: For historical data or bulk processing, our API can iterate through tickets using Zendesk's API, processing at configurable rates to stay within Zendesk's rate limits. This handles initial deployment or periodic cleanup runs.
Middleware Deployment: For maximum control, deploy our processing as middleware between Zendesk and your other systems—processing ticket exports, API calls, or data warehouse feeds.
Ticket Processing
Zendesk tickets contain multiple content elements requiring processing:
Ticket Description: The initial customer message describing their issue. This often contains the most detailed customer information as users explain their situations.
Public Comments: Customer and agent responses visible to the requester. Both sides of the conversation may contain PII requiring protection.
Internal Notes: Private notes visible only to agents. May contain verification information, account details, or sensitive context inappropriate for long-term retention.
Custom Fields: Organization-specific fields that may capture structured PII. Processing can target specific fields based on your data model.
Ticket Metadata: Requester name, email, phone in ticket header fields. These can be redacted while preserving ticket functionality using Zendesk's user merging or anonymization features.
Attachment Handling
Customer attachments present significant PII exposure:
Screenshots: Customers frequently attach screenshots showing error messages, account pages, or system information. These images may display PII not present in ticket text. OCR extraction and visual redaction protects this content.
Documents: PDF invoices, Word documents, spreadsheets, and other files often contain detailed personal or financial information. Document processing handles these with format preservation.
Identity Documents: For account verification, customers may upload ID photos, utility bills, or other identity documents. These require sensitive handling and likely removal rather than redaction.
Processing Options: Attachments can be: redacted in place (original replaced), processed to a separate location (originals preserved for compliance), or flagged for manual review (sensitive categories).
Zendesk Chat Integration
Real-time chat presents unique processing requirements:
Real-Time Filtering: Process chat messages as they arrive, before agents see them. This prevents agents from ever viewing certain PII categories (credit card numbers, SSNs) while allowing general conversation.
Transcript Processing: After chat completion, process the full transcript before archival. The final transcript stored in Zendesk contains redacted content.
Chat-to-Ticket: When chats convert to tickets, ensure the ticket version contains appropriate redaction consistent with ticket policies.
Chatbot Integration: If using Zendesk chatbots, ensure training data used to improve bot responses has PII removed.
Trigger Configuration
Zendesk triggers enable automatic processing based on events:
On Ticket Creation: Process new tickets immediately after creation. Catches PII before agents see it for the first time. Best for preventing initial exposure.
On Ticket Update: Process when tickets are updated (new comments). Ensures ongoing conversation maintains redaction. Can be combined with conditions (only public comments, only customer messages).
On Status Change: Process when tickets reach certain statuses. Common pattern: redact when ticket is Solved or Closed, preserving full data during active support but protecting archives.
Scheduled Processing: Rather than event-driven, process tickets on schedule (nightly, weekly). Useful for batch operations and resource management.
Zendesk Explore Analytics
Redaction preserves analytics capabilities while protecting privacy:
Clean Data Feed: Redacted tickets feed into Explore with PII removed but metadata intact. Analyze trends, response times, and satisfaction without personal details.
Preserved Structure: Redaction uses consistent markers ([EMAIL_REDACTED]) that don't break Explore reports. Word clouds, text analysis, and other features work with redacted content.
Historical Compatibility: Batch-redact historical data to create consistent datasets for longitudinal analysis.
Guide Knowledge Base
Protecting Zendesk Guide content:
Ticket-to-Article: When tickets become knowledge articles, processing ensures customer PII doesn't appear in published content.
Article Processing: Scan existing articles for accidentally included PII from copied ticket content.
Community Forums: If using Zendesk Community, monitor user posts for PII and offer processing options.
Compliance Workflows
Supporting GDPR, CCPA, and other requirements:
Data Subject Access Requests: When users request their data, redact third-party PII from the response while providing the requester's own information.
Right to Erasure: Identify and process all tickets for a requester. Redaction can anonymize tickets while preserving support history, or prepare tickets for deletion.
Retention Policies: Automatically process tickets older than retention period before archival or deletion.
Audit Trail: Document what was redacted, when, and why for compliance verification.
Agent Experience
Balancing protection with agent effectiveness:
Contextual Markers: Redaction markers ([CREDIT_CARD], [SSN]) tell agents what type of data was present without exposing values. Agents understand context without viewing sensitive data.
Selective Access: Configure which PII types to redact based on agent role. Fraud teams might see more than general support. Zendesk roles can map to redaction profiles.
Override Capability: For legitimate needs, authorized agents can request unredacted view with proper logging and justification—supporting the principle of accessible data with accountability.
Sidebar Tools: Our Zendesk app provides agents tools to identify PII in their own responses before sending, preventing accidental inclusion.
Deployment Process
Getting started with Zendesk redaction:
1. Connect: Authenticate via Zendesk OAuth to grant necessary API access.
2. Configure: Define redaction types, processing triggers, and handling options.
3. Test: Process sample tickets to verify detection and output quality.
4. Deploy: Enable production processing with monitoring.
5. Monitor: Dashboard shows processing volume, detection rates, and any errors requiring attention.
