Automating WhatsApp Outreach in Zendesk

december 3, 2020

Why should I use WhatsApp?

You have your Zendesk setup and are using it to help your customers, uphold your SLA’s and get your team informed about what are the most urgent things not to miss. That’s great, but maybe sometimes it feels like your messages are not reaching your audience well enough? You’re probably using email to communicate and are noticing that your team and your customers miss some of your messages. Sadly that’s the norm nowadays, with people only opening about 15-25% e-mails on average (source, campaignmonitor).

Ready to use WhatsApp for your business?

There is another way. WhatsApp has an open rate of 98%

It’s an uncharted territory for business with WhatsApp just recently opening it up for B2B purposes. Sadly they are charging big prices for this (8 cent per message) and want to check every message you send to be sure you’re not sending annoying messages or doing things they can make money from in another way (remember; WhatsApp is owned by Facebook!). Nick to the rescue!

What’s Nick

Nick is a tool for sending out WhatsApp messages whenever you want, however you want. It’s easy to set up and this guide will help you get it set up with Zendesk so that you can do automatic outreach. This guide will explain how to add it to Zendesk and how to use it in your automations or triggers to create valuable interactions with your customers or team. Unsure what to do? Skip to the end for some ideas!

Setting up Nick with Zendesk

Create a Nick account

The first step is to create an account. Use the prompt to the right of me to set up an account, and you’ll receive an e-mail with three things you need

instance id

The id of your instance. It’s a computer generated string that describes what server is yours. You need it to login to your account. Write it down somewhere, or add it to your password manager.

password

The password for accessing your instance. Together with your instance id you can use it to log in to your instance at https://app.getnick.io . It’s computer generated just like the instance id to make sure it’s a safe password and nobody is sending messages in your name. Write it down or add it to your password manager too.

bearer token

The bearer token looks wildly techy. This is your key to access your Nick instance “API”. It’s long to make sure your messages are protected. Copy it somewhere for later use and make sure to keep it safe!

Coupling Nick to WhatsApp

To give Nick access to your phone we need to connect it with the use of a QR code. By scanning the QR code in WhatsApp your phone authorises Nick to send messages on your behalf. If you don’t want to use it anymore you can disconnect it again from your connected devices screen in WhatsApp itself.

Open WhatsApp on the phone you want to send messages from
Open the menu with the three dots
Go to WhatsApp Web
Press the “plus” icon”
Now on your PC login to Nick through the link you got, or by filling in your details at https://app.getnick.io
Scroll down to your QR code
Scan it with your phone. Not working? Manually refresh the Nick page to get a fresh QR code. They only last for 30 seconds so be quick.

That’s it! You’ll be able to see Nick as a logged in device on the list. If you want try sending a test message from your dashboard. Don’t forget to add the country code at the start (without a plus). So sending a message to the dutch number 06-12345678 should be put in as 31612345678.

Connecting Zendesk with Nick

Your phone is now ready to take orders for typing WhatsApp messages. Now we need to automate Zendesk to give orders to Nick on sending messages. To do this we’ll add a “target” to Zendesk. You can then reuse this target to send messages!

Set up a target

Login to Zendesk.
Go to settings (the cogwheel) and select “Extensions” there.
You should be met with a menu with “Targets” and “CRM”. Go to the targets tab.
Choose “Add Target”
Select HTTP target
Fill in the title “Nick WhatsApp Message”
Fill in the URL https://hook.integromat.com/b4xceji7rav9acjnplkmbt4ldt6w4bdf (it’s a weird URL because Zendesk doesn’t add authentication for webhooks yet, so we added it for you so your messages are safe 😉)
For method choose POST
For Content Type choose JSON
Test the target with the following JSON. Fill in the place holders
{
    “token”: “COPY YOUR TOKEN”,
    “number”: “NUMBERTOSEND”,
    “message”: “WRITE YOUR MESSAGE”
}
Almost done, in the bottom right corner select add target to finalize creating this target.

The result should look like this:

Set up a trigger

Now that we have a target we can use Zendesk’s triggers to send messages! We’ll do an example where a user is notified when his support ticket has been completed.

In Zendesk go to Settings > Business Rules > Triggers and you will see your current triggers.
Add a trigger.
Now give it a name like “Notify when completed”.
For conditions add “Status” “Changed to” “Solved” so that the trigger runs when a ticket is completed
Add action
Select “Notify Target” “Nick WhatsApp Message”
Now we can put a message in the JSON. Check out to view available placeholders. The end result might look like this

{

“token”:”YOURTOKEN HERE,

“number”: “{{ticket.requester.phone}}”,

“message”: “Hey {{ticket.requester.first_name}}, your ticket has been solved!”

}

8. Press create

That’s it! Now do a test run with a user that has his phone number given with country code and the message will be sent. Try it out with a test ticket of your own and see it go.

Set up an automation

Setting up an automation works the same. Again choose notify target and use the code above to send. Read up on the difference between Zendesk automation and Zendesk triggers here:

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203660246-What-is-the-difference-between-triggers-and-automations-

Help! Now I can’t use Web WhatsApp

While Nick is sending messages it can’t be used at the same time in Web WhatsApp. We’ve got you covered though. In https://app.getnick.io you can use the pause button to pause Nick.

You can still queue messages that will be sent once you unpause.

Make a schedule

You can also set up a schedule to for example only send WhatsApp messages in a certain time. Like only from 9:00 to 10:00 so that your support can use Web WhatsApp the rest of the day. To do this check out the API for it here http://api.getnick.io/docs/#set-active-hours

If that’s a bit complicated for you, contact us (for example through the WhatsApp icon in the bottom right corner) and ask us to set it up!

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