Is anyone out there using Zendesk with third-party voice integration over (VDI's) like Azure AVD or AWS Workspaces successfully?
The company I work for uses Zendesk for a customer support team in the Philippines. They are using Zendesk Talk to field inbound and outbound support calls. Zendesk explicitly states that Zendesk Talk is not supported over any VDI. Zendesk Talk does work perfectly fine with physical hardware. They don't mention anything about third-party voice providers that integrate with Zendesk.
Providing hardware for overseas support staff is challenging for a number of reasons. I would be very helpful to have a VDI solution that can be used for Zendesk access and voice.
I have been researching the problem and have learned quite a bit. The short story is that voice-over-VDI is an issue because it introduces latency. Regarding VDI, the only solution I have found is a redirect for voice WebRTC traffic directly to the local machine, bypassing the VDI Remote Session host. I’ve read that Citrix and VMware Horizon can do this, but it is expensive. The only other option I found was Azure AVD using the MMR extension. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/multimedia-redirection-video-playback-calls?tabs=intune&pivots=azure-virtual-desktop
Reading the documentation for the Azure MMR extension, it appears there are a handful of CX Phone providers that are known to work with call redirection.
Zendesk offers direct integration with almost all the providers above, but the Azure MMR browser extension requires you to configure the domain you use for call redirection. I am guessing this would be yourdomain.zendesk.com. I'm not sure if this would cause issues.
While it might work, it seems like quite a rabbit hole and is prone to problems. Just wanted to see if anyone has any input or found a solution before I go down the rabbit hole.
Thank you for your question.
Zendesk Talk, is generally not recommended for use on VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) or VM (Virtual Machines) environments.
While Talk is a cloud-based VoIP solution accessible via supported web browsers, voice quality and overall system performance can be severely limited by the virtualized environment. Network requirements and physical device access (especially for audio hardware) often do not meet Talk’s standards in VDI/VM scenarios, resulting in degraded call quality, dropped calls, and inconsistent agent experiences. Here are few reasons why we advise against the use of Zendesk Talk in VDI or VM environments:
This being said, if you need VoIP in a VDI environment, you may want to consider Zendesk for Contact Center powered by Amazon Connect, which is specifically designed for full VDI support and media-less mode. Please take a look at our documentation Introduction to Zendesk for Contact Center for detailed information on this product. I hope it helps.
If you have further questions or need additional information on Zendesk for Contact Center please contact us and we'll do our best to help.