Hi!
I'm a new guy at Zendesk and I have the following task (longread):
GIVEN:
- There is a business (nail salon) that uses Boulevard as a CRM.
- Currently, communication with clients occurs through the following channels:
a) Instagram
b) Facebook
c) Phone
d) SMS
e) Email
PROBLEM: Boulevard only synchronizes with SMS, Email and (probably) phone channels. In order to respond to clients through other channels (Instagram, Facebook), our administrators use a mobile phone specially designed for this purpose.
MAIN GOAL: We would like to leave a single entry point for communication with our clients and for this task we chose Zendesk. In addition, we would also like to transfer the entire existing client base from Boulevard to Zendesk.
MY THOUGHTS:
As far as I know, it is technically possible to transfer the client database from Boulevard to Zendesk. In this case, we will have a client database with all their data (phone, email, first name, last name) in Zendesk. By the default all these clients will be without active tickets, since we will simply transfer them to the Zendesk database.
Respectively, as I understand it, if the same clients contact us via Instagram or Facebook, then for each such request Zendesk will create a duplicate, or even a third copy of the "Customer" entity (in Zendesk terminology). And there is no mechanism that would automatically merge two identical (according to one criterion or another) entities of “Customer”.
Question 1. Is this true?
Question 2. If I understand correctly, the automation of the process of merging the "Ticket" entity with another "Ticket" entity is possible (to eliminate potential duplicate tickets from the same “Customer” from different channels)? For example, using the functionality of the Swifter add-on. Is this true?
Question 3. Let's assume that we have a client database in Zendesk and we know their names, phone number, email, INSTAGRAM and FACEBOOK, and at the same time for EVERY client in the database we will create a "pseudo-ticket" that will always hang open, then new tickets from these same clients from all communication channels with matching data will be automatically merged into this "pseudo-ticket", without creating duplicates of either the "Ticket" entities or the "Customer" entities?
Thus, in the event of a NEW request being received via any of the communication channels, only two possible scenarios are possible:
- The unique client identifier (phone number, first name, last name, Instagram account ID, Facebook account ID) finds a match with our database of old clients (each client will have an opened "pseudo-ticket") and the new ticket will be merged with the "pseudo-ticket" and a new "Customer" entity is not created.
- Unique customer identifier (phone number, name, last name, Instagram account ID, Facebook account ID) does NOT match our database of old customers, no merge occurs, a new entity "Customer" is created.
Thank you very much to everyone who read to the end. I apologize if my thought seemed confusing to you or, perhaps, there is no problem at all and there is an elementary solution (if so, then please tell me, as I said – I am a new guy in to it).
Have a productive working day everyone!
P.S. I had a thoughts to set up automatic merging of "Customer" entities with each other using the Zapier functionality, but after digging around there I realized that there is no merging functionality in relation to Boulevard, there is only the ability to update information about "Customer" entities when creating a new such entity, but I can't figure out how to apply this in practice :(