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Email optional user onboarding - Support SDK limitations

  • August 15, 2021
  • 4 replies
  • 0 views
Rich14

Hi there,

Our Product team would like to begin onboarding new users without email addresses to make user sign up process quicker. This introduces many concerns regarding user profile management and our ability to communicate with users as we currently only have email support channel.

I had thought that the Support SDK would address most of these concerns: With Zendesk mobile SDK implemented in our app we would be able to communicate with users about their tickets through comments they could read natively in the app.

However, I became concerned when I read this:

https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/classic-sdks/unity-native-sdk/unity-sdk/jwt_authentication/

After getting a unique identifier from your app, Zendesk will send it in a request to your dedicated JWT endpoint. Zendesk will expect a response containing a JWT token confirming that the user is known and trusted. The token must include name and email properties.

So does this mean that we are going to need customer email addresses in order for the Zendesk mobile SDK to function properly? I had thought a user would authenticate to our application and to their Zendesk profile simultaneously through SSO...and then we would know the identity of the authenticated user in both our application and in our Zendesk. But this makes it sound like we still need to know the user's email address. 🤔

A phone number only/email optional support environment isn't a unique use case so I feel like there has to be a way to do this. I'm not a developer and I've never implemented Zendesk SDK so please excuse any lack of technical insight here. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated!

 

    4 replies

    C

    Hi Rich,

    For your use case, anonymous authentication may be a better fit since it doesn't require identifying the user.  You can also find a breakdown of the differences between anonymous and JWT authentication in Authentication Decision.

    Thanks,

    Rich14
    • Rich14
    • Author
    • August 30, 2021

    Thanks @Christopher Kennedy! I'm still not sure how this would work for us...

    I don't think anonymous authentication is helpful for us because we would need users to not only be able to submit a ticket to us but also see our replies to them in the SDK and I don't think they could do that without authenticating. Because of course they have to authenticate to see their tickets:

    "End users are authenticated only in the event of making a network call to any Zendesk endpoint such as when requesting their support tickets."

    Basically, I would need users to be able to authenticate without necessarily having an email address on their account and that doesn't seem to be possible. The best (and only) unique identifier we would have to link a ZD profile to their customer account would be the external_id.

    My original concerns remain as we would require users to be able to authenticate but we won't necessarily have an email address on every user's Zendesk profile. 

    C

    Hi Rich,

    I'd like to point out that with anonymous identities, the user can still access the requests that were created on the device.  They maintain that access until they uninstall the app or clear the app's data.

    If JWT is still a necessity after considering this, you can provide a unique placeholder email address for the user as an alternative strategy.  For example, in a JWT request to authenticate a user with an unknown email address, the email property value could be user123456@example.com.

    Thanks,

     

    Rich14
    • Rich14
    • Author
    • September 3, 2021

    @Christopher Kennedy Thank you, that's helpful...will keep this all in mind. Cheers!

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