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Using external steps in action flows (EAP)

TobyH Howard
Suite Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus
Note: Action builder is currently in an early access program (EAP). You can sign up for the EAP here.

Action builder provides an easy way to integrate Zendesk with external systems through action flows. This is accomplished by connecting to external systems and adding steps specific to those connected systems to your action flow. The steps associated with external systems are referred to collectively as external steps.

By connecting to these external systems, admins can automate workflows, improve collaboration, and maintain a seamless experience across multiple platforms. For example, you can define action flows that create a Jira issue based on a Zendesk ticket or create a Jira issue and then notify a Slack channel and update a Zendesk ticket with a link to the Jira issue.

Additionally, while many steps for the supported external systems have been pre-defined, admins can also create actions to define other external system tasks you want to include in your action flows.

This article contains the following topics:
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Connecting to an external system

Before you can include external steps in your action flows, you must connect to the external systems you intend to integrate with. Action flows support connections to the following external systems:
  • Google Sheets
  • Jira
  • OpenAI
  • Salesforce
  • Slack
Note: All external steps performed by an action flow are attributed to the user who connected the external system.
To connect to an external system
  1. In Admin Center, click Apps and integrations in the sidebar, then select Actions > Action flows.
  2. Create or edit an action flow.
  3. Open the step sidebar.
  4. Under External steps, click the external system you want to connect to.
  5. Click Connect.
  6. Follow the prompts to authenticate with the system and complete the connection.

    After you've connected to the system, you'll see an indicator that it's connected and details about the instance you're connected to, as well as the steps available for the connected system.

Understanding what external steps are available

Each supported system has unique steps available for use within your action flows. An action flow can include multiple external steps across the supported systems. For more information about specific steps and examples of how you might use them, see:
Note: If you don't see an external system listed that you want to use, you can create actions to define other external system tasks you want to include in your action flows. These are exposed in Action Builder as action steps rather than external steps.

Using Google Sheets steps

Google Sheets steps can be used to create sheets and add data to a sheet created within the action flow, such as an AI-generated ticket summary, which can then be shared with other users.

The following steps are available:
  • Create spreadsheet: Creates a spreadsheet.
  • Append row: Adds a row to a sheet previously created within the action flow.

Using Jira steps

Jira steps can be used to automatically create and update Jira issues based on tickets. For example, you could automatically create Jira issues for bugs reported in Zendesk tickets, check a Jira issue's status before closing a Zendesk ticket, update Jira issue assignment based on ticket assignment, or move a Jira issue from one status to another when a ticket is being worked.

The following steps are available:
  • Create issue: Creates a new issue in the connected Jira project.
  • Get issue: Retrieves details about an issue.
  • Edit issue: Update a Jira issue's details, including summary, assignee, and description.
  • Transition issue: Changes a Jira issue's workflow status. For example, "In progress" when work begins.

Using OpenAI steps

The OpenAI steps in action flows make it possible for you to provide things such as AI-generated summaries of long tickets to agents, identify negative emotional tones in tickets so they can be routed to specialized teams, extract keywords that can be used as ticket tags, and use tailored AI models to analyze customer messages.

The following steps are available:
  • Analyze sentiment: Detects the emotional tone.
  • Summarize text: Condenses large quantities of text into a brief summary.
  • Extract keywords: Identifies main topics or entities. These can then be used as tags for tickets.
  • Send prompt: A custom prompt and response from the OpenAI API.
    For example, a prompt might be: 
    Analyze this ticket and categorize it into one of the following: Billing, Technical Issue, Feature Request, Bug Report, General Inquiry.
Ticket:[description]
    where [description] is replaced with a value by clicking Add variable.

Using Salesforce steps

The Salesforce steps make it possible to automate many of the actions an agent might take as they work tickets. For example, you can use the Salesforce steps in action flows to automatically create new leads or other Salesforce objects when a user contacts you, automatically add notes to a Salesforce record after a customer interaction, clean up duplicated data, look up Salesforce contact data prior to sending a Slack message or creating a Jira issue, automatically convert highly rated leads identified by AI scoring models, and more.

The Salesforce steps in action flows can be used with the following Salesforce objects: leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, cases, and campaigns. The following steps are available for each of these objects:
  • Create record: Adds a new record to an object.
  • Update record: Changes field values for an existing record.
  • Delete record: Removes a lead or case from Salesforce.
  • Find record: Searches for a record based on identifying information, such as an email address or ID.
  • Convert lead to opportunity: Transforms a lead into an opportunity.
Note: During the EAP, date fields in Salesforce steps aren't dynamic. You must specify exact dates.

Using Slack steps

Slack steps can be used in action flows to streamline communication and make sure users know about other things being performed by action flows. For example, you can send messages to channels and individual users alerting them of new tickets or Jira issue assignments, post AI-generated summaries of tickets into a Slack thread, escalate direct messages to public channels for broader visibility, add reactions to automatically acknowledge messages, or extract message details for analysis and reply with AI-generated content.

The following steps are available:
  • Post message to channel: Send a message to a public or private channel.
  • Send direct message: Send a message to a specific user.
    Note: Although Slack supports DMs with up to 9 other individuals, this step only supports sending a direct message to a single individual.
  • Reply to message thread: Post a reply to a message in a thread. This step can create a thread or reply within an existing thread.
  • Fetch thread messages: Retrieves all messages in a thread.
  • Add reaction: Adds a specified emoji reaction to a message.
  • Fetch message: Retrieves message content and metadata.

Understanding data outputs from connected systems

Each external system you connect to returns unique data from that system. Use the following examples to understand the types of data available as outputs from external steps.

Example Jira data outputs

When connected to a Jira instance, the following data is returned.

Output Description Examples
ID A unique numerical identifier assigned to an issue, project, or other entity in Jira. "id": "10001"
Key A human-readable unique identifier. This is typically a combination of the project key and issue number. "key": "PROJ-123"
Self The API URL for the specific resource. This is useful only for making additional API calls.
Note: If you need a link to the resource that can be used directly (not by an API), you can construct it using a static value and the issue key. For example: https://my_connected_jira_subdomain.atlassian.net/browse/<output.key>
"self": "https://your-jira-instance.atlassian.net/rest/api/3/issue/10001"

Example Google Sheets data outputs

When connected to a Google Sheets account, the following data is returned.

Output Description Examples
spreadsheet_id A unique identifier for a Google Spreadsheet. If the spreadsheet's URL is https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A2B3C4D5E6F7G8H9I0J/edit, then the unique identifier is 1A2B3C4D5E6F7G8H9I0J.
values The actual data in a sheet, represented in a two-dimensional array format of rows by columns. In the following array, Name and Age function as column headers, and each subsequent row provides values for the columns.

[["Name", "Age"],["Alice", "25"]]
http_status_code The HTTP response status code from the Google Sheets API. 200 OK, 403 Forbidden
sheet_title The name of an individual sheet (tab) within a Google Sheets file. Sheet1 or Customer List

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