For businesses with an existing phone support solution or sophisticated telephony needs, Talk Partner Edition enables you to choose your own call center software and integrate it with Zendesk’s omnichannel solution.
This article contains the following sections:
Why use Talk Partner Edition?
Although you use Zendesk Support, we realize that you might use a call center solution other than Zendesk Talk that you want to connect to Zendesk’s omnichannel experience. With Talk Partner Edition, you can use 130+ pre-built telephony integrations that plug directly into Support, or use the Talk Partner Edition API to write your own integrations.
How to use Talk Partner Edition?
If you don’t want to use the pre-built integrations, the Talk Partner Edition developer guide contains a wealth of information to help you integrate your existing call center solution with Zendesk products.
With the Talk Partner Edition API you can configure telephony requests to trigger actions in Zendesk Support, for example:
- Identifying an agent based on the phone device
- Creating a ticket and displaying it to an agent
- Opening an existing ticket for an agent
- Displaying a user’s profile to an agent
- Adding a recording or transcription to a ticket
- Creating a voicemail ticket
You can try out Talk Partner Edition when you are on a trial or paid subscription of Zendesk Suite. For more details and examples, see the Talk Partner Edition developer guide.
What telephony integrations are available?
For a full list, see the Zendesk Apps Marketplace.
What are the features of Talk Partner Edition?
Talk Partner Edition (TPE) APIs has two features to help with Computer Telephony Integrations (CTI): Standard Call Object and Voice Comment. You can use Standard Call Object to store third-party, industry-standard call data in Zendesk. Voice comment is for Talk Partner Edition-based apps and is ideal for voicemails. For example, to display information such as the end-user number, the name of the agent that took the call, or the call duration.
Standard Call Object
The Standard Call Object is a foundational feature that works well with third-party call integration with Explore, and can store third-party, industry-standard call data in Zendesk. CTI integrations must save only their call data in the standard call object. Zendesk manages the object's storage and visualization.
Previously, CTI integrations could either store their call data in custom ticket fields or tags, which made the data visible in Explore, or use ticket comments to display the call data within the ticket. However, each of these options had downsides.
Storing call data in custom ticket fields meant that if a ticket involved multiple calls, and the CTI integration updated the ticket with data from the latest call, the information from the previous call would be lost. Similarly, tags aren't intended for structured data and ticket comments aren't suited to presenting long lists of tabular data. Additionally, all of these options add clutter to tickets.
Voice Comment
A Voice Comment is a special type of comment currently used by both Talk Partner Edition-based apps and Zendesk Talk to display information from calls. This includes:
- End-user number
- Name of the agent that answered the call,
- The duration of the call
- Display of the controls to play call recordings directly in the ticket
Voice comments are perfect for voicemails as they are short and always come with an audio recording. However, sometimes they are too limited to meet all the needs of CTI integrations.
The enhanced TPE Voice Comment architecture, developed exclusively for TPE, works in conjunction with the standard call object. After the data is stored in the call object, partners tell Zendesk which call record they want to pull data from, and which fields they want to display in the comment. Zendesk Talk then presents the data in the ticket.
Further reading
See the following resources for more help with Talk Partner Edition:
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