Translate your Zendesk Help Center with Transifex Zendesk Integration

Translate your Zendesk Help Center with Transifex Zendesk Integration
Panagiotis Papachristofilou
November 11, 2020
4 min read

First things first, speaking to your customers (and prospects) in their own language is crucial to your business’s success. Whether it’s a blog post, a marketing campaign, or your help center, Harvard Business Review states that there is a strong connection between in-language content and a consumer’s likelihood of making a purchase. On top of this, according to a CSA Research study, the ability of a customer to obtain information in their own language is more important than the price for 56.2% of consumers. (Find a full breakdown of the business impact of localization in our infographic Localization ROI by the numbers.)

In short, making information and support available to your customers in their native language directly impacts your bottom line. This, coupled with a revelation shared by Zendesk that 81% of customers are trying to solve their issues by themselves before contacting any support channel, is why we built a new and improved Zendesk integration from the ground up. 

With our Zendesk integration, you can now easily offer your customers a streamlined, multilingual resource for self-service where they can easily get the answers they need without contacting your support team. 

Why was a new integration needed?

Our first Zendesk integration was built back in 2016. After several improvements, extensions, and optimizations, our product and engineering teams realized that the current integration had reached its performance limits. This was mainly due to Zendesk API performance issues arising from the limitations of the integration architecture (which prohibited further enhancements. On top of this, we had noticed cases where attempting to sync too many articles through the Zendesk API resulted in content overload sync failures.

Another strong motivation for developing this new integration was to enable our users to leverage an even more automated workflow closer to a Continuous Iteration/Continuous Development. With this in mind, our goal was to minimize the user intervention in the localization of Zendesk articles, saving users time from trivial tasks. 

What’s different in Transifex Zendesk Integration?

Zendesk 2.0 is a completely new take on localizing support and help desk information, focused on intelligent automations and better performance. 

Most notably, the new Transifez Zendesk integration is built upon the Transifex UI, whereas the previous version was implemented as a Zendesk plugin. For this integration, we used an internal tool called TxSyncer as the base for performing certain tasks related to syncing content between Transifex and Zendesk. (Fun fact: we expect TxSyncer to be the basis for other integrations, speeding up delivery on new connections … stay tuned for even more integrations to come!)

All the above translates into enhanced user experience and convenience. Here are just a few of the ways the new and improved Transifex Zendesk integration is making the localization team’s lives easier: 

  •  Upon setup, all existing translations from Zendesk will be pulled to Transifex,  creating a single source of truth for all your global content. (For any subsequent edit of the integration, no additional translations will be pulled, only source string changes and updates.)
  • Developers and support agents can automatically send content to Zendesk following the localization workflow criteria of choice, as content is fully translated, reviewed, or proofread.
  • Easily separate and organize content in Zendesk by linking different articles and other dynamic content of the same brand with different projects in Transifex. This way, you can distinguish any automated/ macro dynamic content localization from your main Help Center content. 
  • Bonus: By implementing the integration within the Transifex UI, we can guarantee syncing of content, despite any failed Zendesk API calls that were happening in the past due to the number of articles.

PS: If you’re using Help Scout, you can read this article.

Panagiotis Papachristofilou
Panagiotis is a B2B Marketing & GTM Leader obsessed with innovation and customer experience. He's currently leading the Marketing & Demand Generation function at Transifex.
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