How to import and sync agents from Zendesk

This article explains how to synchronise agents and groups from Zendesk to your babelforce account. If you haven't yet added your Zendesk integration - you can find an article here.

As soon as your integration accesses Zendesk, it will find all agents and groups. Go to

Automations > Apps (Integrations)

and in the particular Zendesk integration, click on the small loupe.

You will first see the list of available agents and their Zendesk roll: 

Select the agents you would like to synchronize and click on "Synchronise user". It will then add all the agents to the babelforce Agent set.

If any of the agents you try to add clashes with an existing agent that you created in babelforce, you will get a little warning, e.g. that the phone number or the email of the specific agent is not unique. These clashing agents will then not be synchronised. You can then decide to fix the clash either by changing the agent already in babelforce or the agent in Zendesk.

Upload agents with a CSV file

Besides importing agents from Zendesk, you can also create or update many agents at once with a CSV file. Go to

Agents and Users > Agents

and click on the Upload button (arrow up) in the top right corner of the agent list. Then select your CSV file.

Format of the CSV file

• One row per agent. The first row holds the column names.
• Separate the columns with a semicolon (;). Files separated by commas are rejected. Tip: Excel with German regional settings saves "CSV (Trennzeichen-getrennt)" with semicolons.
• Save the file in UTF-8 so that umlauts and accents come through correctly.
• Column names are not case-sensitive (email and Email both work).

Example file:

email;name;number;tags
anna.example@example.com;Anna Example;4930123456789;"team_berlin,outbound_de"
ben.sample@example.com;Ben Sample;4940987654321;"team_hamburg"
carla.demo@example.com;Carla Demo;;

A column you leave out of the file is left unchanged for agents that already exist. For example, a file with only email and tags updates the tags and keeps each agent's name and number.

Agent groups can't be set with the CSV upload at the moment. Assign groups afterwards under Agents and Users > Agent Groups, or edit the agent.

What happens during the upload

babelforce checks the whole file before it changes anything. If a single row is invalid, e.g. an invalid email address or an email that appears twice, no agent is created or updated and the message "error on validate file" appears. Check your file against the rules above, correct it, and upload it again.

If the file is valid, an agent whose email already exists in your account is updated, and an email that doesn't exist yet becomes a new agent. New agents receive an invitation email to set their password. Reload the page to see them in the agent list.

Agents uploaded this way appear with the source internal, which means they aren't linked to Zendesk yet. To link them to their Zendesk users, click on the Sync button (circular arrows) next to Upload, select your Zendesk integration, tick the agents and click on Connect. babelforce matches the agents by email address, so use the same email addresses in the CSV file as in Zendesk.