Integrating your application with Zendesk brings customer conversations into Aha! Builder. You can surface live ticket data alongside your own views to create customer-specific pages, escalation dashboards, and reports — and write data back to Zendesk to create or update tickets from your application.
Click any of the following links to skip ahead:
Prerequisites
Action |
Requirement |
|---|---|
Integration direction |
Two-way |
Credential type |
API token Note: As of January 2026, email and password API authentication no longer works. All API requests must use a token or OAuth. |
Aha! Builder plans |
All Aha! Builder plans |
Required Aha! Builder permissions |
Application owner |
Zendesk plans |
All paid Zendesk plans: Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus |
Zendesk permissions |
Administrator to enable token access and create tokens |
Zendesk API tokens do not have granular scopes. They authenticate as the user whose email you provide and inherit that user's permissions. If your application needs to create or update tickets, the authenticating user must have agent or administrator permissions in Zendesk.
Get your Zendesk API token
You will need an API token from Zendesk to connect your Aha! Builder application. Also note the email address for the authenticating account and your Zendesk subdomain. You will need all three values to authenticate.
Log in to Zendesk as an administrator.
Click Admin Center from the product dropdown in the upper-left corner above the sidebar, or go to
https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com/admin.Navigate to API configuration and select the checkbox beside Allow API token access.
Navigate to API tokens and click Add API token.
Enter a description, such as "Aha! Builder."
Click Save.
Copy your API token now and store it in a secure location. Zendesk will not show it again after you close the page.
Zendesk support resources |
|---|
Add your secrets in Aha! Builder
Once you have your API token, add it to your Aha! Builder application along with the authenticating email address and your Zendesk subdomain:
Navigate to your application in Aha! Builder.
Click Configuration in the top navigation bar.
Click the Secrets tab.
Under the Zendesk tile, click Create.
In the Subdomain field, enter your Zendesk subdomain. If your Zendesk URL is "fredwin.zendesk.com," your subdomain would be "fredwin."
In the Email address field, enter the email address you use to log in to Zendesk.
In the API token field, paste your API token.
Click Ask Elle to integrate to start an AI chat.
Your credentials are now available to your application code. Secrets are encrypted and stored securely. They are never exposed in your application's frontend code.
Secrets are environment-specific. If you have both a Preview and a Production environment, you will need to add the secrets to each one separately.
Use the integration
After you save your secrets, you can ask Elle to create features that read from or write to Zendesk. Elle generates the code to connect to the Zendesk API using your secrets.
Read data from Zendesk:
"Add a page that shows my open Zendesk tickets with their subject, status, and priority."
"Create a dashboard that lists recent Zendesk tickets assigned to our team, sorted by priority."
"Show a weekly summary of ticket volume by tag, grouped by product area."
Write data to Zendesk:
"Create a Zendesk ticket when a user submits a support request from this application."
"Update the priority of a Zendesk ticket based on the customer tier stored in this application."
"Add an internal note to a Zendesk ticket when its linked record changes status here."
Write operations require the authenticating user to have agent or administrator permissions in Zendesk. If the user has end-user or read-only access, write requests will fail.
Update a secret
You can update a secret's value at any time. For example, update it when you rotate your API token:
Navigate to your application in Aha! Builder.
Click Configuration in the top navigation bar.
Click the Integrations tab.
Click Edit next to the secret you want to update.
Enter the new value and click Save.
Remove a secret
To remove an integration secret from your application:
Navigate to your application in Aha! Builder.
Click Configuration in the top navigation bar.
Click the Integrations tab.
Click the More options button (...) next to the secret you want to remove.
Click Delete.
Click OK to confirm.
Removing a secret breaks any features in your application that depend on it. Review your application after removing a secret to confirm it still functions correctly.