Zendesk is a cloud-based customer service platform that provides a suite of tools and solutions to help businesses manage and improve their customer support, engagement, and relationships.

While you can benefit from Zendesk’s standalone features and capabilities in a variety of ways, you can get even more value by integrating Zendesk with your product or your internal applications. 

We’ll help you kickstart the integration process with Zendesk by walking through every step you need to follow to retrieve your API key.

Related: A comprehensive guide to ticketing APIs

Step 1: Log in to your Zendesk account

Start by either creating an account or logging in (if you already have an account). You also need to have the necessary permissions to access account settings and generate API keys.

Step 2: Navigate to settings

Once logged in, click the gear icon on the left-hand menu. Once there, click on the “Go to Admin Center” hyperlink.

Step 3: Access your API settings

In the admin center, look for the "Apps and integrations” category on the left.

Under this, you'll find an option labeled "API." You can choose between Zendesk API or Conversations API, depending on what you’re looking to integrate. 

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Related: How to get your API key in Insightly

Step 4: Generate a new API token

We’ll just go over using the Zendesk API. Before you can generate your API key, you need to enable token access first.   

Once it’s enabled, you can generate your API key and add a description for it. 

Other key considerations for building to Zendesk’s API

Before integrating with Zendesk’s API, it’s worth considering other items:

Pricing

Zendesk has 4 price plans with additional features you can add on. Depending on if you choose a monthly or yearly subscription, the prices change a bit. In the pricing screenshot below, you’ll find the annual subscription for 5 seats.

You can trial every plan for free except Enterprise. Also, with a trial account, you can access an API token for testing your integrations. 

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You can learn more about Zendesk’s pricing here.

Rate limits

Zendesk has a variety of rate limits; they depend on the objects you’re looking to access and the plan you’re on. In addition, if your organization needs to increase the Support and Help Center API rate limits, you can do so with the High Volume API add-on.

You can also view Zendesk’s endpoint rate limits here. 

Final thoughts

Many of your customers use other customer service tools, whether that's Intercom, Front, GitHub, etc. 

You can offer countless additional ticketing integrations to your customers by simply integrating with Merge’s Ticketing and Project Management Unified API.

To learn more about the API, and Merge’s platform more broadly, you can schedule a demo with one of our integration experts!