How we handle Data in Answer Search
We understand you take your customers data very seriously, so we are 100% blunt on what Zendesk data we handle, how we access it and how we store it.
More than that, we put you in the driving seat when it comes to data handling. You have full control on what data from your Zendesk account you allow us to read and store. Obviously, this will impact the level of functionality available in the application.
How we access your Zendesk data
In order to provide our rich search functionality in Zendesk, Swifteq needs to read, store and index a set of records and fields from your Zendesk Support account. To do so, we use Zendesk's secure REST API and follow best practices when accessing this API.
All the traffic between our app and Zendesk API is exchanged via HTTPS, so is 100% encrypted.
We use OAuth 2 to authenticate all our application's API requests to Zendesk. OAuth provides a secure way for our application to access your Zendesk data without having to store and use the passwords of Zendesk users, which is sensitive information. All you have to do is authorize us to read your Zendesk data. No passwords or API keys, no mess.
What Zendesk data we read and store, and why
As mentioned above, you have full control on what data you allow us to read for your Zendesk account, excepting what we consider to be required for basic app functionality.
Help Center Articles
We use your Help Center articles to index and make them available to your Customer Support team for fast searching and linking into an existing response.
We use this API endpoint to read the articles data from your Help Center instance. None of your customers data is accessed from this endpoint
We read and store the following fields: article title & body, author name, dates & times, url, language, section, category, labels, votes.
We need the articles to provide the core functionality of our app, so loading of this data point cannot be disabled.
Tickets in Zendesk Support
We use the content of your Zendesk tickets to index and make them available to your Support team for fast searching of old answers and customer questions.
We read the tickets data using the following API endpoints:
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Search API: read the archive of old tickets
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Ticket Audits: read the entire conversation flow of each ticket (public and private comments)
For each ticket we (optionally) store the following data on our secure servers:
Agent Replies
This is the agent-side of the conversation, both public and private comments. For each agent message in the conversation we store:
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the content of the message
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date & time
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agent name.
Loading this data point is optional and can be disabled before you connect your Zendesk account.
However, it enables an important part of the app's functionality: searching and reusing past answers from older support tickets. Our advice is to keep this enabled.
Customer Messages
This is the customer-side of the conversation: what the customer said when he created the ticket and after that. For each customer message in the conversation we store:
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the content of the message
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date & time
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customer name.
Loading this data point is optional and can be disabled before you connect your Zendesk account.
When this data point is disabled, the loss in functionality is relatively small: your team will not be able to search for questions customers previously asked.
Standard ticket fields
We read and store a small number of standard fields for each ticket: Ticket Id, Channel, Group, Data & time, Tags.
We think there is no privacy concern in relation to these fields and we need them to index, filter and sort the tickets data.
How we store your Zendesk data
All the data is stored securely in Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in Europe, Ireland. This service provider meets international security standards such as ISO 27001 and SOC 1, 2 and 3.
All of our servers are within our own virtual private cloud (VPC) with firewalls and network access control lists (ACLs) that prevent unauthorized requests from getting to our internal network.
All the data stored is encrypted both at rest and in motion.