Practical Zendesk Administration

Chapter 3. Security

By its nature, customer service software captures personal information about people and organizations. This information is stored in the cloud as a SaaS solution. The idea of customer information being stored outside of a company’s firewall often makes administrators nervous, but the reality is that any company in a position similar to Zendesk understands the potential security concerns, and takes every possible precaution to mitigate risk. Zendesk have some extraordinarily large companies in their customer list, and their security team takes the privacy of the information in your Zendesk instance very seriously.

The topics in this chapter will help you, as an administrator, to take best advantage of the security features in Zendesk.

Social Media Logins

As part of its integration with popular social media platforms, Zendesk has integrated its user management system in a way that allows users to log in using these platforms—if this is enabled by an administrator. The benefit to your customers is that they do not need to memorize a dedicated username and password for Zendesk, because they’re using a username and password that already exists in another system. From Zendesk’s perspective, the tool is basically saying, "If you can successfully log in to one of these social media platforms, we trust that platform enough to accept their word on the fact that you are who you say you are."

The platforms supported by this feature are Twitter, Facebook, Google, and OpenID, ...