When Support Tickets Turn into Projects

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With last month’s release a new Basecamp Target saw the light of day. Basecamp integration is a highly requested feature amongst our customers but so far we haven’t really identified what the common use-case is. The new Basecamp Target was bred by our own Basecamp usage, and we look very much forward to getting some customer feedback.

If you’re unfamiliar with Zendesk Targets they’re basically communication channels that you can trigger from ticket events. One of our more popular targets is the Clickatell SMS target that enables to send out SMS messages triggered by specific ticket events, e.g. an escalation or a re-prioritization. Another popular target is the Twitter target that enables you to send out status messages or an event stream to a Twitter account.

Of course Basecamp is the legendary web-based project-management tool, that has led the way for many enterprise 2.0 start-ups like ourselves. It’s built by the Getting Real people at 37signals, has millions of users and is renowned for its ease-of-use and simplicity.

Here at Zendesk we use Basecamp to qualify, plan, assess and discuss the hundreds of feature requests we harvest from customers, stakeholders and of course ourselves. Some of these feature requests are spawned of support tickets. In stead of having a manual copy-and-paste workflow, we implemented a Basecamp Target that enabled us to create a message in a Basecamp project directly from a support ticket.

And that target is now available for all our customers. As with any other target you have full control over the conditions that triggers the target and what the target sends. It’s enabled by an account admin by selecting Settings > Extensions > Targets. When configured and enabled it’s available as an action on all triggers and automations. Have fun and let us know what you think.

  • Jerome

    This is great news!
    Anyways you guys can integrate with TRAC?
    Best
    Jerome cS

  • Jamie Brammer

    Was excited to see the Basecamp target. We're using ZenDesk and Basecamp. We use ZenDesk for our service desk and product management (by creating custom fields for various items including priority and then setting up views sorted by priority). However we need the task breakdown features in Basecamp for development –> the automation we'd love to have is when we assign a ticket to our development team then there'll be a To-Do list created in Basecamp with all the ticket details (including links back to ZenDesk)… our development team can then breakdown the task by adding individual To-Dos in that list.

  • Alexander Aghassipou

    Jamie,

    Long time since…

    So, instead of creating a message in a project you would like a todo list (with all ticket comments) created for the project, correct?

  • Jamie Brammer

    Hey Alexander… great to hear from you again… keep up the good work.

    Yes the ideal thing for us would be to map the ticket to a To-Do list… where ticket subject is the To-Do list name, and perhaps even just the ZenDesk URL for the ticket in the List description… sure it would be great to port over all the comments into the List description but then we’ve also got files, images etc. in ZenDesk that our developers would still need access to.

  • http://www.coherencedesign.co.uk Graham Robson

    I agree with Jamie that the possibilities run deeper than just the message push to target. Although this is useful in support of a method to automatically notify, via a message, to manually set-up a To-Do List.

    To expand on Jamie's scenario, the ability to create a new Project or To-Do list & To-Do List Item dynamically from a ZD Ticket. A target would well with this, to push latest comments, but you'd want these to go against a To-Do List Item.

  • http://www.coherencedesign.co.uk Graham Robson

    WoW – you must have been working on this already! I see that the Basecamp target has been expended to enable creating To-Do List as well as messages. The create To-Do List works a treat!

    The create message and add comments as To-Do Items are also great. Just need to add a variable into the target Message & To-Do ID's and we'd be complete.

    Well done, Thanks, Graham

  • http://www.ajaxunion.com Marketing Company

    How does a marketing company use this feature to help keep track of user requests? Right now we use basecamp messages to do that. But there are no priorities etc.

  • fabio

    Can you push an assignee from ZenDesk to BaseCamp. So that basecamp assigns Who's responsible? rather then anyone ?

  • Kate

    I agree with Fabio. We are using this feature but its sort of worthless if you cannot send an assignee to Basecamp that becomes the person responsible for the todo and notifies them. Otherwise they aren't aware its even been created.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/RichardCColwill Richard Colwill

    What’s happening with integration with the NEW BaseCamp?