What is Contact Sync?
Contact sync is the functionality that allows us to identify callers who exist in third party integrations like Zendesk and Salesforce based on their phone numbers. If you have a contact named Bryce Love in your Zendesk account with a phone number of (310)-867-5309, Contact Sync is how we know to tell you that Bryce is calling when we get a call from that phone number.
How does it work?
When you first connect one of those integrations, we copy all of the contacts from there into Talkdesk (for Salesforce, we copy Contacts and Leads). Every half hour after that, we retrieve any contacts that have been created or updated since the last contact sync finished, to keep your data fresh.
What are the benefits of Contact Sync?
As mentioned, Contact Sync enables us to identify anyone who calls in if they exist in your CRM or support tool. Beyond that, it allows us to make sure anything our automation framework creates in your CRM is correctly attributed to the right user. For example, if you have an automation that creates a new Zendesk ticket at the end of each call, we want to make sure the requester for that ticket is the person who called. Using the above example, we would know not only that Bryce Love is calling in, but also that he is the same Bryce Love from your Zendesk instance - thus, that’s the person to whom we should attribute the ticket we’re creating. Contact Sync enables us to do all of this seamlessly, without you worrying about the details.
What if I don’t want my contacts copied to Talkdesk?
Contact sync is optional and can be turned off as part of the integration setup process. That said, if you do so you lose all of the aforementioned benefits.
Are there any known circumstances in which Contact Sync might run into issues?
The main situation in which you may run into issues is if you create a contact in a third party system, but it has not had time to sync to Talkdesk yet. Because Contact Sync runs every half hour, it can take up to 30 minutes to bring a contact over after you create it elsewhere - that means, if you receive a call from or make a call to that contact in the window before it’s synced, we won’t be able to identify the caller, nor will we be able to properly attribute any objects we create in a third party system to it.
We have a number of behaviors in place to help resolve this issue - for example, if you click to call from a Contact or Lead in Salesforce, we will identify the person you’re calling and will log calls against this person correctly, even if they have not been synced to Talkdesk yet. That said, there are still situations in which calling unsynchronized contacts will lead to an undesirable behavior, so we strongly recommend that you allow a half-hour after a contact is created in a third party system before making any outbound calls to their phone number.
A note about Zendesk contact sync behavior
We have implemented one behavior unique to contact sync from Zendesk. If you have two contacts on the Zendesk side, both of which have been synced to Talkdesk, and you merge them in Zendesk, Talkdesk will delete the one that corresponds to the Zendesk contact that was removed during the merge. This is to avoid issues with duplicate contacts in Talkdesk and ensure that your Talkdesk contacts mirror your Zendesk contacts as closely as possible. Similarly, if a contact is deleted in Zendesk, the corresponding contact will be deleted in Talkdesk.
How does Talkdesk match contact for an inbound call?
Talkdesk can only match with contacts that have been synced to your Talkdesk account. When an inbound call is received, our call routing system will try to match the phone number of the caller with the list of contacts of the account. From there, we have 3 potential scenarios:
- No existing contact matched the phone number, therefore Talkdesk will automatically create a new contact and this new contact will appear when the call is offered to an agent.
- One unique contact matched the phone number, which will then appear in the interface when the call is offered to an agent.
- More than one contact matched the phone number, in which case the interface will present a list of potential other matches to the agent so that the agent can change it once the call is accepted. One of the possible matches will be selected by default if the agent does not make a selection; this is typically the first contact that was created in Talkdesk.
Contact deletion in Salesforce and Pipedrive
Contact Sync in the Salesforce and Pipedrive integrations also supports contact deletion. To enable this option is Salesforce, follow the instructions here.
Also, if this option is enabled in the Pipedrive integration configuration, contacts deleted in Pipedrive will also get deleted in Talkdesk.