Zendesk to Redshift: 2 Easy Steps to Move Data

Getting data from Zendesk to Redshift is the right step towards centralizing your organization’s customer interactions and tickets. Analyzing this information can help you gain a deeper understanding of the overall health of your Customer Support, Agent Performance, Customer Satisfaction, and more. Eventually, you would be able to unlock deep insights that grow your business.

What is Zendesk?

Zendesk is a Cloud-based all-in-one Customer Support Platform widely used by a broad spectrum of enterprises, from large corporations to small startups. Using any data — from anywhere — Zendesk presents businesses with a comprehensive view of the consumer. Hence, its products are built to include and innovate depending on user input collected through beta and Early Access Programs (EAPs).

Companies that have outgrown their current CRM or are investigating other systems, currently utilize Zendesk’s Support Platform, or deal with a high volume of incoming customer inquiries can benefit from Zendesk. The Zendesk Support Platform helps companies thrive in self-service and proactive engagement by delivering consistent support. Organizations can manage all of their one-on-one customer interactions using Zendesk’s one Customer Support Platform. 

Zendesk CRM Software allows you to deliver personalized support where consumers expect it, expand your customer experience process, and optimize your operations. Businesses can find a range of Zendesk products with solutions catered to their needs. Out of its suite of CRM products, Zendesk Sunshine is a contemporary CRM Platform built on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Zendesk CRM Software Products are simple and easy to use, thereby allowing business teams to focus on making the most of their time and energy by selling and answering customer questions. This helps in the expansion of businesses without disrupting software services.

For more information on Zendesk Solution, do visit Zendesk’s informative blog here.

What is Amazon Redshift?

Amazon Redshift is a petabyte-scale, fully managed data warehouse service that stores data in the form of clusters that you can access with ease. It supports a multi-layered architecture that provides robust integration support for various business intelligence tools and a fast query processing functionality. Apart from business intelligence tools, you can also connect Amazon Redshift to SQL-based clients. It further allows users and applications to access the nodes independently.

Being a fully-managed warehouse, all administrative tasks associated with Amazon Redshift, such as creating backups, security, etc. are taken care of by Amazon.

For further information on Amazon Redshift, you can check our other post here.

For most recent updates on Amazon.com, Inc, visit the Amazon Statistics and Facts page 

Methods to Move Data from Zendesk to Redshift

• Method 1: Copying your Data from Zendesk to Redshift Using Custom Scripts
• Method 2: Moving your Data from Zendesk to Redshift Using Hevo

Let us, deep-dive, into both these methods.

Method 1: Copying your Data from Zendesk to Redshift Using Custom Scripts

Here is a glimpse of the broad steps involved in this:

1. Write scripts for some or all of Zendesk’s APIs to extract data. If you are looking to get updated data on a periodic basis, make sure the script can fetch incremental data. For this, you might have to set up cron jobs
2. Create tables and columns in Redshift and map Zendesk’s JSON files to this schema. While doing this, you would have to take care of the data type compatibility between Zendesk data and Redshift. Redshift has a much larger list of datatypes than JSON, so you need to make sure you map each JSON data type into one supported by Redshift
3. Redshift is not designed for line-by-line updates or SQL “upsert” operations. It is recommended to use an intermediary such as AWS S3. If you choose to use S3, you will need to
   1. Create a bucket for your data
   2. Write an HTTP PUT for your AWS REST API using Curl or Postman
   3. Once the bucket is in place, you can then send your data to S3
   4. Then you can use a COPY command to get your data from S3 into Redshift
4. In addition to this, you need to make sure that there is proper monitoring to detect any change in the Zendesk Schema. You would need to modify and update the script if there is any change in the incoming data structure

Method 2: Moving your Data from Zendesk to Redshift Using Hevo

Hevo is fully managed and completely automates the process of not only loading data from your desired source but also enriching the data and transforming it into an analysis-ready form without having to write a single line of code. Its fault-tolerant architecture ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.

Using the Hevo Data Integration Platform, you can seamlessly replicate data from Zendesk to Redshift with 2 simple steps.

Step 1: Configure the data source using Zendesk API token, Pipeline Name, Email, and Sub Domain.

Step 2: Configure the Redshift warehouse where you want to move your Zendesk data by giving the Database Port, Database User, Database Password, Database Name, Database Schema, Database Cluster Identifier, and Destination Name.

Hevo does all the heavy-weightlifting and will ensure your data is moved reliably to Redshift in real-time.

Sign up here for a 14-Day Free Trial!

Advantages of Using Hevo

The Hevo Data Integration platform lets you move data from Zendesk (Data Source Available for Free in Hevo) to Redshift. Here are some other advantages:

1. No Data Loss – Hevo’s fault-tolerant architecture ensures that data is reliably moved from Freshdesk to Redshift without data loss. 
2. 100’s of Out of the Box Integrations – In addition to Freshdesk, Hevo can bring data from 100+ Data Sources (Including 30+ Free Data Sources) into Redshift in just a few clicks. This will ensure that you always have a reliable partner to cater to your growing data needs.
3. Minimal Setup – Since Hevo is fully managed, setting up the platform would need minimal effort and bandwidth from your end.
4. Automatic schema detection and mapping – Hevo automatically scans the schema of incoming Freshdesk data. If any changes are detected, it handles this seamlessly by incorporating this change on Redshift.
5. Exceptional Support –  Hevo provides 24×7 support to ensure that you always have Technical support for Hevo is provided on a 24/7 basis over both Email and Slack.

Challenges While Transferring Data from Zendesk to Redshift Using Custom Code

Before you write thousands of lines of code to copy your data, you need to familiarize yourself with the downside of this approach.

More often than not, you will need to monitor the Zendesk APIs for changes, check your data tables to make sure all columns are being updated correctly. Additionally, you have to come up with a data validation system to ensure all your data is being transferred accurately.

In an ideal world, all of this is perfectly doable. However, in today’s agile work environment, it usually means expensive engineering resources are scrambling just to stay on top of all the possible things that can go wrong.

Think about the following:

1. How will you know if an API has been changed by Zendesk?
2. How will you find out when the Redshift is not available for writing?
3. Do you have the resources to rewrite or update the code periodically?
4. How quickly can you update the schema in Redshift in response to a request for more data?

On the other hand, a ready-to-use platform like Hevo rids you of all these complexities. This will not only provide you with analysis-ready data but will also empower you to focus on uncovering meaningful insights instead of wrangling with Zendesk data.

Conclusion

The flexibility you get from building your own custom solution to move data from Zendesk to Redshift comes with a high and ongoing cost in terms of engineering resources.

In this article, you learned about Zendesk to Redshift Data Migration methods. You also learned about the Zendesk Software and Amazon Redshift Data warehouse. However, integrating and analyzing your data from a diverse set of data sources can be challenging and this is where Hevo Data comes into the picture.

Visit our Website to Explore Hevo

Hevo is a No-code Data Pipeline and has awesome 100+ pre-built integrations that you can choose from. Hevo can help you integrate your data from numerous sources such as Zendesk (Data Source Available for Free in Hevo) and load it into a destination to analyze real-time data with a BI tool and create your Dashboards. It will make your life easier and make data migration hassle-free. It is user-friendly, reliable, and secure.

Want to take Hevo for a spin? Sign Up for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand. You can also have a look at the unbeatable pricing that will help you choose the right plan for your business needs.

Share your experience of learning about Zendesk to Reshift Data Migration. Let us know in the comments below!