Case Study | Meet Me in the Middleware: Creating Connections between HubSpot and Zendesk for Process Improvement

In early 2021, Delos’s Australia office had tracking systems in place for clients, deals, and requests — multiple different systems. When inquiries came in, it could be difficult to know where to look for the exact information they needed. While support requests came in through Zendesk, information about the homes and homeowners Delos serves lived in HubSpot.

To handle inquiries more quickly, effectively and efficiently, Delos needed a way to access all the relevant information they had in a single, convenient place. They needed to deal with the customer holistically, including a view of their past support needs and growth with the company. Such a system could provide key information for better support and smarter sales approaches.

Unfortunately, the out-of-the-box Zendesk-and-HubSpot integration was designed to only push limited amounts of data from Zendesk to HubSpot, with no native mechanism for information to flow from HubSpot to Zendesk. This wouldn’t do. It had to be a two-way street, so all of the relevant information came up, regardless of which system was used to access it — or which channel the inquiry came from.

With nothing available on the market to accomplish this, the fxnction team set to work custom-building the middleware application Delos needed. We were able to facilitate the necessary API calls between both systems, incorporating full Zendesk tickets within the Zendesk object in HubSpot. Now, each support ticket can be associated with a property listed in HubSpot’s Deals object and a homeowner in its Contacts object, closing the loop and completing the picture.

Most excitingly, bringing all of this data into HubSpot allowed us to set up automated processes around the ticket data for a variety of uses, such as better-targeted marketing. We were also able to implement automated version control, so when a ticket is updated in HubSpot, its Zendesk entry gets updated, and vice versa.

This ended up requiring a high level of not only expertise but familiarity with the client’s processes. For example, if a homeowner’s email address is included in the Zendesk ticket, it’s simple enough to associate the ticket with the contact and get it to cross-reference with its HubSpot counterpart. However, not all sales in HubSpot would necessarily be associated with the email address used to contact support. We solved this by honing in on a piece of information that would be tied to the implementation in question no matter the source: the deal ID.

Using the deal ID as a central pass-through, where properties and homeowners can be linked to deals, and vice versa, the Contact, Deal and Zendesk custom objects could all be associated with one another, creating a complete picture. As properties became updated or new tickets opened, that “complete picture” on both platforms updates automatically to reflect it.

Ultimately, building a custom middleware solution between HubSpot and outside systems like Zendesk requires a tailored strategy and the ability to iterate on the go. A team with expertise, perceptiveness and flexibility can find those connection points and leverage them to drive smarter processes.

If you’re interested in learning how to map your outside data systems into a popular CRM like HubSpot, schedule a call with us today.