Proactive support with the Zendesk Support SDK

Barry Carroll
Jul 27, 2017 · 2 min read

Recently I got a one-star review of one of my Android apps. This is the story of how I worked with the user to change it to a five-star review, and then added proactive support with the Zendesk Support SDK so that it never happens again.


This story is about the Zendesk Support’s Android SDK. You can do similar in our iOS SDK too!

Zendesk’s Google Play Reviews app makes it easy to turn Google Play reviews into Zendesk tickets. This is how I woke up one morning and saw that I had a one-star review from a user in Korea.

One of the features in the app is the pronunciation of words using Android’s text-to-speech (TTS) APIs. The user had complained how Swedish words were being pronounced as if they were English words. We quickly tracked the problem down to the user having the Samsung TTS installed, but without the Swedish voice data. Google’s TTS engine is different in that it doesn’t require that the voices are installed; it will fetch them over the network if required. This gave me an idea to use the Support SDK to help prevent this issue in the future.

The first thing that I had to do was to not assume that a given locale was supported. I had been ignoring the return code for the speak() method. Apps using TTS should check if a locale is supported like this:

After adding this to my TTS code I was able to check for SpeechStatus.ERROR_LANGUAGE_NOT_SUPPORTED, and tell the user why the app didn’t pronounce the word that they had selected. When this occurs I show a Snackbar to the user:

The Snackbar shown when the language is not supported

The FIX IT action deep-links into a Help Center article using the Support SDK. It also synthesises a navigation back-stack so that the user will be brought to their TTS settings when they have finished reading the article. The code behind FIX IT looks like this:

Here’s a loop of how it looks in action:

Proactive support using the Support SDK

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this. I’d love to hear if you’re doing similar things with our SDK!

Zendesk Engineering

Engineering @ Zendesk

Barry Carroll

Written by

SDK guy at Zendesk.

Zendesk Engineering

Engineering @ Zendesk

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