Available CRM actions for AI agents and Sunshine Conversations

Zendesk AI agents are AI-powered chatbots that interact with your customers on messaging, email (including API and web form), and voice (EAP) channels. They can have conversations with customers and perform actions in authorized systems autonomously, automating and resolving issues so that your human agents can focus on more complex work.

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CRM actions enable communication between AI agents and your CRM platform. These actions are platform-specific, meaning different actions are available for each CRM platform.

This article contains the following topics:

Available CRM actions for Sunshine Conversations

Creating a CRM action

Related articles:

About actions for AI agents

Creating and adding actions for AI agents

Reviewing and managing actions for AI agents

Available CRM actions for Sunshine Conversations

The term metadata is used a lot in these actions, and it can be any information you would like Sunshine Conversations to collect, store, and send to AI agents or your system.

There are a couple of things to bear in mind with this:

You will need to customize the Sunshine Conversations widget snippet to capture that.

We can only advise in this regard, this widget customization must be done by your engineering team or a technical partner which we are happy to recommend.

Learn more in Using metadata.

AI agents support the following CRM actions in Sunshine Conversations:

Get user

Update user

Get conversation

Update conversation

Overwrite user tags

Overwrite conversation tags

Add user tags

Add conversation tags

Clear cached user

Clear cached conversation

Create ticket

Add a webview

Get user

This action is a combination of two actions, Get User Info and Get User Metadata, and is used to retrieve information such as first name, last name, email, or metadata by selecting from the drop-down list.

You can add more fields to update by clicking on the button: Get Another Field

For more technical information check out the following Sunshine Conversations developer documentation:

Authenticating users in your application

Authenticating users in the help center

Sunshine Conversations API reference

Update user

This action is a combination of two actions, Update User Info and Update User Metadata,  and is used to update user fields. You can update as many ticket fields as needed.

You can add more fields to update by clicking on the button: Update Another Field

An example use case for this would be setting the action Update User > Email for anonymous chats, this ensures that when escalated to an agent, the ticket is linked to the contact in Zendesk

If you intend to update a user's email address using this action, you must change the "Creating email identities" setting to "Use both verified and unverified emails." For instructions on how to modify this setting, see Configuring email identities.

Get conversation

This action is a combination of two actions, Get Conversation Data and Get Sunshine Converstaion Metadata, and is used to retrieve conversation data from the fields available in the drop-down menu or defined with the <Metadata> option.

You can add more fields to update by clicking on the button: Get Another Field

This is great to use in the case that you use a form to collect data from the user, such as name and email data. By using the action this data is saved and can be sanitized in AI agents to be made available to the agent or ticket upon escalation.

Important: If you’re retrieving information from an end-user-editable custom field, in the “Field to retrieve” field, select "(Metadata)", and then format the "Key" field as follows: zen:ticket_field:123456789 (replacing the number with the actual number of the custom ticket field). Agent-only custom fields have to be referred to by field ID only. For help finding the field ID, see Finding the field key or field ID for a custom field.

Update conversation

This action is a combination of two actions, Update sunshine conversation and updateSushineConversationMetadata, and supports updating conversation fields and metadata.

Multiple fields can be updated by clicking the button: Update Another Field

You can use Update Conversation > Display Name to change the name of a conversation shown in the multiple conversations view for the web messenger or mobile SDKs

Overwrite user tags

The action was known as Update Sunshine Tag. Previously the tags would be overwritten on both, the user and conversation level, now we offer the option of choosing which tags you want to update. The tags added/created when a conversation is created are not affected.

Overwrite conversation tags

The action was known as Update Sunshine Tag. Previously the tags would be overwritten on both, the user and conversation level, now we offer the option of choosing which tags you want to update. The tags added/created when a user is created are not affected.

Add user tags

This action was known as Append Sunshine Tag. Adding a tag adds the tag to the Zendesk ticket when a conversation, for example when escalated to an agent — and you can use tags to select the related value in a Zendesk drop-down field. All tags will be added to the list of existing tags. This is a free text field, so you can type the name of the tag you would like to be applied. Multiple tags can be added using the plus button.

Previously, any tags added would apply to both, the user and conversation. We now allow the ability to select which of these you want to update.

Add conversation tags

This action was previously known as Append Sunshine Tag.

Adds a tag to the Zendesk ticket (for example, when escalated to an agent). You can use tags to select the related value in a Zendesk drop-down field. All tags will be added to the list of existing tags. This is a free-text field, so you can type the name of the tag you want to be applied. Multiple tags can be added using the plus button.

You can use curly brackets with a parameter name to add a parameter value as a tag. However, if you add more than one tag this way in a single "Add conversation tags" action and one of the parameters is null or doesn't exist, this action fails and none of the tags included in the action are added.

Clear cached user

This action was known as invalidateUserCach. It clears the user data saved in the session. Why would you do this? We retrieve all user fields at the beginning of the conversation and cache them within AI agents to reduce the number of individual API calls to SunCo. So if we need to retrieve fields that have been updated since the conversation began, we have to first clear the cached user

Clear cached conversation

This action clears the conversation data saved in the session. All conversation fields are retrieved at the beginning of the conversation and cached within AI agents to reduce the number of individual API calls to SunCo. If a conversation field is updated after the conversation begins, you must clear the cache so the conversation fields can be retrieved again.

Create ticket

This action creates a Zendesk Support ticket for deflected chats when the chat ends. You will be asked to add the Virtual Agent Group ID which you will find within Zendesk Support. So when the control is passed via the switchboard they can map it to the correct department.

Add a webview

This action is only available from block-level, and allows you to create a webview directly within the dialogue builder. You would use this to create a dynamic webview based on custom parameters collected during the chat.
This would be different than sending a standard webview of store locations like with Sunshine Templates. An example would be using the customers' location to send them directions rather than just showing them a map with stores pinned.

Creating a CRM action

CRM actions can be created at the AI agent, intent, or block level. For details, see Creating and adding actions for AI agents.