Visually Replay User-Facing Issues With Zendesk and Datadog Session Replay | Datadog

Visually replay user-facing issues with Zendesk and Datadog Session Replay

Author Jamie Milstein
Author Aaron Kaplan

Published: February 2, 2024

Zendesk provides support teams with an integrated solution for processing all types of customer inquiries and feedback. But as organizations scale, support tickets can multiply, making it difficult to parse customer feedback and investigate issues promptly and thoroughly. Customers often report problems without providing the detailed context needed for effective troubleshooting. Support engineers work painstakingly to piece together an accurate picture of user experience, following up repeatedly with individual customers for additional information and aids such as screenshots in order to reproduce bugs. This drawn-out troubleshooting process hinges on guesswork and the time and patience of customers, often yielding dead-ends and frustration.

We’re excited to announce our new integration with Zendesk and Datadog Session Replay. Session Replay captures individual user sessions via telemetry and reconstructs them in a video-like playback interface. With this integration, support engineers can quickly reproduce issues by directly accessing relevant user sessions from any Zendesk ticket, eliminating their reliance on customers to provide detailed context when reporting a problem and enhancing the speed and precision of their troubleshooting.

Home in on customer-reported issues with precision

Once you’ve set up Session Replay in Datadog and installed the integration from the Zendesk marketplace, you can access the relevant user sessions for any support ticket by selecting that ticket in Zendesk and then selecting Datadog RUM from the right-hand sidebar.

Selecting a session from this list or clicking “View all sessions” takes you to Datadog RUM, where you can watch a pixel-perfect reproduction of exactly what each user experienced. Each session includes an event timeline that breaks down each page load and DOM change. This direct visibility into and granular breakdown of each session enables you to zero in on the root causes of customer-facing issues without complex tooling, guesswork, or drawn-out deliberations with customers, ultimately helping to minimize the mean time to resolution (MTTR) of customer tickets.

Session Replay also allows you to create playlists, or folder-like aggregations of user sessions. This can come in handy when multiple customers submit tickets reporting the same issue, pointing to an underlying bug. Support teams can group user sessions into Session Replay playlists and share them with product and engineering teams to notify them of the issue and guide their troubleshooting.

Expedite support with a clear picture of customer experience

Integrating Datadog RUM’s Session Replay with Zendesk provides on-demand visibility into individual user sessions, minimizing the burden on both support teams and customers and helping you to improve reliability and customer satisfaction. To get started, you can install our Session Replay integration from the Zendesk Marketplace. You can also check out our dedicated blog post on Session Replay. And if you’re new to Datadog, you can sign up for a 14-day .