HR to ITSM
Personio to Zendesk integration: employees with office and manager in the internal service desk
With an integration between Personio and Zendesk, every employee from Personio appears as an end user in your internal Zendesk, in the organisation of their office and with department, language and manager, and IT gets a task before the start date and before the last working day. An extension in Personio does not count as a departure, and leavers are suspended instead of deleted.
What the integration does
Organisations with Personio for HR and Zendesk as internal IT service desk often announce new colleagues through a shared spreadsheet. The service desk does not know which office a requester belongs to, so a question about an access badge reaches the wrong office.
- HR creates the new employee in Personio; they are in onboarding status until the start date.
- KoppelHet receives the notification from Personio and adds the employee as an end user in Zendesk, in the organisation of their office, without a welcome email.
- Within the agreed lead time before the start date, the IT group of that office gets an onboarding task.
- When office, department or manager change, the user in Zendesk follows.
- An end date leads to an offboarding task and after the last working day the user is suspended.
What to watch for with Personio and Zendesk
- Personio does not allow two employees to share an email address. That makes the address a reliable second key for finding existing Zendesk users who already emailed the service desk.
- Each office in Personio becomes an organisation in Zendesk. Triggers in Zendesk can then route a question about a badge or a desk to the IT group of the right office.
- The manager from Personio goes into a user field that points to another Zendesk user. An agent thus sees in the ticket who the manager is and can involve them from Zendesk, without looking in Personio.
- Personio only exposes attributes that were released for the integration in advance. If a user field in Zendesk stays empty, the attribute is often not yet released in Personio; KoppelHet reports this in the first run.
- An extension in Personio creates a new contract while the old end date remains. KoppelHet looks at the newest contract, so Zendesk gets no offboarding task and the user is not suspended.
- Personio has a preferred language per employee. KoppelHet sets the user's language in Zendesk accordingly, so colleagues in other countries get the service desk's automatic messages in their own language.
- Not every change in Personio sends a notification. KoppelHet therefore also compares periodically, so for example a different department still reaches Zendesk.
This integration is also part of joiner, mover, leaver.
How we build and run it
- The integration runs on the KoppelHet platform, hosted in a data centre in the EU.
- Every sync and every error is visible in the functional log; on an error your administrator is notified.
- A change that cannot go through is not half-applied but queued for another attempt.
- KoppelHet is ISO 27001 certified. Data travels encrypted and stays on the platform no longer than needed.
- After go-live we manage the integration and adjust it when your process changes.
- The integration fits next to your existing integration layer. Only the fields in the design are transferred; the platform keeps no register of its own.
Implementation and price
This is not an app you switch on. We build the integration for your organisation on our platform, with building blocks we reuse on every project. So it is custom work that does not start from scratch.
A consultant prepares the intake and analyses both systems. We then record the mapping and exceptions field by field, test in the test or acceptance environment and go live at a moment you choose. Costs are a one-off amount for the setup and a monthly amount for platform, monitoring and support.
Frequently asked questions
Can contractors and interns be in Zendesk too?
Yes, if they are in Personio. Per type of employment we agree whether they get a user and whether an onboarding task is created.
What happens to tickets of colleagues who left?
They are kept. The user is suspended and not deleted, because a deleted user cannot be recovered in Zendesk.
Technical details for IT
For those who want to know how it works under the hood: APIs, fields and sources used.
- Personio is read through webhooks (Person.created, Person.updated, Employment.updated) and the Personio API v2 (persons and employments), with a periodic comparison. Only attributes released under Readable employee attributes are returned.
- Zendesk is written through the Users API (create_or_update on external_id or email, with skip_verify_email and locale; suspended on departure). Organisations through create_or_update on external_id, memberships through the Organization Memberships API. The manager in a user field of type lookup. Tasks through the Tickets API with type task, due_at and group_id.
Which fields are transferred
The key fields. The full mapping is agreed per customer.
| Field in Personio | Field in Zendesk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Personio-id | external_id | |
Voornaam en achternaam | name | |
email | email | Unique per employee in Personio |
office | organization (via organization_memberships) | |
department | user_fields: afdeling (dropdown) | |
supervisor | user_fields: leidinggevende (lookup naar gebruiker) | |
Voorkeurstaal | locale | |
employment_start_date | Onboardingtaak (type task) met due_at | |
employment_end_date (nieuwste contract) | Offboardingtaak en daarna suspended = true |
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