Integrating ScreenSteps Live Into Our Zendesk Support Site

As you may or may not know, we use Zendesk for our help ticketing system. Until recently we have been using PunBB for our forum software. This last week we finally switched our forums over to Zendesk. Why? It is one less service we need to update and manage and Zendesk has some pretty cool stuff coming out for their forums.

Since we were going to be driving more of our users to our Zendesk site we wanted to customize the presentation a little more. This is what we did:

• Customized some basic CSS – mainly just changed the colors for some elements.
• Added our own navigation tab that pointed to our ScreenSteps Live site (details here).
• Added our Provide Support customer chat link to the Zendesk template using some custom javascript.

Everything was looking pretty good. But when users clicked on the Documentation tab they were taken to our ScreenSteps Live site that didn’t look at all like our Zendesk site. That wasn’t very good. So we added a custom template to our ScreenSteps Live site to make it look like our Zendesk site. You can see the results here:

• Our Zendesk site
• Our ScreenSteps Live site

There is a slight difference. The Zendesk site has a liquid layout while the ScreenSteps Live site has a fixed width. I probably could have done the liquid thing on ScreenSteps Live but I wanted to change as little of the Zendesk CSS as possible just to keep things simple.

So far we are really happy with the solution. We are able to bring together the best of ScreenSteps Live and Zendesk and still present a common user interface to our customers.