Introduction
Webhooks are automated HTTP requests sent from apps when something happens. They have payloads and are sent to a unique URLs. This essentially acts as the app's phone number or address. This process allows different applications to communicate with each other in real-time.
They are triggered by specific events in a system. For example, when a user starts a chat, a webhook can notify your application's user system to update user with its chat URL on the Console.
Customer Support can benefit from webhooks. Especially when we want to sync messages/chats attributes with other systems, like your internal CRM.
Let's see how SignalZen implements webhooks feature.
Webhooks and event types
There are quite a few event types that SignalZen supports for triggering webhooks: message.created, user.created, user.closed, user.rated, user.subscribed_by_email, user.sent_transcript, user.enabled_copilot, user.disabled_copilot, user.blocked, user.destroyed.
We won't go through each event type because their names are quite explanatory themselves. Most likely, SignalZen will expand the events list as the time goes.
Security
As outlined in the Docs, making sure that clients receive webhook requests from SignalZen, the integrator needs to validate signature of each webhook received.
You can find more information on the Docs page.
Event data
Event data is usually built in the same way as you would use SignalZen API for retrieving that resources. Also, we send event type which will help for you to understand what event got triggered.
As you can understand, 2 types of resources for now can be included into the payload of a webhook. It's message and/or user resource(s).
Use cases
There are many use cases for which webhooks might be a good choice. For instance, you might want to integrate SignalZen with your Analytics and Reporting tools. Then you could track your chats and messages statistics on your desired statistics platform.
Another great example is alerting or notifying someone outside SignalZen in a way you desire. It can be you sending an SMS from your system to someone who could answer some chat when you receive the webhook.
Associating your CRM users with chats is also a great example of tight integration with SignalZen.
Conclusion
Sometimes for having great system of processes and data sharing across multiple platforms can be challenging. Webhooks is a great tool for helping to cope with that.
Use webhooks securely and wisely!
