I am in a situation that should be familiar to people trying to integrate their helpdesk with other platforms:
The companies we do business with are already assigned unique GUIDs in our ERP platform. The GUIDs I am talking about are unique IDs looking like "6d2d2107-3112-4d47-a439-1b3b8ffd6e83".
In order for our systems to interconnect they must be able to reference each company by the same ID and using our ERP assigned GUIDs is our preference (for a number of technical and policy reasons we do not want to store the Freshdesk IDs of the companies to our ERP - it has to be the other way round).
In Freshdesk, I can create a custom text field field for a company and store those GUIDs there. However, this approach has an important disadvantage:
Freshdesk does not care if the ID I am storing there is unique or not - it will happily allow me to use the same ID for more than one companies. The fact that Freshdesk does not allow me to create a new company with the same name is not sufficient protection as company names are not very reliable as IDs (ie "W.BLACK LTD", "W. BLACK LTD", "W BLACK LTD." etc)
I propose that Freshdesk either adds a special field called 'external_id' to companies and contacts (BTW, that is what Zendesk does). This will be a text field. Freshdesk will make sure that non-empty values stored there are unique.
Just to explain what we are trying to do: We will bulk import our existing customer list to Freshdesk (including the GUID of each company). Then, we will write a Freshplug that, for each company, reads the GUID stored in Freshdesk, make an API call to our ERP and get information from it (for example, the current company name, whether this customer has a valid support contract, a link to the relevant webpage of our ERP etc). This Freshplug will be available at the ticket level and will provide the supporter with useful information.
