Customer support with MCP (Zendesk + Slack + internal licensing API)

Customer support teams switch between tools constantly: checking Slack for context about customer issues, finding tickets in Zendesk, adding comments, and then handling the issues in internal dashboards or waiting for dedicated teams to handle those issues.

For customer support teams handling dozens of tickets daily, more time is spent context-switching and navigating interfaces when this time could be used to handle more customer complaints. What if you could help more customers faster without losing context or time?

There’s a simpler approach: Use MCP servers to connect all your tools. Instead of switching between Slack, Zendesk, and your internal systems, handle everything through Claude conversations.

This guide shows you how to connect Zendesk, Slack, and your internal license API through MCP servers, so customer support agents can resolve tickets in minutes. We’ll show a basic internal licensing API as an example, but you can switch this out for any internal API you need your team to interact with.

What are we building?

We’re building a customer support workflow that connects Zendesk, Slack, and an internal License API through MCP servers.

The customer support agents can ask Claude to find the customer’s ticket in Zendesk, check related Slack discussions, and provision the license through the internal API.

You’ll set up three MCP servers:

• A Zendesk MCP server to find tickets and add comments
• A Slack MCP server for finding context about customer issues
• An internal API MCP server for provisioning licenses

Prerequisites

To follow this quickstart, you need:

• Claude Desktop  installed
• Access to Zendesk  and Slack accounts
• An internal API with OpenAPI documentation (or a copy of the License API )

Setting up Zendesk and Slack

Follow these guides to set up the first two MCP servers:

• Using Slack with MCP
• Using Zendesk with MCP

Once you’ve added both servers to your claude_desktop_config.json and restarted Claude Desktop, test the setup.

Testing the flow

Open Claude Desktop and enter the following prompt.

Claude will search both systems and present the information. At this point, the customer support agents have the customer’s details and the context about their issue.

The Zendesk and Slack integrations already save time. Instead of customer support agents having to go through Zendesk and scroll through Slack channels, Claude gathers everything in seconds. But it’s likely that the customer support agents still have to switch to another system to handle the license issue.

You can automate this final step by creating an MCP server for the internal License API. If you have an OpenAPI document for your API, Gram can generate the MCP server in minutes.

Create the License MCP server

Now, let’s automate the manual license creation step by creating an MCP server for the License API.

Install and run the Taskmaster License API

If you don’t have an internal API ready, clone the License API to follow along:

The API runs at http://127.0.0.1:8000 and includes the OpenAPI documentation. In production, you would use your actual internal tool API instead.

Create the MCP server on Gram

Usually, building an MCP server manually requires writing code with the MCP SDK, TypeScript, or FastMCP, then managing the hosting infrastructure.

We’ll use Gram  to generate an MCP servers from OpenAPI the existing OpenAPI documents and handle the hosting on its free tier.

Sign up for Gram  and follow these steps:

• On the Toolsets page, upload the License API’s OpenAPI document.

• Create a toolset named License and enable the tools you need.

  

• In the Auth tab, set LICENSE_API_SERVER_URL to the URL of your internal tool API. If you’re following this guide with the local License API, expose the API with ngrok  by running the ngrok http 127.0.0.1:8000 command and using the forwarding URL to fill in the LICENSE_API_SERVER_URL variable.

• In Settings, create a Gram API key .

Install the MCP server in Claude Desktop

In your License toolset’s MCP tab, copy the Managed Authentication configuration.

Open the Claude Desktop application, navigate to Settings -> Developer, and click Edit Config.

Open the claude_desktop_config.json file, copy the Managed Authentication configuration from Gram, and replace <your-key-here> with the value of the Gram API key you created.

Restart Claude Desktop, open a new chat, and verify that the integration works by asking Claude to create a license for a test user.

The complete customer support workflow

Your claude_desktop_config.json should look like this:

To test the complete workflow, open Claude Desktop and send the following prompt:

The specific response will vary based on your actual data, but you’ll observe Claude:

• Finding the support ticket in Zendesk, checking related discussions in Slack, and gathering context about the customer’s issue.

  

• Using your new License MCP server to create licenses for the customer having issues, and adding a comment to the Zendesk ticket.

  

Final thoughts

You’ve built a customer support workflow that connects Zendesk, Slack, and an internal License API through MCP servers. Gram hosted the internal API integration without requiring infrastructure management or custom MCP server code.

The License API represents any internal service with an OpenAPI document. You can replace it with your existing systems to create workflows for:

• User provisioning: Combine Slack discussions with Zendesk tickets to automatically create user accounts in your SaaS platform.
• Inventory management: Use customer requests from support tickets to trigger inventory updates or purchase orders.
• Financial reporting: Aggregate data from your support system, communication tools, and internal billing systems for automated reporting.