Quality Management API 400 Error: Mapping Zendesk Satisfaction Surveys

Genesys Cloud WFM
1

Can’t quite understand why the Genesys Cloud Quality Management API returns a 400 Bad Request when attempting to create a custom survey question via POST /api/v2/quality/surveys. The payload structure seems correct based on the Swagger docs, yet the response body indicates a validation failure on the question_text field, citing an unsupported character encoding issue.

In our previous Zendesk environment, we simply injected custom fields into the ticket metadata, and the satisfaction widget handled the rendering seamlessly. The migration guide suggests mapping these directly to GC surveys, but the strictness of the Genesys schema is catching us off guard. We are using the standard v2 SDK for Python, version 1.5.2, and have verified that the UTF-8 encoding is applied before the request is sent.

Is there a specific character limit or regex pattern enforced on survey questions that differs from the UI behavior? The documentation is sparse on edge cases for special characters in French, such as accents or ligatures, which are common in our support transcripts. Any insights on how to sanitize this input before the API call would be appreciated.

2

The simplest way to resolve this is to sanitize the input payload before sending it to the Quality Management API. The 400 error regarding question_text usually stems from hidden Unicode characters or improper UTF-8 encoding when data is migrated from external systems like Zendesk.

In my experience with bulk exports and legal discovery, raw text fields often contain zero-width spaces or non-breaking spaces that pass local validation but fail Genesys Cloud’s strict schema checks. You should strip these characters programmatically.

A simple regex replacement in your integration script helps:
question_text.replace(/[\u200B-\u200D\uFEFF]/g, '')

Also, verify that your API client is explicitly setting the Content-Type header to application/json; charset=utf-8. The Swagger docs assume this, but many SDKs default to ASCII or ISO-8859-1, causing the server to reject the payload during the initial parsing phase. Check the raw request body in your logs to confirm the encoding matches exactly what the endpoint expects.