Softphone fails to initialize for migrated Zendesk agents with 401 Unauthorized

Voice & Telephony
1

Hey everyone, I’ve run into a really strange issue with the Genesys Cloud softphone initialization during our Zendesk-to-GC migration. In Zendesk Talk, agents just clicked ‘call’ and it worked via the plugin. Here, the softphone icon stays grayed out, and the browser console throws a 401 Unauthorized error when attempting to retrieve telephony user details. The agents are authenticated in the UI, so the token seems valid, but the telephony service rejects the handshake. This feels like a permissions sync issue similar to how Zendesk API tokens sometimes lag behind user role updates.

  • Verified that the agents have the Telephony capability enabled in their User Profiles, matching the Zendesk Agent role permissions.
  • Cleared cache and tested in incognito mode to rule out stale session tokens, but the 401 persists.

Is there a specific delay or manual step required to activate telephony permissions after migrating user data from Zendesk? The migration script ran successfully, but the telephony endpoints seem to be checking a different attribute.

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2

This looks like a token scope mismatch rather than a full authentication failure. The UI session token often lacks the telephony:access scope required for the softphone handshake.

Verify the OAuth client configuration used during the Zendesk integration. Ensure the telephony scope is explicitly enabled for the connected app, then force a re-login to refresh the claims.

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