11 Sure-Fire Tactics to Leverage Zendesk for Superior Customer Service

Zendesk has a reputation of a go-to platform for customer support operations and for a good reason. It’s one of the most easy-to-use and accessible service tools that helps you manage customer relationships flawlessly.

However, learning about Zendesk and actually leveraging it to its optimum potential are two very different concepts.

Intended for both new and seasoned professionals who are familiar with Zendesk but have missed out on getting the most value from it, this blog post is a crash course on using Zendesk in full force! Here are the 11 most effective tips and tricks that will help you master the art of customer service.

11 Best Practices to Utilize Zendesk Like a Pro

1. Set up KPIs to Improve Customer Service

A customer service KPI is an important metric for tracking and optimizing support performance.

An ideal KPI system tracks agent performance and compares it across groups with each group working on a variety of tickets with varied processes, times, and complexity.

An ideal KPI system has the following three attributes:

• Balance: It is important that a KPI system has not too many but enough indicators that are related and interconnected – similar to a system of checks and balances in any organization.
• Transparency: Both support agents and support managers should be able to understand who it is intended for.
• Scalability: An ideal KPI system should be able to handle the growth, splitting, and complexity of your team.

Your customer support teams can improve operations, improve productivity, and better understand customer interactions with customer service software that makes tracking, managing, and understanding KPIs easy across channels.

2. Enable Notification to Identify Tickets

How many times do you say ‘thank god, I have enabled the Gmail notifications otherwise I would have missed this urgent email?’

Notifications are always helpful to avoid the embarrassment of missing out on important updates.

Similarly, enabling notifications to identify tickets when no SLA is applied would do a world of good to your support executives.

Handy tips to identify tickets that are stuck due to no SLA:

• Use First and Next Response targets for the specific group. For other SLA targets, you might need to tweak the logic or implementation of this to get it to work correctly.
• Automate the notification process.
• Even though all your automation will be based on business hours, you can replace it with calendar hours if you prefer.
• Set up an HTTP Target for the channel you would like these notifications to be posted to when it comes to triggering a Slack notification.

3. Use Placeholders to Populate Tickets With Information

The use of automated messages has become more and more prevalent, and placeholders play an important role in this.

For instance, you need to notify your customers about an upcoming event, a server outage, or anything else that requires sending out a mass email.

Furthermore, you want a ticket requester to see their names rather than being addressed with starting phrases. Therefore, [[ticket.requester.name]] is the most helpful placeholder. This way tickets will show each customer’s full name in received messages.

This is an effective way to send personalized emails.

4. Engage Customers With Messaging

You can use Zendesk’s messaging bots to communicate with your customers and keep them engaged while your support reps are not available.

By upgrading to bot-enhanced messaging, you can offer comprehensive, automated conversations beyond the basic response setup and create a bot to assist customers before handing them off to agents.

However, if the customer subsequently chooses to speak with an agent, you can create custom ticket fields to simplify the pre-engagement questions in order to minimize the amount of information the agents need to collect.

5. Integrate Jira With Zendesk

With the Zendesk-JIRA integration, your Zendesk tickets and Atlassian Jira issues can be linked, tracked, and synchronized, promoting collaboration between your support and development teams.

By integrating these two platforms, your development teams using Jira can have access to Zendesk tickets associated with Jira issues.

As for the support agents, they can add comments to Zendesk tickets to communicate with Jira issues.

By leveraging the field syncing feature, your team can sync Jira and Zendesk Support data in near real-time.

This keeps Jira and Zendesk up-to-date with ticket and issue information. Furthermore, Jira can automatically update a Zendesk ticket when the issue status changes.

By doing this, your support team is always aware of any changes in development, thus helping them give timely and accurate assistance to the customer.

6. Capture Content With Zendesk Knowledge Capture App

Among Zendesk’s offerings is the Knowledge Capture App.

With this app, agents can add new entries to the knowledge base using predesigned templates that appear in the agent’s interface.

By doing so, agents won’t have to leave their typical workflow to create an article when they encounter a knowledge gap.

By allowing agents to contribute directly to the knowledge base, you will be able to expand it significantly.

7. Set Up Automatic Ticket Routing

Customer service teams commonly rely on skills-based routing to resolve tickets efficiently.

A new ticket is assigned to an agent based on their expertise depending on its subject matter.

Questions regarding billing are automatically forwarded to the billing specialist, questions regarding mobile apps are forwarded to the mobile specialist, etc.

By routing tickets this way, teams are able to address tickets quickly and efficiently as they require less consultation and research.

8. Automate Mundane Tasks With Triggers

Triggers are used to check and shoot predefined conditions. This means that if the trigger meets the “if” and “then” conditions, the pre-set action will be immediately triggered.

Customer service teams can save time and effort with Zendesk triggers.

For example, if someone raises an urgent ticket that requires help from other agents or even departments, they can automatically notify them.

In this way, everyone who has received the notification and is available will be aware that customers need assistance.

This will allow your agents to help one another. They can even take over if someone is unavailable, notify customers about their issues automatically, escalate tickets, and do so much more.

Ultimately, this will increase issue resolution time.

9. Create Macros to Save Time

Macros are used by most Zendesk customer support teams to record tickets without having to fill in the same information repeatedly.

By using them, your support team can quickly resolve your most common tickets, automate the process of closing simple requests, and send users to your community forum.

Moreover, if a customer has not responded for a while, you can also send them a reminder.

10. Browse Workflows Swiftly Using Tags

You can create Tags in Zendesk to provide additional context to tickets and topics. It helps to sort tickets and assign the right ticket to the right stakeholder.

Ticket tags can be applied to users, organizations, and tickets. Using a tag like ‘sales’ or ‘about_sales’ might be helpful in identifying all requests that are actually sales inquiries.

11. Save Time With Keyboard Shortcuts

Make Zendesk easier to use by using keyboard shortcuts. The following steps can be executed using your keyboard (if you are using a Mac, replace “alt” with “option”):

• To navigate to home: Ctrl + Alt + H
• Next ticket: Ctrl + Alt + down
• Open macro box: Ctrl + Alt + M
• To Save comment as internal note: Ctrl + Alt + X
• To Save or modify the ticket as pending: Ctrl + Alt + P

To view the complete list of shortcuts, click on the profile icon in the top right corner of the Zendesk window and select “Keyboard Shortcuts.”

The Bottom Line

So, there you have it. If using Zendesk’s customer support software to its maximum potential is your top priority, these tips are going to be your leading light.

Whether you want to manage your service team’s productivity or want to collect upfront customer information, Zendesk is a great platform to set up your business for success.

Ready to Take the Next Step Towards Mastering Zendesk? Talk to Us!