5 Essential Tips for Startups to Get Started With Zendesk

A majority of enterprises rely on customer service solutions to serve millions of customers. But this doesn’t imply that customer service solutions are just for big businesses.

You do not need a million customers to benefit from customer service software.

Whether you own a startup or an enterprise, you need a solid customer support strategy to keep your business growing.

That’s where Zendesk becomes a vital part of your business strategy to ensure seamless customer support.

What is Zendesk?

Zendesk is a cloud-based customer service platform that offers a variety of features for smooth customer service.

More than 170,000^[1] small and medium-sized companies, as well as large corporations, use Zendesk.

As many large organizations have discovered the power and capabilities of having a support system that Zendesk offers, startups can also leverage its benefits.

In this blog post, we will discuss the benefits of using Zendesk for startups and how to get started with it.

What Makes Zendesk Suitables For Startups?

Zendesk offers a wide range of features that can be used to provide better customer support. It provides the following capabilities to effectively manage, prioritize, and track customer interactions:

• Consistent Customer Service

Zendesk consolidates all customer requests into one place. Your support agents can handle multiple tickets at once with this system, which improves efficiency.

Zendesk features that help streamline your customer service:

1. Multi-Channel Platform

The Zendesk platform enables agents to work with tickets from any source, such as Help Center form submissions, emails, text chats, mobile phones, and social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter.

Consequently, your customers can contact you via any channel they choose.

2. Conditional and Custom Ticket Fields

This allows your agents to gather information from customers about support issues, which makes it easier for them to determine the type of support your customers require.

• Self-Service for Your Customers

“The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”- Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon

Zendesk Help Desk software helps you set up an online help center to provide answers to frequently asked questions as well as knowledge-based content like community forums, user guides, related articles, and search tools.

Zendesk Features that Support Self-Service

1. Knowledge Base

Zendesk’s knowledge base contains useful articles that address frequently asked questions. Furthermore, you have the option of restricting the content within the knowledge base to a specific group of customers.

2. Answer Bot

With Zendesk, a basic AI bot called Answer Bot analyzes customer inquiries and provides potential answers. If the customer is satisfied, the tickets will not be routed to an agent. Thus, it frees up your agents to handle complex inquiries.

• Boost Branding with Zendesk Customization

With Zendesk, you can customize your customer service tools based on your team’s needs.

1. Zendesk Customization

Zendesk customer support software allows you to design and refine customizations using more than 100 APIs. Additionally, you can customize the Zendesk community to reflect your company’s brand.

2. Zendesk Integration with Third-party Platforms

Third-party integrations are one of Zendesk’s best features.

There are a variety of apps that can be integrated with the Help Desk software, including Slack, Salesforce, Magento, and others. By integrating these technologies with Zendesk, you can customize your support ticket system to offer efficient and valuable customer engagements.

• Zendesk for Startup Program

To uplift the startup community and equip them with tools and features to enhance their customer support, Zendesk has introduced the ‘Zendesk for Startups’ Program. Apart from its cool features and capabilities that would aid your customer servicing efforts, this initiative makes it ideal for startups as early-age startups get it for free for the first six months.

Now that you have gained a better understanding of Zendesk’s features and benefits, here’s how to get started with Zendesk and leverage this feature-rich platform.

Getting Started With Zendesk

Zendesk CRM enables startups to offer customer services as big players in the market do. With its features and customization ability, it offers you the ability to establish the foundation of your business.

Here’s everything you need to know about getting started with Zendesk:

• Configure Essential Channels

The most significant aspect of using Help Desk software is its ability to integrate all of your communication channels into one interface.

Your customers would communicate with you via email, phone, social media, and chat.

To be available to answer their questions, make sure that you have configured essential channels to get your communication in one place.

• Define User Cases

To access any part of the Zendesk Suite, your team members must sign in and be authenticated.

Ensure that your team members get the necessary access to data and tools by defining user cases.

• Route Support Requests

The support requests you receive from all of your support channels can be automatically routed to specific agents or agent groups and organized into views.

To route tickets automatically, you can create business rules (triggers and automation) based on their data and take appropriate action.

Additionally, you can set the priority of the ticket based on who sent you the support request.

• Set Support Requests For Non-Business Hours

It is critical to set the customer’s expectations about when their request will be answered.

Zendesk Suite lets you do this by creating a business hour schedule that can be used to automatically notify your customers when you’ll be available.

• Implement Zendesk Suite Support

To provide support to your customers, you should create support channels. Create a messaging system, live chat, a voice channel, etc.

You need to determine which agents will be manning each channel. Set up a schedule to deal with support requests during non-business hours.

The Bottom Line

As startups address the need to establish positive customer relationships, Zendesk is increasingly becoming a popular choice among them. This feature-rich customer support platform offers complete access to the tools and capabilities you need to strengthen your customer service efforts.

Want to Get Started With Zendesk? Talk to Us!

Statistics References
^[1] Zendesk Press Release