3 Secrets to Improving Customer Satisfaction with Zendesk

What is the secret of high customer satisfaction scores? It is a net positive difference between customer expectations and customer experience: Anticipating what your customers want and providing a better service. In 2021 it is no longer enough to have a known brand name and a solid product. Companies have to back up with outstanding service. In this article, we will discuss ways how Zendesk can help you provide exceptional service. Follow this guide and watch your customer satisfaction score rise. 

What do customers want

Before working on your customer experience, you need to understand your customer expectations. They are becoming more sophisticated every year. Recent customer trends suggest that customer service is becoming the main differentiation point between products. In some industries knocked price differentiation from the pole position. These four trends define customer experience in 2021 and beyond.

Easy and Effortless

Measuring customer effort scores is not new, but their importance is growing. Companies that grew despite COVID challenges all understood one thing: the importance of customer obsession. Their service is a consistent experience from start to finish. The core principle is to minimize customer effort. 

Seamless switch between channels

64% of customers in a customer trends survey by Zendesk reported that they used a new customer service channel in the last 18 months. 73% of them plan to use it more in the future. Customers expect companies to adopt new channels quickly. The days of frustrating, frantic searching for a customer service hotline somewhere in the depth of your FAQ section are over. 

Short wait times

Remember those ‘Thank you for reaching out to us. Someone will be in touch within 72h.’ emails? They too are a thing of the past. Modern customers expect a reply within 12h by email – even sooner by phone or social media. A timely response shows that you respect your customer and value their time. 

Empathetic agents

The new trends in customer support put agents before many challenges. Having a pleasant voice on the phone is not enough anymore. Support agents in 2021 must communicate proficiently on different channels and in different styles. A chat is different from an email or a voice call. Empathy and humanity are crucial skills to connect with the customer. 

How to give customers what they want?

Having understood what your customers expect of your business, let’s discuss ways to achieve this with Zendesk. 

1.Empower customers to self-help

Most customers prefer to find the answer to their problem themselves rather than going through support. They value convenience and 24/7 availability. Your business can use this to an advantage. Zendesk Guide comes with a variety of valuable tools to build your self-service help center.

Publish your five most common questions as support articles in your help center. Make sure you link your tickets with the knowledge base to improve your resolution time and reopen KPIs. Help center articles are part of the knowledge base the Answer Bot uses to provide answers to inquiries. 

2.Reduce response times

A short response time is an important performance metric for your customer satisfaction. Improving it must be a priority in your customer support strategy. To gain better insight and find improvement potential, we recommend keeping track of the following KPIs in your Zendesk Dashboard.

• Ticket Volume overall
• Ticket volume by support channel
• Opened vs. solved tickets ratio
• Response time
• Resolution time
• First contact resolution rate
• Backlogs

These KPIs will help you find bottlenecks in your support structure. Assigning more agents to a particular channel, providing more agent training, or making changes to your help center are some of the possible solutions to improve performance. 

To improve response further, consider using predefined actions and templates. They are a helpful tool to take the load off your agents. This gives them the time and resources and to focus on finding the solution to a complex issue. 

• In chat support, you should set up the bot to answer first and deflect common inquiries to your knowledgebase articles.
• In messaging support, send automated updates to the ticket status — for example, an automated confirmation with an estimated response time.
• In Email support, provide your service agents with templates for common scenarios and problems to solve. 

3.Omnichannel Support

Zendesk Messaging opens the doors to omnichannel support. Customers expect that they will have several ways to contact your business – and can choose the one they prefer most. Some customers pick up a phone; others prefer to send emails and others like an informal chat over WhatsApp or a similar direct messaging service. Offering several channels lets you meet the customer where they are but also places your agents before new challenges. Zendesk Messaging removes a bulk of the complexity and opens the doors for seamless communication across channels. Keep the information together and manage everything from one place. Every time a customer comes back, all past data is available to the agent. This provides much-needed context for an individual customer service experience.

Ready to up your customer experience game?

Our expert team of bilingual project managers at Unwired Logic specializes in small businesses. We can help you select the right combination of tools and implement it. Stay flexible and scalable without unneeded bulk. We take care of the tech, and you take care of your customers.