July 7, 2021
Zendesk is a popular and user-friendly help-desk management solution. Even in complex environments, it is easy to implement and learn. This makes Zendesk very agent-friendly, agile, and scalable. It is no wonder that it is among the top solutions on the market. If you wonder: ‘what does Zendesk do and how can it help my business grow?’, this guide is for you. Get ready to supercharge your customer service. In the following section of this Zendesk guide, we will cover:
- What is Zendesk, and how do you use it?
- What are the main features of Zendesk
- What are triggers and automation
Zendesk has dedicated applications for both support and sales. In this article, we will focus on Zendesk Support.
An introduction to Zendesk
Zendesk is a cloud-based solution to manage your help desk, knowledge bases, online communities, and customer service portals. Zendesk is designed to be an ‘out-of-the-box’ solution, and many of its applications and features come from previous user best practices. You can fully customize the front-end and apply your branding and brand identity. At its core, Zendesk is a tool to empower your support team, provide better service, and become more effective. In terms of pricing, Zendesk has many packages to choose from, depending on your budget and required functionality.
Zendesk lets you automate repetitive tasks. This improves collaboration between your support agents and also across the organization. Because agents are free to tackle more complex inquiries with Zendesk, your support becomes faster and more personalized. Zendesk incorporates best practices in its functionality. You will be able to meet customer expectations easier, improving your customer satisfaction levels.
An overview of powerful Zendesk Features
Views
The views section will be one of the most-used features by your team. It contains all the tickets created by a member of your support team or customers. You can find views on your Zendesk Dashboard on the left-hand side. The section has many pre-set filters to view only ‘All unsolved’ or ‘recently solved’ tickets. While in the beginning, it is possible to manage without tickets, when they reach into the hundreds, the filters do come in handy.
Zendesk Explore – the integrated reporting tool
To provide the best customer service, you have to strive for continuous improvement. You can’t improve a solid understanding of your customer service data. Zendesk Explore is the reporting functionality that aggregates all your confusing raw data into actionable insights. With this tool, you can understand what goes wrong and what works best for your customers. The tool enables you to make strategic decisions for your business confidently – based on actual performance data. The reporting tool comes with several pre-built dashboards, but you can fully customize it, to capture insights relevant for your business.
Zendesk Chat
When you think of customer support, most likely, chat comes to mind. It is slowly overtaking contact forms as the default contact method. Zendesk Chat is where you can communicate with customers who are active on your page at that moment. Zendesk Chat integrates with Zendesk’s Answer bot making your support active 24/7.
Whenever a visitor is online on your page, they will appear in the Chat section of the Zendesk app. Each chat will open a new ticket, so it is possible to follow up later. The agent can write notes and other relevant information about the interaction within the section. A transcript of the chat will be sent automatically to the client if they share their email. This way, even if the client abandons the chat or navigates away from the page, you can continue the conversation through a different channel.
When chatting with an existing client, information about all past tickets will be visible within the window. This provides agents with context about the client and helps to provide customized and individual support. It will help drive your customer satisfaction levels up and is a standard best practice in customer support.
The analytics section will take input for many of the KPIs from your chats and their performance:
- Response time
- Chat duration
- Satisfaction
- Wait time for served customers
- Wait time for missed customers
- Conversions
Zendesk Talk
Zendesk Talk is the section where you can manage and handle all phone conversations. You can customize every aspect, such as queue size or maximum queue time, and even record custom greetings. Zendesk Talk can synchronize with other channels, so agents see all the information relevant to the customer and have the full context. With Interactive Voice Response (IVR), the customer will get routed to the right agent, making the process more efficient. Just as with Zendesk Chat, you can view the relevant KPIs in the analytics tool.
A Guide to triggers and automation
Automations and triggers are two of the Zendesk tools that let your agents and your business save a lot of time. They are two different types of rules in your Zendesk workflow. A trigger is action-based and an automation is time-based. Your saved triggers run through whenever the ticket status changes and check if the new status matches the parameters. Automations, on the other hand, occur after a set amount of time passes. Learn more about triggers and automations with our detailed tutorial.
Unwired Logic is a Zendesk Master Implementation Partner and we are available to help answer any questions or inquiries you may have. Please feel free to contact us.
