Helping to prepare your team: Getting the most from Zendesk

With all the uncertainty around COVID-19, we’re contingency planning, and we know you’re probably doing the same. We have compiled a list of our product features and ideas to help your team continue to work effectively. Best of all, most of these utilise tools that are already included in your subscription.

Improving collaboration

Remote working can impact collaboration, but customer experience doesn’t need to suffer.

• Read our best-practice article on effective team communication
• Visit the apps marketplace to integrate your company collaboration tools into Zendesk. The Collaboration Add-on makes it easy to include other teams in tickets (via Slack and email).

Tracking productivity

Zendesk Explore enables you to track and delve into agents’ productivity, so you can best support them, even when working remotely.

• See our easy-to-follow "recipes" for creating customised reports
• Use the free Time Tracking app to track the length of time agents spend working on individual tickets. Track their work and identify where you can make process changes to improve response times.
• The Talk live monitor enables you to track calls and delve into agent statistics. Admin tools enable managers to listen to calls, provide help, and join calls. Read our best-practice tips for monitoring Talk.

• Chat also has a live monitor to track chats. Here’s a best-practice article for Chat.

• Review this Fine Tuning article on improving agent productivity

Managing ticket volumes

Increasingly, customers also want to help themselves (67% of customers prefer to self-serve).
It’s important to offer customers robust support tools that can be accessed 24/7.

• Ensure your Help Centre is up to date and matches the questions being asked. Create an Explore report to analyse the one-touch tickets and create content.
• Use Content Cues to identify the gaps in your Help Centre
• Answer Bot can automatically serve the content to customers before and after ticket submission to issue zero-touch tickets that don’t need agent involvement.

Providing omnichannel support

Customers increasingly expect to be given a choice on which channel to contact you. Regardless of the channel they use, your agents will have access to the context of previous conversations, suggested answers, full functionality and the ability to change the channel.

• Use Talk or Talk Partner Edition to take calls in Zendesk and create tickets (with call recordings and QA options). The Talk network requirements are here.
• Live Chat is a more efficient channel than the phone and will enable your agents to deal with more customers at the same time.
• WhatsApp is an exploding channel, popular with both customers and agents. Customer expectations for response times are lower for WhatsApp than Chat, giving you more flexibility and taking the pressure off the agent.

How to access Zendesk remotely

Zendesk can be accessed remotely from any device connected to the internet.

• There are only a few low-level technical requirements
• iOS and Android apps are available for mobile devices
• Secure your agents’ access through Single Sign-on options, IP Address Restrictions and customised Agent Roles.

Don’t hesitate to contact us

We will continue to monitor this situation daily and provide further updates on this blog. Please be assured that we are here to help you continue to provide great experiences for your customers at support@zendesk.com.