Streamlining the resolution of employee service requests

Summary: ◀▼

You can set up task lists, approval requests, and action flows to help agents handle employee service requests. Use automatic ticket routing to assign requests to the right teams, train agents on workflows, and automate updates in external systems. These features support common scenarios like hardware asset assignment and new hire onboarding, improving ticket management and service quality for employee requests.

Articles in the series

Articles in the series

• Messaging deployment guide: Introduction
• Part 1: About the Zendesk Employee Service Suite
• Part 2: Using the sample data for employee services
• Part 3: Simplifyig the submission of employee service requests
• Part 4: Streamlining the resolution of employee service requests

Employee Service Suite | Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus

Approvals, task lists, and action flows were designed specifically to solve employee service requests more efficiently. These features can be used with other Zendesk features, such as triggers, AI agents, and omnichannel routing, to help agents solve employee requests efficiently and with a consistently high quality of service.

This article contains the following topics:

• Best practices for setting up employee service ticket workflows
• Examples combining Zendesk features to solve common employee service scenarios

Best practices for setting up employee service ticket workflows

Consider the following best practices when setting up your ticket workflows for employee services:

• Configure automatic ticket routing.

  Whether you're using Zendesk for customer service or employee service, you need to have a way to get the tickets to the right agents.

  This could be simple triggers that route IT-related service requests to a team of IT agents, HR service requests to a team of HR agents, and so on. Then, those agents could use views to see the tickets assigned to them and their groups. That would be a pull-based routing method, since the agents would be selecting or pulling the tickets they work on from a view.

  Alternatively, for a more sophisticated routing system, you could use omnichannel routing with custom queues designed to identify each type of service request and route them to agents on the appropriate internal team. Optionally, you could further refine the routing assignments based on the skills an agent must have to solve a request or the ticket's priority.

  For more information, see Routing and automation options for incoming tickets.

• Train your agents on the ticket workflow.

  First and foremost, make sure your agents understand how they receive their work in Zendesk. Do they assign it to themselves from views or is it automatically assigned to them by omnichannel routing?

  Also, make sure that they know what task lists exist and understand how and why to use them as well as when and how to use approval requests. It might help them to understand the following about task lists and approval requests, respectively:

  • Task lists: Many employee service requests require agents to take predictable and repeatable steps to solve. For example, certain HR requests might require a review by the Legal or Security teams or an IT request might require the approval of the requester's manager. Admins can define the lists of tasks required for these common types of service requests so help ensure agents know what actions they need to take. Then, the task list can be added to the ticket by an agent or an action flow, and the assigned agent can check off their task items as they are completed.
  • Approval requests: Approval requests are added to tickets by agents, API, or action flows when something about the ticket requires the approval of someone other than the ticket assignee. Commonly, approvers are users who don't spend all day working in Zendesk. Therefore, the approval request process is designed to make it as simple and easy as possible for approvers to respond to approval requests rapidly and let the agents proceed with solving the ticket.
• Use action flows to automate actions in external systems based on employee requests in Zendesk.

  Action flows are user-defined automated sequences of steps that perform actions in Zendesk and external systems based on a defined event that initiates the workflow. They can be used to update ticket, user, and custom object properties in Zendesk, send notifications through external systems, and update data in external systems.

  Especially in employee service scenarios, it is common to need to keep external systems up-to-date based on changes that are prompted by tickets. For example, if onboarding new hires to your company involves submitting a New hire service request, the HR agent working the ticket might need to ensure the new user is added to Zendesk and an external HR system, such as Workday. Rather than manually creating that user twice, they could create it once and use an action flow to ensure the same user information is reflected in the other system.

Examples combining Zendesk features to solve common employee service scenarios

The following examples demonstrate some of the ways you can combine Zendesk features to solve common employee service scenarios.

Assigning hardware assets (IT)

• Add hardware service items to your service catalog and connect them to your IT asset types.
• Create an Assigning hardware assets task list. The list should include a task to create an approval request assigned to the requester's manager and a task to update the assigned asset's record in Zendesk to reflect its status as assigned and the user to whom it was assigned.
• Create an action flow that automatically adds the Assigning assets task list to tickets created for service requests for hardware assets.
• Create a ticket trigger or custom omnichannel routing queue that routes tickets created for service requests for hardware assets to the IT team's agents.

Onboarding new hires (HR)

• Add a New hire onboarding service to your service catalog.
• Create a ticket trigger or custom omnichannel routing queue that routes tickets created for new hire service requests to the HR team's agents.
• Create a New hire task list. This should include tasks for things such as performing background checks; adding the new employee to the HR system, payroll, and messaging system; and submitting service requests to IT to get a laptop and necessary software licenses assigned to the new employee.
• Create action flows that:
  • Automatically adds the new employee to Zendesk based on their information in the HR system, such as Workday, after the ticket is updated to reflect that the employee's background check has been completed.
  • Post a "Welcome" message to a team's channel in their messaging system, such as Slack, when a new employee is added to their team's group in Zendesk.