One of the things that I have struggled with as a small business owner (I teach music on the side), is finding a way to quickly, elegantly, and efficiently track my customer information, and capitalize on this data to provide a more elegant and personalized experience for my customers. While there are a battery of full fledged CRM solutions available, I needed to find a way that was not only simplified (for ease of use, and speed), but was also integrated with my communications platform of choice, Zendesk Support.

A great new feature launched in the summer of 2013 called User and Organization Fields. At first, I struggled to comprehend why I would ever want to store all of this information; wouldn’t I rather have it be a Ticket field? Don’t I already have a lot of this information in my Address Book? Finally it dawned on me—if I have it available as a User Field or an Organization Field , I can store information that persists across all tickets by that user or Organization.

One of the things that people are craving is a truly personal touch in their support interactions, something that let’s your customers know that you really care , that you're hearing them, and that you're processing their inbound communication. In fact, in my experience, rarely do people become more agitated (myself included) than when they believe they are not being heard. By storing key bits of information in the User’s profile I can accomplish a variety of things, including:

    • Storing key user data, so they don’t have to repeat it each time we come into contact
    • Have fields for technical information, serial numbers, or operating system information
    • Keep details on the user in a place that is actionable , rather than in a big blob, in a Notes box:

Have you ever found yourself doing the same thing over and over and over and over … But don’t want to simply fire off a generic, impersonal macro to your beloved customers?

If so, then this just may pique your interest. How’d you like to store important customer data right in your own Zendesk Support instance, and populate your responses to your clients with personalized information, in just moments? It is possible to populate a ticket in under ten seconds—here's proof:

In the following sections of this article, I explain how to set all of this up.

Adding user field placeholders in your macros and triggers

It’s like magic when you finally apply your user information via placeholders in your correspondence, triggers, and macros.

For my music studio, I can create user fields not only for what the students are studying, but also their parent’s names, band directors, instrument, age, grade, and more. I can then quickly convert this information that used to be siloed in my address book to placeholders that can be used in my customer communication. This approach can be adapted to the specific key pieces of information that are most helpful for your business.

It is then possible to create a series of macros that use this information, as in these examples:

  • Tailored greetings
    • “Dear {{ticket.requester.dad}}, little Jimmy is really doing well!”
    • “Great to hear from you! How is Mr. {{ticket.requester.pets_name}}?”
  • Connecting with your clients
    • “How is {{ticket.requester.spouse_name}}? How’ve you been? It’s been a while since I saw you at {{ticket.requester.last_contact}}!”
  • Track significant information
    • “I’m sorry to hear that you’re having trouble with your {{ticket.requester.product_model}}!
    • "The serial number we have on file for you is {{ticket.requester.serial_number}}."
    • "Are you still running system {{ticket.requester.operating_system}}."

This has saved me an incredible amount of time in my own teaching, as I can take assignment notes in the custom fields during lessons, then with a few clicks I can do the following:

  1. Send an email sent to the student with their assignment
  2. Provide a permanent record that they can check 24/7 (in my Help Center)
  3. Allow them to Print a hard copy of their assignments

To use a User Field as a placeholder, you simply need to know the field key. You can then use the custom user field from your requester, ticket assignee, and more (check out the User data section of the Placeholders reference).

The most common application you’re likely to use, however, is with your customer, the ticket requester . In this example, our Field key is widget_model . If I’m writing back to them, I simply need to include the following placeholder: {{ticket.requester.custom_fields.widget_model}} and it will place the contents of that field into the ticket comment.

Creating macros with your user fields

The true power of these new placeholders comes into play when you combine them with macros. By placing your new custom field placeholders inside a macro, you can quickly populate your most common responses, greetings, and more.  Here is an example of how I've used placeholders and Markdown together to save me time in my own customer interactions:

Customer Lists and MailChimp - your new best friends

Using your new custom user field, you can create a variety of Customer Lists that will help you sort, categorize, and keep your business running smoothly.

Personally, as someone running a part-time small business, a few things I struggle with include contacting multiple parties and tracking payment history. I’m going to walk you through two ways that custom user fields have been a true godsend when I need to proactively reach out to my customers in the event of a cancellation or if we need to reschedule our session.

Occasionally, things happen. Someone gets sick, I get a great gig, the car breaks down, or I’m abducted by aliens… which means that things must sometimes be rescheduled! In the past, this meant lots of text messages, emails, and phone calls. With a little lead time however, and a combination of a custom user field, a customer list, and a MailChimp , I am a much happier music teacher.

Step 1: Create a custom field on a user

Create a custom user field to store the data you wish to track, act upon, or use in your communication.

Step 2: Create a customer list

Create a customer list based on your desired criteria. Since I wanted a list of my Monday students, I chose to filter my Lesson Day user field.

Step 3: Create a MailChimp campaign

Now that you have a customer list set up based on one of your user fields, you can then take advantage of the great MailChimp Campaign App . With short work, you can create a campaign, and send out a message to your new Customer List. To get the most of out this process, in MailChimp, be sure to set your reply address as your support email address. Then when customers reach out, a ticket will be created in Zendesk Support.

Business Rules, final thoughts, and your assignment

As with any other placeholder, you can also use your user and organization custom fields in the email notifications that are generated by your triggers and automations. I hope that this article has helped spark an idea or two for being more effective with your time and automating a more personal touch in your customer communication.

By automating some of my processes and having detailed notes of our interactions (key bits of critical information that I can see on every interaction with my customers) I can then focus on the most critical task—providing my customers with the outstanding experience that they expect and deserve.

I challenge you to see if you can find at least one way to make use of your user and organization fields. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how useful they can be!

More information about the features mentioned in this article

  • Adding Custom Fields to Users
  • Adding Custom Fields to Organizations
  • Creating and Using Customer Lists Creating and Using Customer Lists
  • Printing Tickets
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