Installing and using the Proactive Tickets app

 

The Proactive Tickets app helps your team go beyond the support ticket, focus on your customers, and build better relationships by enabling you to use customer lists to proactively reach out to segments of your customer base. Instead of waiting for your customers to reach out for help, you can kickstart customer service by creating proactive tickets on their behalf. 

The Proactive Tickets app, now upgraded to version 2,  is available in the current version of Zendesk for Team, Professional, and Enterprise plans. 

Here are some ways you might want to use proactive tickets:

• Manage business renewals: Create proactive tickets when your customers are coming up to their subscription renewals. With subscription type or renewal date stored in custom user or organization field in your Zendesk, you can target specific customer types. 
• Online retailers: Proactively reach out to customers according to their service changes, purchase history, or order fulfillment status. With knowledge of your buyers' history, getting ahead of potential issues in your buyers' experience drives up revenue and reduces abandonment.  
• Internal help desks: Notify users within your organization of service disruptions or changes in policy. Keeping your employees up and running reduces downtime and maintains their productivity. 

To help you get started, this guide will walk through: 

• Installing the Proactive Tickets app
• Creating proactive tickets campaigns
• Best practices for your proactive ticket campaigns

Installing the Proactive Tickets app

1. Click the Admin () icon in the sidebar, then select Apps > Marketplace.
2. Find the Proactive Tickets app, then click the title.
3. On the app details page, click the Install App button on the upper-right side of the page.

After the app is installed, you'll see the Proactive Tickets () icon appear in the left navigation bar. 

Creating proactive ticket campaigns

It's best practice to double check your customer list and make sure that you are sending to the correct group of customers.

To create a proactive ticket campaign

1. Click the Proactive Tickets () icon in the left navigation bar. 
2. Choose search criteria to create a filtered list of customers. 
3. Enter a unique name in the Name your campaign field. The name will be added as a tag to all the tickets for this campaign. You can use this tag to create custom reports.
4. Enter remaining details, like the subject, description, ticket status, and assignee, in the Create your proactive ticket section. 
5. Click Next to preview your proactive ticket.
6. Review your proactive ticket details and click Send to send your campaign.
7. Once your tickets are all created, a confirmation page appears. Additionally, Zendesk will automatically create a ticket view for your campaign. Click Go to ticket view and use that dedicated view to manage your proactive tickets. 

Zendesk creates proactive tickets at a rate limit of 200 tickets per minute. Depending on how many proactive tickets you're creating, it might take a few minutes for your entire campaign to run. Please do not leave the screen during this time.

Best practices for your proactive ticket campaigns

In addition to setting up the Proactive Tickets app, you can set up other aspects of your Zendesk to support your proactive ticket campaigns. 

Before you create proactive tickets:

• Your proactive tickets will follow the existing workflows you have set up in your Zendesk. Review your triggers setup to make sure you want your proactive tickets to follow the same workflow. To create a dedicated workflow for your proactive tickets, you'll need to set up a trigger based on the unique tag for your proactive ticket campaign. See Streamlining workflows with triggers for setup help. 
• Meet with your team to communicate the objectives and create an action plan for your proactive tickets campaign. Identify queue management, triage, and escalation strategies. With a prepared plan of attack, your team will be more efficient and productive in managing your proactive communication.
• Create other relevant tools, like macros to speed up repetitive responses, to support your proactive ticket campaign. See Using macros to update tickets for setup help. 

As you create your proactive tickets:

• Make sure that you do not create more proactive tickets than your team can reasonably support. If you're planning on proactively communicating with your customers, you'll want to be prepared to be able to respond back quickly and efficiently. A great way to gauge how many tickets your agents can support is by simply looking at your agents' ticket resolution power, as measured by tickets solved per day.
• Be mindful of your customers when creating proactive tickets on their behalf. Just like any other outbound customer communication, you want to be careful on how often you "reach out" or "spam" them. 
• Double-check your customer lists before sending out your proactive ticket campaign. We recommend that you create no more than 1,000 proactive tickets per campaign, so make sure your customer list has fewer than 1,000 customers. If you need to send to more customers, you'll need multiple campaigns. 

After you create your proactive tickets:

• Check out the ticket view Zendesk automatically creates for you. You can use this view to organize and manage your proactive tickets. You can customize this ticket view to fit your needs. See Using views to manage workflows for setup help. 
• To report on your proactive ticket campaign, you can use the unique tag that was created for your proactive ticket campaign. You'll need to use Insights to create custom reports based off of this tag. See Using Insights (Professional and Enterprise) for more information.