Introducing the Zendesk Support Suite onboarding tasks

This topic provides an introduction to the tasks shown in the Support Suite onboarding wizard and gives you guidelines on where to find more information. The Support Suite provides a full-service, cross-channel experience for your customers with Support, Guide, Chat, and Talk all working together.

Your new Support Suite account features the Zendesk Agent Workspace. This workspace is enabled by default on your account. To learn more, see Documentation resources for the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

Follow the instructions on the Support Suite Welcome page to get started.

• Welcome! Experience the Support Suite
• Connect with customers
• Set up your team
• Create a self-service help center
• Learn more about the Support Suite

Welcome! Experience the Support Suite

After you complete a sample ticket demonstration, a Welcome to Zendesk page appears. Use this page to complete additional onboarding tasks and learn about the Zendesk Support Suite. You will see how the Support Suite works by learning how to connect with customers, set up your team, and create a self-service help center.

Zendesk recommends you complete the onboarding tasks in order.

• To begin, click Get started.

Tip: The onboarding tasks in this wizard are not intended to be a complete introduction or product set-up. Once you finish with your onboarding tasks in this wizard, Zendesk recommends using the Zendesk Trial Guide to help you evaluate Zendesk features and see how they'll work for you.

Connect with customers

One key element of a winning support strategy is to enable customers to connect with your over the channel of their choice. The easier you make it for customers to reach you, the faster you can help them.

Onboarding tasks in this lesson include:

• Get your built-in support address and phone number
• Create your own support email address
• Take it further

The tasks give you a quick introduction to each contact point available in the Support Suite that you can use to manage customer requests. Each topic should take from 1 or 2 minutes to complete.

Get your built-in support address and phone number

In this task, you'll get the following information about your account:

• Your Support email address where customers can send their support requests.

  Any email sent to this address automatically becomes a ticket in your Zendesk account. Zendesk created a default support address for you, but you can change it or add more addresses. Later in this lesson, we'll show you how to add additional email addresses.

• Your Talk number where customers can call for help.

  When customers call this number, Zendesk automatically creates a ticket so you have a record of the call. Zendesk created a default phone number for you, but you can change it later or forward an existing number. Zendesk Talk includes a variety of features you can use to set up your call center, including enabling call recordings, adding voicemail, and so on.

You'll learn more about each of these contact points as you work through the onboarding tasks. For more information about using email in Zendesk, see Getting started with email. For more information about using Zendesk Talk, see Getting started with Zendesk Talk.

Create your own support email address

When you set up Zendesk Support, by default you have one related email address to submit tickets: [e-mail], but you can provide your end users with alternative email addresses, called support addresses. You can add as many support addresses as you need. Support addresses can be either variations of your Zendesk email address or external email addresses.

To create your own Support address

1. Click Create support email address.
2. Enter a new support email address.
3. Click Create address.

After you complete the onboarding tasks, you can add additional email addresses you want to use on your site, set email preferences, or customize your email templates. For this onboarding, we recommend using the single, default email address provided by Zendesk. You can customize this later as needed.

To learn more about using email in Zendesk, see Getting started with email. For more information, about adding support addresses, see Adding support addresses for users to submit tickets.

Take it further

This section includes some additional tasks you can do to complete the lesson. You can perform these tasks now or return later to complete them.

• Forward an existing email address

  If you have an existing email address that is well-known with your customers, you can forward those to Zendesk so your conversations are stored in one place. For more information, see Forwarding incoming email to Zendesk Support.

• Set up live chat
  To use Zendesk Chat with the Web Widget, enable Chat on the Web Widget and configure Chat settings.

  • Click Set up live chat Web Widget to see a short description on how you can customize the Web Widget.
  • Click Copy to clipboard to get a copy of the Web Widget code and send it to your website development team.

  To learn more about the Web Widget, see Providing omnichannel support using Web Widget. To set up the Web Widget, see Using the Web Widget to embed customer service in your website.

• Add social messaging support

  You can complete your customer connections by adding social messaging channels to your account. When you install and configure social messaging channels in your account, your agents can view social messages that customers send to Zendesk as part of a support request and they can reply to these messages, all from a single, unified interface.

  To learn more about social messaging, see About social messaging channels for the Zendesk Agent Workspace. You need a Support Suite paid account to set up social messaging, it's not supported for trial accounts.

Set up your team

Another key element of a winning support strategy is to assemble a great team of agents and give them the best tools possible to do their jobs.

Onboarding tasks in this lesson include:

• See the conversation flow
• Add your team
• Manage conversations

The tasks give you a quick introduction to how your agents can manage customer conversations over the channel of their choice. Each topic should take from 1 or 2 minutes to complete.

See the conversation flow

The Zendesk Agent Workspace provides a single, unified interface your agents can use to manage customer conversations. In this workspace, conversations with customers can flow across channels as part of a seamless, natural process.

To see the conversation flow

• Click Tour agent workspace.

  Follow the on-screen instructions to take the tour.

• Click Next to start the tour and continue through each description.

  At the end of the tour, you'll return to the onboarding wizard.

To learn more about the Zendesk Agent Workspace, watch the following video. To start a conversation, see Serving chats in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

Make the most of Agent Workspace (2:33)

 

Add your team

Next, add some team members to try out the workspace. Team members can be agents or admins. For this onboarding task, we recommend only adding a few agents to test-drive your site. Later, after you plan how to arrange agents into groups and organizations, you can add them using a bulk import or through the Zendesk API.

To add your team

1. Enter an Email address for each team member you want to add.
2. Select a Role for each team member.

   Typically, you'll have lots of agents on an account, but only a few admins.

3. When you've finished adding team members, click Add team.

   Each team member you added will receive an email message with an invitation to join your Zendesk account.

To learn more about users and team members, see Understanding Support user roles. To add agents to Zendesk, see Adding agents and administrators.

Manage conversations

This task provides you with a demonstration of how your agents can manage conversions in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. It shows you how agents can set their online status and accept new customer requests.

To manage conversations

1. Click See how to manage conversations.

   Follow the instructions in the demo to set your online status and accept a new conversation.

2. To set your status, click the agent status icon () in the top bar and select Online from the status menu.

   Only agents who are online can accept new chats and social messages.

3. Click Accept to accept a message and start a conversation.

To learn more, see Managing unified conversations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

Create a self-service help center

Self-service support equips customers with round-the-clock information without having to wait for a response. It is one of the lowest-cost channels for providing excellent customer service and high resolution rates. However, the success of online self-service depends on the quality, quantity, and accessibility of your company’s knowledge-base content.

You help center consists of a knowledge base and a customer contact portal. As a Guide admin, you can create and publish articles in the help center and work with your agents to make sure customers have the latest, up-to-date information about your products.

The onboarding task in this lesson includes visiting your help center. It only takes a few minutes to complete. As part of this lesson, the onboarding wizard has automatically activated your help center for you.

To visit your help center

• Click Visit help center.

  Your help center includes a few articles to get you started.

For this onboarding task, just talk a look at the your help center and open a few articles. Later, you can customize your help center, add more articles, and so on.

To learn more about Zendesk Guide, see Welcome to Guide. To set up your help center, see Getting stared with Guide.

Learn more about the Support Suite

Congratulations! You have completed the onboarding tasks. After you onboard the Zendesk Support Suite, refer to these documents to learn more.

• Evaluating your Zendesk trial account

  This article describes how to evaluate all the products in Support Suite, including Support, Guide, Chat, and Talk to see how they will work best for you.

• Launch guide for Zendesk Support Suite products

  This article describes how to install Zendesk Support Suite in a production environment with a full set of features.