Getting started with The Zendesk Support Suite requires understanding what omnichannel customer support is, creating a deployment strategy, setting up channels, and then rolling out channels to your agents and customers.
This article is a high-level overview about getting started and is intended for admins.
- Planning your deployment of the Support Suite
- Rolling out the Support Suite
- Accessing products in the Support Suite
- Using The Support Suite products together
- Setting up and rolling out Zendesk Support
- Setting up and rolling out Zendesk Guide
- Setting up and rolling out Zendesk Chat
- Setting up and rolling out Zendesk Talk
- Rolling out channels to your customers
- Rolling out social messaging channels to your customers
- Extending the Support Suite with the Zendesk platform
Planning your deployment of the Support Suite
Deploying the Support Suite requires some planning. You need to think about both your overall omnichannel customer support strategy and your deployment strategy.
Benefits of omnichannel customer support
The Support Suite is an omnichannel customer support solution. Omnichannel customer support is a customer support strategy that seamlessly brings multiple support channels together for customers, agents, and admins. The root word omnis means “all” in Latin.
Traditionally, companies use a multichannel support strategy—they try to make themselves accessible through the communication channels that their customers use (for example, email, phone, text, chat, and social messaging) using a variety of siloed tools and technologies. This results in different channels being deployed over time, but in a manner that results in a less than ideal experience for everyone involved.
For example, here’s what can happen when you don’t use an omnichannel support solution:
| Without omnichannel customer support | |
|---|---|
| Customers | Customers often have to repeat themselves over and over, or they are passed from one agent to the next because they switched channels. |
| Agents | Agents spend time navigating through multiple interfaces, leading to inefficiencies and long handle times. |
| Admins | Admins struggle to get a sense of what’s happening across channels. They struggle with a fragmented purchase and deployment process. |
Omnichannel customer support solves these problems. Here’s what the experience looks like:
| With omnichannel customer support | |
|---|---|
| Customers | Customers can start a conversation in one channel and finish it in another without having to repeat themselves. |
| Agents | Agents have a clear view of customer behind the ticket, including their history and preferences. |
| Admins | Admins can get a sense of what’s happening across channels with regards to ticket volumes, handle times, and agent utilization. |
Planning for omnichannel customer support
When planning for omnichannel customer support, think about your current customer support strategy, and identify the pain points that your users (customers, agents, and admins) are currently experiencing. Do some of your pain points match the ones mentioned in the table above? Do you have any others?
What to think about
Think about what you need to do to “bring multiple support channels together” so that everyone involved has the best experience possible. Your goals might be to increase customer satisfaction, reduce agent turnover, or decrease resolution time.
- What are your business goals?
- What kind of experience do you want to deliver to customers?
- What are your customer support goals?
- How can you increase customer satisfaction?
- What types of support matter most to your customer? Is there a particular channel that they tend to use and prefer?
- How does your product affect your support strategy? For example, is your product simple enough that you can deflect a large percent of questions away from agents by setting up a Help Center? Or is it something technical or complex and your customers often need to talk to someone to resolve their problems?
- How many agents do you need?
- Can agents cover multiple channels or are they specialized?
Staffing requirements
Planning your deployment strategy
When planning your deployment strategy, think about where you are now and where you want to be in the future. Remember that you need to create a specific, clear plan about how to roll out channels to your agents and customers.
What to think about
You might need to involve different people at your company to answer your questions. Collecting information is a very important part of planning your deployment because it helps you develop a realistic timeline and avoid mistakes.
- What are your most popular channels?
- How do you get most of your tickets? Emails, phone calls, or some other channel?
- What is your ideal mix of channels?
- In what ways do you provide reactive and proactive support?
- Is your customer support currently outsourced? Are you are bringing it in-house for the first time?
- Do you have any systems that you want to stop using? How do you plan to migrate information from those systems?
- Do you need a third party to help you with planning and deployment?
- Do you need to create an internal change management committee?
- How do you staff channels?
- Are agents responsible for managing multiple channels at once?
- What is your workflow for channel switching and follow up?
- How do you train your agents? Do you use fee-based training courses? Do you train your agents yourself?
- Do you know where to find webinars and other resources that may be useful?
Deploying the Support Suite using a phased approach
There are a few things that make rolling out the Support Suite to your customers a little bit easier on you.
You’ll need to start with Support. After that, it’s a good idea to set up Guide. We recommend setting up a Guide Help Center right away, so that at the very least, you can start collecting undocumented, internal knowledge from your agents. A Help Center can help deflect tickets away from your agents and allows them to focus their attention on more complicated support requests. If you don’t have a set of documentation yet, don’t let that stop you. Once you have Guide set up, you can leverage knowledge from your agents to create articles and, if you need to, you can always improve the content later on. For more information, scroll down to Setting up and rolling out Zendesk Guide.
You’ll probably want to make yourself fully available over live channels like Chat and Talk later because they require live agents that are on-call and that can respond right away to customer requests. Instead, start by being extremely targeted about how you offer live channels. Start by using phone to make outbound phone calls on particularly tricky tickets, for example. Or start by offering proactive Chat on certain key points in your customer journey. This gives you time to determine if you have enough staff, and to estimate things like your average number of calls, average length of calls, and how much time agents need after calls to wrap things up. When you’re ready, you can do advanced configuration and full rollout of Talk and Chat.
- Learn about each product in the Support Suite.
- Set up Support Suite products in a way that makes sense for your company.
- Train agents to use the products.
- Test your setup before making channels live for your customers.
Planning your timeline
You may be wondering how long it’s going to take you to deploy. This is a common question, but one that’s difficult to answer because each company deploying the Support Suite is unique. The answer is “it depends.”
- The unique wants and needs of your company and customers
- What other tools and technology you are switching from
- If you are an existing Zendesk customer, what channels you already have in place
- If you are a new customer starting from scratch, or bringing your customer support in-house for the first time (vs. outsourced customer support).
- The options you want to configure initially.
Rolling out the Support Suite
Now that you’re done with planning, you're ready to start setting up your Zendesk products. There are many possible ways to set up each product and you’ll need to decide which things you want to do before you roll out the products to your agents and customers.
- Accessing products in the Support Suite
- Using the Support Suite products together
- Setting up and rolling out Zendesk Support
- Setting up and rolling out Zendesk Guide
- Setting up and rolling out Zendesk Chat
- Setting up and rolling out Zendesk Talk
- Rolling out channels to your customers
- Rolling out social messaging channels to your customers
- Extending the Support Suite with the Zendesk platform
Accessing products in the Support Suite
You can easily switch from one Zendesk product to another using the product tray. For more information, see Switching among Zendesk products.
Using the Support Suite products together
When you buy the Support Suite, the pricing is different, but the products are the same. They don’t behave any differently. You are buying a solution that you can use to create an omnichannel customer experience, but it doesn’t mean that you’re automatically set up for omnichannel customer support.
You still need to think about how to use the products together, in a way that makes sense for your business and customers. The main thing you need to think about is, “where do you want tickets to go?” Ticket workflow is very important. Think about your ticket workflows, and think about using your Zendesk products in a combined way. Your customers want to be able to have a conversation with you about their problems and have a seamless experience, but in order for that to happen you need to do certain things.
Here’s an example about how you might use Support and Talk together:
Let’s say that you want to set up groups and business rules in Support to help you manage Talk calls received outside of business hours. First, you need to create groups of agents to respond to calls. Then, you create business rules to route tickets to those groups.
This section includes information, ideas, and suggestions that may be useful as you start thinking about how to use Zendesk products in a combined way and how give customers the best possible experience.
Adding agents
You don’t need to add agents and admins manually to each of the different products in the Support Suite. You add them once to Support, and from there you can enable the other Support Suite products. For example, Chat and Talk. This is done from an Admin Center link in the agent’s profile. See Setting roles and access in Zendesk Admin Center.
As for Guide, Support agents are automatically Guide viewers, by default. However, you can make Support agents Guide admins instead. See Changing an agent's role to grant Guide administrator privileges.
You can bulk import agents to Support using a CSV file as described in Bulk importing users. However, there’s currently no way to enable agents for Talk or Chat when using this method. So, when using the Support Suite, you can bulk import the agents to Support, but then you have to enable them for other products using the Support interface. This issue also applies to importing agents through Zendesk API.
If you want to enable multiple agents for Talk at one time, you can do that by following the instructions for editing Talk permissions in bulk found in Determining which agents can use Zendesk Talk (Talk Team, Professional, and Enterprise).
Support Suite seats and Contributor agents
If you have Chat Contributor agents in-place and are buying the Support Suite, make sure that you understand how Contributor agents are affected by your purchase.
Assigning roles to users
Zendesk products include a number of user roles that are key to managing the people who generate support requests and those who resolve them.
| Product | Roles | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Support | Account owner, Admin, Agent, [Custom roles], End user | |
| Support Enterprise | Legacy agent, Light agent (add-on required), Staff, Team leader, Advisor, End user | Support light agents cannot be chat owners, admins, and agents, or Talk agents.
Note: Light agents are only available with the Collaboration add-on (see About add-ons (Professional and Enterprise).
|
| Guide | Guide Admin, Guide Agent, Guide Viewer, End user, Anonymous user | |
| Chat | Owner, Admin, Agent, [Custom roles], Visitor | Support admins are Guide admins by default.
Support agents can also be Guide admins. If using custom roles in Support, the custom role contains a Help Center role. If your Support plan does not include custom roles, the Support role has no impact on the Help Center role. On these plans, the Help Center role is a setting on the user profile. |
| Talk | Agent, Admin, Team lead, End user | Incoming callers are Support end users. A Talk admin may also be the Support admin. |
For more information about roles in Chat, see Understanding the default user roles in Zendesk Chat.
For more information about roles in Talk, see Setting permissions for which agents can use Talk (Enterprise only).
Using Support triggers and automations to manage ticket workflows
Use automations and triggers, which are types of predefined actions called business rules, to automatically route tickets. The key thing to keep in mind about these features (their key difference) is that automations are time-based and triggers are event-based. What that means is that automations execute, or fire, every hour (although not necessarily at exactly the same time every hour). Triggers, on the other hand, execute, or fire, when the ticket is created and every time it is updated. Also, be aware that Support triggers are not the same as Chat triggers.
When you buy the Support Suite, you might increase the number of channels that you have to manage. If that’s the case, features that automatically route tickets become very important. For example, you now have tickets coming to and from Talk, Chat, and Guide to Support, and you need make sure they go to the right place.
Using Support custom triggers to avoid unnecessary emails
Triggers can result in a lot of email, so when you add a new channel, make sure that you test the result from an end-user perspective and that you’re happy with the experience. You may want to deactivate default Support triggers and replace them with custom triggers so that end-users are not bombarded with unnecessary or poorly timed emails (see Support default triggers).
Here’s an example of a case where you might want to deactivate a trigger:
If Notify requestor received request (a default trigger) is active and a customer leaves a Talk voicemail during non-operating hours, a Support ticket is generated and the customer receives an email saying that their request was received. You might not want to send that email. Customers like it when you reply from the channel they choose for communication.
Let’s say that your company tries to respond to customers through the channel they use to request help, whenever possible. You have a policy or practice that says when a customer contacts you by phone, you try to reach them two to three times by phone before resorting to an email. If this is the case, you need to deactivate the Notify requestor received request trigger so that the email is not sent, and consider using a custom trigger instead.
Using Support macros and Chat shortcuts to improve agent efficiency
Use Macros and shortcuts to reduce or eliminate time spent on simple, repetitive tasks. Keep in mind that macros and shortcuts aren’t the same thing, and that you can’t sync them. They are completely separate features.
You create macros in Support and shortcuts in Chat. You can’t use macros from Support in the other Support Suite products, and you can’t use shortcuts from Chat in the other Support Suite products.
Also, there’s more than one types of shortcut in Chat. You can use conversation shortcuts to add common phrases such as “Hi. Do you need some help?” to a chat. If you are looking for shortcuts to help you navigate the Chat interface, use keyboard shortcuts instead.
Defining your SLA policies
A Service Level Agreement, or SLA, is an agreed upon measure of the average response and resolution times that your support team delivers to your customers. Providing support based on service levels ensures that you're delivering measured and predictable service. It also provides greater visibility when problems arise.
You can define SLA service targets in Zendesk Support so that you and your agents can monitor your service level performance and meet your service level goals. Zendesk Support highlights tickets that fail to meet service level targets so that you can promptly identify and address problems.
Support SLA policies don’t apply to live channels such as Chat or Talk because the service targets are different. For example, let’s say that your company goal is to answer chats within 60 seconds and you want to know how well you‘re doing. You need to use Explore to create a report, instead of using a SLA policy.
For more information, see Defining and using SLA policies (Professional and Enterprise).
Setting up groups and departments
You can create groups in Support, and departments in Chat.
In Support, groups collect agents together based on criteria those agents have in common. Groups can only contain agents; no end-users can be included. All agents must be assigned to at least one group, but they can be members of more than one. For more information about groups, see Creating, managing, and using groups.
In Chat, departments are used by larger companies to organize support agents that respond to chats to more efficiently direct visitors to an agent who can help them. For more information, see Creating agents and departments.
Groups in Support don't have to correspond to departments in Chat. For example, if you create a group in Support called Legal, it does not automatically create a department in Chat called Legal. You can choose to give groups and departments the same names, if that suits your needs, or you can use them for different purposes, which is common.
Using tags
You can apply tags to tickets, users, and organizations in Support. Tags are simply words, or combinations of words, you can use to add more context to tickets and topics (see Using tags).
You can also create Chat-specific tags and use them in Support. You must predefine Chat tags from the Chat dashboard first (go to Settings > Account > Chat Tags). If the Chat tag isn't predefined, then an error appears when agents try to apply them from Support (see Understanding different types of tags in Chat and Adding tags to chat sessions).
It can be helpful to develop an internal policy about how your company uses tags. We recommend doing this because it can be problematic to have multiple similar but different tags if you use business rules to route tickets based on tags.
Agents can add any new tags that they want. Without a set policy, you may end up with a lot of different tags over time. You can’t restrict the ability to add tags, so you need to curate tags in other ways. For example, sometimes people create an internal list of approved tags and ask that agents use only the tags that are on the list. The list can be kept in a common location like SharePoint, Google Drive, or on a wiki where everyone can access it.
Setting business and operating hours
Business hours and operating hours are an important part of managing customer expectations when you are not available to provide immediate help. You’ll need to have a workflow in place for following up with customers, regardless of when they contact you.
If you don't provide 24/7 support to your customers, you can use business hours in Support to acknowledge your availability. This gives customers a better sense of when they can expect a personal response to their support requests. For more information, see Setting your schedule with business hours and holidays.
After you create your schedule in Support, you can assign a schedule to a phone number in Talk. On the Support Suite Professional plan, you can set only one schedule. On the Support Suite Enterprise plan, you can set multiple schedules. Calls are routed to available agents based on your scheduled business hours. For more information, see Routing calls based on business hours (Talk Team, Professional, and Enterprise).
In Chat, business hours are called operating hours and you can use them to set a schedule for when agents appear online. Any schedules you create in Zendesk Support will not transfer over to Zendesk Chat. For more information, see Creating a schedule with operating hours (Professional and Enterprise) (Chat).
Setting up and rolling out Zendesk Support
All of the Zendesk products are designed to work with Support, rather than by themselves as standalone products. So, you’ll want to set up Support first.
- Get started with Zendesk—Add groups, create and edit user roles, create business schedules, and create user fields.
- Create your brand—add support addresses, create custom ticket fields, create ticket forms, create organization fields, import organizations, and set up the Web Widget.
- Configure admin settings—Configure security settings, add apps from the Zendesk Marketplace, set up third party integrations, and configure single sign-on.
- Create your workflow—Create triggers, automations, SLAs, agent views, and agent macros.
- Build your brand—Customize your Help Center, create content for your help center, create a community for end-users, customize your domain, add your Facebook page and Twitter account.
- Launch!—Import end users, forward your email, embed the Web Widget, and activate your help center
For more information and links to articles on these subjects, see the Launch guide for Zendesk Support Suite products.
For more ideas about how to get started with Support, see the Getting Started Guide for Zendesk Support.
Setting up and rolling out Zendesk Guide
We recommend setting up a Guide Help Center right away so that, at the very least, you can start collecting undocumented, internal knowledge from your agents. The Knowledge Capture app can help you with this. If you don’t feel ready to make information public, that’s not a problem. You can make articles internal-only while you build a collection of articles.
In some cases, setting up Help Center takes longer. This may be the case if you are creating all of your content from scratch, are moving a large set of existing content into Help Center, or if you want to customize your Help Center instead of using default theme.
- Set Guide roles and permissions
- Create user segments
- Brand your Help Center
- Configure team publishing workflow
- Customize your Help Center
- Create content for your Help Center
- Configure the Knowledge Capture app
- Create a community for end users
- Customize your domain
- Activate your Help Center
For more information and links to articles on these subjects, see the Launch guide for Zendesk Support Suite products.
For more information about getting started with Zendesk Guide, see the Getting Started Guide for Zendesk Guide. For some good ideas on how to plan your guide, see The data-driven path to building a great help center.
Setting up and rolling out Zendesk Chat
One of the most popular channels, and a favorite with customers, is live chat. Your customers can either initiate a new chat session and create a new support request or chat about one of their existing unsolved tickets. Agents can also proactively start a chat with customers. The entire chat conversation between the agent and the customer is captured as a ticket in your Zendesk Support instance (or as an update to an existing ticket).
You’ll need to either enable the Zendesk Agent Workspace (recommended) or set up Chat in Support using the Chat integration app.
- Add chat agents
- Create departments
- Configure chat settings
- Create chat triggers
- Create shortcuts
- Configure the Web Widget (instead of the Chat widget)
- Activate chat analytics
- Activate chat monitor dashboard
For more information and links to articles on these subjects, see the Launch guide for Zendesk Support Suite products.
For more ideas about how to get started with Chat, see the Getting Started with Zendesk Chat.
Setting up and rolling out Zendesk Talk
Even in the age of email, social media, and whatever new channel is just around the corner, sometimes customers prefer to use the phone for certain conversations. Voice conveys tone and emotion, so customers may prefer it for sensitive or urgent issues. Whether it’s to resolve complex support issues or to receive personalized service, many people appreciate companies that make the investment in providing quality support over the phone.
Zendesk Talk is cloud-based call center software that helps companies provide more personal, productive phone support. It’s built right into the Zendesk multichannel support ticketing solution, allowing teams to deliver phone support from the same platform they use to manage all other customer conversations. Easy to set up and use, Zendesk Talk helps organizations boost agent productivity, improve cross-channel reporting, reduce costs, and—most importantly—improve the customer experience.
Before you roll out Talk to your customers, here are some things that you may want to do:
- Add talk numbers
- Configure talk settings
- Create greetings
- Configure IVR and routing
- Configure agent forwarding
- Activate Talk
For more information and links to articles on these subjects, see the Launch guide for Zendesk Support Suite products.
For more ideas about how to get started with Talk, see these documents and articles:
Rolling out channels to your customers
When rolling out the Support Suite to your customers, think about how your customers get your contact information. Do they do a general internet search that brings them to your website or Help Center? Once they are there, do they search for a support email or phone number? Where do you put your contact information? Is it on printed materials such as receipts and product packaging too?
The reason this matters is because customers often start a conversation in one channel and finish it in another, starting with channels that they are most comfortable with and that they find the most convenient. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to switch channels, especially from your website or Help Center.
Another important consideration is when to make channels available and for whom. Limiting availability at first can help you to gauge demand, training, and staffing needs to ensure a responsive customer experience.
The Web Widget is an important tool for providing your customers with an omnichannel customer support experience. You can add it to any of your web properties to allow your customers to get quick access to all of the different forms of support that you offer. There are a lot of customization options, but here’s an example of what it can look like.
This Web Widget does several things from a single place. It gives the customer access to knowledge base articles. It allows them to request to talk to an agent, to chat immediately with an agent online, or to fill in a form about their problem and be contacted later.
You can provide the same embedded customer support in an Android or iOS app.
For more information, see Embedding customer service in mobile apps with the Support SDK.
Rolling out social messaging channels to your customers
The Support Suite includes the Social Messaging add-on, which expands the social messaging capabilities of Zendesk Support. After you complete setup, messages from social messaging channels will become tickets in your Support account, and then your agents can respond to the requests from Support.
With this add-on, you can:
- Add LINE accounts to Support. If you have also purchased hosting for WhatsApp phone numbers, you can also add WhatsApp accounts.
- Receive private messages (Twitter DMs and messages sent through Facebook Messenger).
- Add more Facebook and Twitter accounts. The add-on also increases the number of Facebook and Twitter accounts that you are allowed to have.
For more information about setting up social messaging, see Installing and setting up the social messaging add-on and Using social messaging channels (Social Messaging add-on).
Extending the Support Suite with the Zendesk platform
The Zendesk platform for developers consists of APIs for each product, a JavaScript framework for building add-ons for the Support and Chat admin interfaces, and SDKs to embed customer service in mobile apps and web pages.
- Use the Zendesk APIs to automate tasks, work with your data, or integrate the data in your own products or services
- Use the Zendesk Apps framework to build add-ons for Support and Chat
- Use the mobile SDKs for Support and Chat to embed customer service in your iOS and Android apps
- Use the Web Widget JavaScript API to control and customize the customer service embedded on your web pages
For more information, see the Develop Help Center.
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