Monitoring your remote support effectiveness during the COVID-19 pandemic

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During difficult periods like the COVID-19 pandemic, your first priority must always be the safety of your employees. This means that many or all of your agents might need to work from home. Additionally, during difficult times, your ticket volumes might increase as concerned customers seek help with your products or services.

In this article, we'll share some ways to keep your customers happy and to keep your agents happy and productive.

This article contains the following sections:

Helping your customers
Helping your agents and productivity
Further reading

Helping your customers

The main way you hear from your customers is through tickets. These tickets might be received through email, phone call, or a variety of other channels. During a difficult time, your ticket volumes might increase substantially. To keep on top of things, it's crucial for you to understand how many tickets are coming in and be able to understand problem areas. Zendesk Explore has your back here. The pre-built dashboards tell you all you need to know about your ticket volumes and where tickets are coming from. If you're using Explore Professional or Enterprise and an About field, you can dig in further to see exactly which product or service areas need more attention. Read on for details.

How many tickets do we have?

The Support dashboard, built into all versions of Explore gives you an immediate look into your ticket volumes. You can look at your busiest times to help you allocate staff, how many tickets are being solved (or reopened after being solved), and much more.

Get started with the Support dashboard

What are our problem areas?

Support provides a bunch of ticket fields you can use to filter, sort, and find your tickets. However, we recognize that no two companies are alike, so we included custom fields that let you customize tickets to your needs. For example, your company sells cameras and you want to sort tickets by camera model. By adding a custom field, your agents and your customers can label tickets by each camera type. You'll often hear this referred to as an about field. With this information, you can use Explore to really dig into any problem areas.

More information on the About field

Learn more about reporting with custom fields

Ticket handling tips

Finally, here are some tips that can help you keep your ticket volume under control:

Keep your knowledge base organized and up to date: If you're using Guide, a great knowledge base means that many of your customers will find the answer to their problem without ever opening a ticket. Read this introduction to Guide for some excellent tips on organizing your knowledge base.
Communicate with your customers: Some tickets take longer than others to solve. However, customers want to know their ticket is not lost somewhere. Update ticket comments regularly to let your customer know the status of their request.
Automate closing tickets: Consider creating automations that remind customer about tickets in the Pending state. This state usually means that you are waiting for a response from the customer. If the customer doesn't respond after a certain amount of time, you could close the ticket.

Helping your agents and productivity

In a time of uncertainty when agents are suddenly uprooted from their usual work environment and also might have personal worries, it's understandable that productivity might drop a little. Use the information in this section to help you identify times when you might need more help, to prioritize your tickets, and to identify agents who might need more support or training. Read on for details.

What's our workload?

The Support dashboard contains reports that let you look at how many tickets are being created on average every day or even every hour. You could prioritize agents to work at the busiest times or if you don't have enough agents consider prioritizing tickets more carefully to ensure you're working on the most important tickets first.

Get started with the Support dashboard

Which tickets are the most important?

When you receive a ticket, set its priority either manually, or automatically using a business rule. You can then use the Support dashboard in Explore to see how many tickets of each priority you have.

While you'll concentrate on the higher priority tickets, don't forget the lower priority tickets. Always update a ticket with a comment if you can't get to it straight away.

How responsive are we?

To make sure your customers are happy, it's important that agents reply quickly when they have a problem. The "Tickets by first reply time brackets" report in the Explore Support dashboard is an excellent way to get an immediate snapshot of how quickly your agents are answering tickets.

How productive are my agents?

The Assignee updates tab of the Zendesk Support dashboard in Explore gives you a wealth of information about how your agents are doing. Want to look at your top ten ticket solvers, or which agents are responding to tickets the fastest? No problem!
Remember to use these figures as a guide. Your agents are likely very busy right now and some tickets take longer to solve than others. Still, this dashboard can help you to understand when you might need some more help or ticket prioritization to reduce your ticket workload.

Tips to help your agents and productivity

Finally, here are some tips that can help your agents and productivity:

There's a saying "What you don't know doesn't hurt you". Well, that's not so true in the customer support world. It's essential that you communicate with your agents and have your agents communicate with your customers. Meet regularly with your agents so you are aware of any problems that are not necessarily collected by Zendesk data.