Boosting team productivity

As a Zendesk admin, it's your job to ensure the success of your Customer Support team. In this article, you'll learn about some great Zendesk tools that can help you and your agents work more efficiently, be more productive, and make your customers happy.

This article contains the following topics:

• Helping your agents focus on the right tickets
• Helping your agents to understand your customers
• Optimizing the ticket handling workflow for agents
• Encouraging collaboration among your agents
• Enabling agents to easily share knowledge
• Extending functionality for your agents
• Monitoring your progress

Helping your agents focus on the right tickets

A key way for you to improve your agents handling of tickets is to make sure tickets are well-organized and easy to find. This will help you get tickets to the right agent as quickly as possible.

Zendesk Support groups organize your agents into relevant groups and your tickets into views, then matches them up so that the right agents see the right tickets.

Views

Views display tickets in logical buckets based on rules you create. For example, you can add a view for tickets from high-priority customers or a view for tickets that are about to exceed SLA policies. Agents can also create their own personal views for tickets they want to track.

Using views can help you quickly determine which tickets need attention from you or your team and plan accordingly.

See Using views to manage ticket workflow.

Groups

Groups are used to create collections of agents based on criteria those agents have in common. All agents must belong to one group, but they can also belong to multiple groups. Groups are available on the Support Team plan and higher.

Groups can work closely with views. The example below shows a view for the Documentation group. This contains only tickets assigned to members of the Documentation group, and only members of that group can see it.

See Creating, managing, and using groups.

Tip: If you're using Support Enterprise, you might benefit from Skills-based routing and Guided mode.

Skills-based routing enables you to define skills (for example, languages, locations, or technical knowledge) that you apply to users. When a ticket comes in, you can define what skills it needs. The ticket is then automatically assigned to the right agents.

Guided mode ensures that tickets are addressed in the appropriate order. It's a custom role option that requires agents to work through tickets using a Play button.

Helping your agents to understand your customers

Having convenient access to information about your customers helps your agents provide faster, more efficient, and more personal service. Every Support ticket contains a customer context menu that gives you an at-a-glance overview of your customer, and their recent ticket activity.

It's a great way to find out more about your customer and to see their recent interactions. Agents can additionally add notes about the customer that other agents can see.

Agents can toggle this view from the ticket properties menu. It's a good idea to educate agents about this feature in your agent training and onboarding.

See Viewing customer context in a ticket.

Tip: Admins and developers on Support Enterprise can customize this menu to display more information about user activity by using the Events API.

Optimizing the ticket handling workflow for agents

As your agents work with tickets, you'll begin to see repetitive processes that agents take again and again. For example, if a customer requests warranty information, you'll want to send out the same information every time.

To save time performing operations like this, you can create a macro. Macros can perform a range of different actions on tickets including:

• Add comment text
• Change the assignee
• CC other people on the tickets
• Add attachments

For example, you can create a macro to use when customers ask for warranty information about your product that takes the following actions on the ticket:

1. Sets the About field to Warranty.
2. Adds the tag Warranty question.
3. Adds your standard company warranty text to the ticket comments.
4. Solves the ticket.

In addition to saving time, this also ensures that actions you take on a ticket and messages you send to customers in ticket comments are standardised. To personalize messages, you can use placeholders. When the macro is run, placeholders are replaced by fields from the ticket, for example, the customer name.

To perform the process, the agent selects the macro from the ticket.

See Using macros to update tickets.

Tip: If you're using Support Enterprise, you might benefit from contextual workspaces which can automatically present a ticket workspace containing only the fields, macros, and apps an agent needs based on conditions you specify like the agent group or the organization name. See Setting up contextual workspaces.

Encouraging collaboration among your agents

Zendesk offers many solutions to help your agents collaborate and share knowledge, but this can be as simple as making detailed comments on tickets and holding meetings regularly.

• CCs enables you to include end users and agents on ticket notifications. Internal and external users can add CCs to tickets. CCs can respond to ticket notifications publicly, or they can remove the requester from the notification to submit a private response.
• Followers enables you to include additional internal users (agents or administrators) on ticket notifications. Internal users can add followers to tickets.
• @mentions enables agents and admins to add other agents to the tickets by typing @ and the agents name. The agent is added to the ticket as a CC.

See Using CCs, followers, and @mentions

Tip: If you have the Collaboration add-on for Support Professional and Enterprise, you can take things further by:

Enabling side conversations which enable agents to quickly contact people who are not in the agent's support team or from another company and might not have access to your tickets (like Finance, Purchasing, third-party Vendors, etc.). See Using side conversations in tickets.

Creating Light Agents, internal staff who have limited permissions but can leave internal comments on tickets and provide other input. For example, an engineer might want to view ticket information to identify issues, but does not need permissions to update tickets or reply to customers. See Understanding and setting light agent permissions.

Enabling agents to easily share knowledge

If you have a Knowledge Base, the Knowledge Capture app in the Support agent interface helps agents to search for Help Center articles and provide customers with links to them, without leaving the ticket.

If you are using Guide Professional or Enterprise, agents can also add inline feedback to flag articles for updates and even create new Help Center articles while answering tickets.

The Knowledge Capture app is not available on Support Essential.

See Knowledge Capture app resources.

Extending functionality for your agents

As your experience with Zendesk Support increases, you might find that you want to extend the capabilities of the product or integrate information from another business tool into your ticket workflow.

The Zendesk Marketplace contains hundreds of apps written by Zendesk and companies who use Zendesk that provide a wide range of product integrations and enhancements.

Apps are available for Support Team, Professional, and Enterprise, but not Essential.

Here are some app suggestions to get you started:

• The Slack app lets you:
  • View ticket notifications in Slack channels
  • Create new tickets in Zendesk from within Slack
  • Comment on existing ticket from within Slack
• The Salesforce app enables you to pull in any CRM data, including custom objects, so your Support team can see a full Salesforce customer profile next to a live ticket in Zendesk Support.
• The User data app provides your agents with a complete picture of the customer right from the ticket to provide the best and personalized support.
• The Time Tracking app helps you to track the time agents spend working on tickets. You can use this information to create detailed reports using Explore Professional.
• The Show Related Tickets app analyzes your ticket subject and shows you other tickets with matching terms. This can help you discover multiple incidents with the same issue and link the incident tickets together.

Tip: If you're on Support Professional or Enterprise and can't find an app you want, you could write your own! The Zendesk developers site contains full instructions.

Monitoring your progress

A big part of maintaining an efficient and productive team is to continuously monitor performance and make adjustments when necessary. With Support Professional and Enterprise, you get access to Zendesk Explore, our analytics software. The free version, Explore Lite contains reporting dashboards that give you access to key metrics about your agents, tickets, and productivity.

Note: The paid versions, Explore Professional and Explore Enterprise give you the reporting dashboards plus the ability to build your own custom reports.

Key metrics you should be measuring include how fast agents respond to tickets, how often a ticket is passed between agents before it's solved (known as touches), and the number of tickets solved and unsolved at the end of the day.

For details about how you can use Zendesk Explore and the business information it gives you to improve your support, see Using the metrics that matter to improve customer support.

Don't forget to check in with your agents regularly. Are they happy with your processes? Do they have input that could make things more efficient?