This article contains some best practices to help you improve your customers’ experience during the busy season. For example, Zendesk Support volume for retailers increases by about 42% during the holiday season, or you may have a medical supplies or health care business with increased activity during a special situation like an epidemic. It’s important for your team to have the tools they need to handle the extra workload.
This article contains the following sections:
- Have the right resources in place
- Organize your FAQs and update your knowledge base
- Leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to improve agent efficiency
- Use a messaging Web Widget and AI agents to convert more visitors
- Integrate apps to further improve the customer experience
- Keep up with the latest
Have the right resources in place
Recognize that customer satisfaction is the foundation of your business. Busy seasons are important times for both you and your customers. They expect businesses to be available when they are shopping or seeking help, and they expect you to be responsive quickly when they’re in a rush. Make sure your agent resources are hired and trained before the busy season starts.
- Consider Zendesk subscription plans that allow you to add temporary agent accounts to help with the seasonal workload.
- Take advantage of Zendesk training resources which are available to get your staff up and running.
- Create agent-facing help center articles with internal-only permissions so your agents can quickly access your corporate policies and procedures.
Organize your FAQs and update your knowledge base
The majority of customers (60%) prefer self-service to speaking with a customer support agent, so it’s important to understand the types of requests that come in during the rush and identify if there are any gaps in your content.
Find out what customers are asking
You can use reports to help you understand what customers are asking. You can also build a report that surfaces frequently asked questions during the busy season. Once you identify some of those common issues (or common themes) that occur during the rush, you can drill down into each ticket to learn more about the context.
This example slices the number of tickets by issue type and uses a date filter to show only results from November to January. "Issue type" is a custom field that can contain any information you want. It's often known as the "About" field. In the results, you'll see that the "International shipping" issue type was by some measure the biggest issue over the past week.
For more information on how you can use custom fields, see The 'About' field.
For more reporting ideas, check out the Zendesk Explore recipes reference.
Use Knowledge in the context panel to update your articles
Based on your Insight findings, you can use Knowledge in the context panel to surface and update your articles with the best, up-to-date answers. The Knowledge section allows agents to preview help center content and suggest feedback on articles directly from the agent interface.
See Using help center content in your tickets without leaving Agent Workspace.
Create rush-themed FAQs
It’s also beneficial to create a rush-themed FAQ page which can link out to all your recently updated articles, so customers can easily find what they are looking for as they browse your site. Here are a few tips:
- Frame each of your articles in a question context and have them cover only a single problem. This structure makes information easier to find.
- Make the subject line as descriptive as possible and make sure the article subject line matches the article content.
- If you are an Enterprise customer, you can create a rush-themed help center template for articles or for a special section or category. You can use the rush-themed template for special articles while their regular content keeps the usual, non-rush template.
Leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to improve agent efficiency
You can leverage AI to decrease time to resolution, boost agent productivity, and take your knowledge base to the next level. Zendesk offers a set of tools in the Suite, free of charge, as well as a robust set of tools in the Copilot add-on, available for purchase.
For more information, see Empowering your team with AI-powered tools.
Use a messaging Web Widget and AI agents to convert more visitors
- Configure a messaging channel.
- Add Web Widget for messaging to your website or mobile app.
- Automate your messaging channel with an AI agent.
For more information, see Getting started with messaging.
Integrate apps to further improve the customer experience
Review the Zendesk Marketplace for the latest offerings. Zendesk apps can make your agents more productive and increase customer satisfaction. The Marketplace contains apps for productivity, time tracking, e-commerce, and social media. For example:
- Zendesk recommends integrating with a popular retail applications such as Shopify,
Magento, or Big Commerce. These integrations enable you to surface information about your
customers from directly within Zendesk. They can provide you with visibility into
customer profiles and display order information.
- Use a gift app to provide a personal touch with your customers and make your customer service stand out. You can send physical gifts to customers with just a few clicks. This can help increase customer loyalty, retention, and customer satisfaction ratings, and help smooth over issues for customers who have rush season frustrations.
- Consider additional popular apps to increase the efficiency of your agents and improve customer satisfaction.
Keep up with the latest
Zendesk continues to add new features to improve the agent workflow. Follow the Announcements section and leverage the Zendesk Community for the latest information.