Recipe for the customer-centric company: Collect customer insights and act on them

This is recipe 1 of 3 in our Cookbook for the customer-centric company.

Featured ingredients: custom user fields and custom organization fields.

This article contains the following sections:

• A recipe for the retail (consumer) business

• A recipe for businesses providing software support

A recipe for the retail (consumer) business

As a retailer, you face a variety of customer types—from a one-time shopper to a lifetime loyalist. How do you hone in on the customers who would benefit from some extra attention? Using custom user fields, you can segment your customer base by capturing relevant data and creating unique workflows based on these data points.

This recipe walks through how you can configure your user fields and business rules to optimize how you support your customers based on what you know about them.

Skill level: Beginner

Time required: 30 minutes

Ingredient list

• 2 date user fields

• 2 drop-down user fields

• 1 trigger

Instructions

Step 1

Start by gathering customer data in user fields in your Zendesk. As a retail business, you may want to capture the following types of information about your customer. Knowing their spending habits, billing cycle, and social influence can help determine which customers you need to prioritize.

Name of field	Field type	Field options
Date of last purchase	Date	Manual entry, via the API, or via bulk import
Subscription renewal date	Date	Manual entry, via the API, or via bulk import
Average annual spend	Numeric	Manual entry, via the API, or via bulk import
Service level	Drop-down	"Platinum", "Gold", "Silver", "Bronze"
Social influence	Drop-down	"High", "Medium", "Low"

Step 2 

After you create your custom user fields, you can now set any user field as a condition in a Zendesk Support business rule, such as a custom trigger.

For example, if a high-spending, influential customer submits a support request, you might want to alert the appropriate team members. This example trigger escalates any ticket from a customer on a platinum service level or one that spends over $1000/year with your business, or has high social influence. 

A recipe for businesses providing software support

Its common practice for a software company to track customer type and service level plan. For a B2B company, you most likely want to capture customer information for a group of customers—an organization.

This recipe outlines how to configure custom organization fields and workflows to support your customers at different times of a sales cycle.

Skill level: Beginner

Time required: 30 minutes

Ingredient list

• 3 drop-down organization fields

• 1 numeric organization field

• 1 checkbox organization field

• 1 trigger

Instructions

Step 1 

Start by gathering customer data in organization fields in your Zendesk Support. For each organization, you can capture the organization's account type, monthly spend, contract agreement, service level, as well as if they have agreed to be a referenced customer.

Name of field	Field type	Field options
Account type	Drop-down	"Active customer", "Prospective customer", "Churned customer", "Partner"
Monthly spend	Numeric	Manual entry, via the API, or via bulk import
Customer reference	Checkbox	Mark checkbox if true
Contract agreement	Drop-down	"Monthly", "Quarterly", "1-year", "2-year"
Service level	Drop-down	"Platinum", "Gold", "Silver", "Bronze"

Step 2

After your organization fields are in place, you can create a trigger based on the organization field data to set up a dedicated workflow based on customer type.

For example, when your business prospects submit a ticket, you can create a trigger to automatically set the priority of their tickets to high and loop in relevant sales teams, who can be agents or light agents in your Zendesk account.

The next recipe in our Customer-centric Cookbook is Create meaningful views of your customers.