Recipe for the customer-centric company: Create meaningful views of your customers

This is recipe 2 of 3 in our Cookbook for the customer-centric company.

Featured ingredient: Customer lists

This article contains the following sections:

• A recipe for the retail (consumer) business

• A recipe for an organization with mobile-savvy customers

A recipe for the retail (consumer) business

As shown in the first recipe in our cookbook, knowing your customers is the first step to creating a tailored experience for each and every customer. But even with all your customer information, how do you find common denominators across your customer base and group them so you can manage them more effectively?

This recipe takes you one step beyond custom user fields and details how you can use user field data to build customer lists—an organized list of your customers based on specified attributes.

Skill level: Intermediate

Time required: 30 minutes

Ingredient list

• 1 drop-down user field

• 1 date user field

• 1 checkbox user field

• 5 customer lists 

Instructions

Step 1

Start by adding customer data in user fields in your Zendesk. This retail business example is going to focus on capturing customers’ product usage data, along with other data points that are important to the business.

Name of field	Field type	Field options
Preferred product line	Drop-down	Product line A Product line B Product line C
Subscription signup date	Date	Manual entry, via the API, or via bulk import
Average annual spend	Numeric	Manual entry, via the API, or via bulk import
VIP customer?	Checkbox	Set tag to "vip"

Step 2

An alternative to adding custom user fields is to create a trigger that sets an user field to a specific value. For example, you can create a trigger so that whenever a customer submits a bad satisfaction rating, the customer gets flagged.

Set up the following custom user field:

Name of field	Field type	Field options
Bad rating submitted	Checkbox	Set tag to "bad_rating"

Create a trigger with the following conditions and action:

• Meet ANY of the following conditions:
  • Ticket: Satisfaction is Bad
  • Ticket: Satisfaction is Bad with comment
• Perform these actions:
  • Requester: Bad rating submitted Yes

Step 3 

Now with your user fields created, you can start building customer lists to start seeing who your customers are beyond the Zendesk Support ticket. Let's create lists to see which customers are using which product line, customers who've recently signed up, and the customers who are VIP.

List name	Filters
Product line A	Preferred product line is Product line A
Product line B	Preferred product line is Product line B
Product line C	Preferred product line is Product line C
New customer in last 30 days	Created is within the previous 30 days
VIP customers	Tags contain at least one of the following: "vip"
Bad rating submitted	Tags contain at least one of the following: "bad_rating"

Step 4 

Customer lists are a great way to get a quick view of your customers outside of the ticket view. In addition, you can take action on these lists. You can easily export a customer list to a CSV file or use the MailChimp Campaign app or SurveyMonkey Create app to send an email or survey to a targeted customer list.

List name	Recommended actions
Product line A	Email about new updates or announcements to product line A Survey for product feedback with SurveyMonkey Create app
Product line B	Email about new updates or announcements to product line B Survey for product feedback with SurveyMonkey Create app
Product line C	Email about new updates or announcements to product line C Survey for product feedback with SurveyMonkey Create app
New customer in last 30 days	Welcome newsletter Ask about the onboarding experience with SurveyMonkey Create app
VIP customers	Special email invite to an event or sale with MailChimp Campaign app
Bad rating submitted	Follow up with an email with MailChimp Campaign app

A recipe for an organization with mobile-savvy customers

As businesses and their customers grow increasingly mobile, optimizing the experience on mobile devices becomes part of creating a great support experience. For organizations with a customer base that primarily engages via mobile devices, tracking mobile usage is critical.

This recipe walks you through how to build customer lists that capture mobile usage information and shows steps you can take to optimize your customers’ mobile experience.

Skill level: Intermediate

Time required: 20 minutes

Ingredient list

• 2 drop-down user fields

• 4 customer lists

Instructions

Step 1 

Start by creating user fields that are relevant to your customers’ mobile usage. In this example, let's assume all of our customers are iOS users for simplicity’s sake. This can help give your team a sense of the mobile devices that your customers prefer and that you need to optimize for.

Name of field	Field type	Field options
Mobile phone	Drop-down	iPhone 4 iPhone 4S iPhone 5 iPhone 5C iPhone 5S
Tablet	Drop-down	iPad 2iPad AiriPad Mini
iOS version	Text	Via API

Step 2

Using the mobile information stored in your custom user fields, you can start building customer lists to group customers who have the same preferences in mobile phones and tablets. There are many ways you can organize these lists. For example, you can create a list that captures all iPhone users and then sort the list by device. Or you can narrow in on one specific device model.

List name	Filters	Group
Preferred mobile phone	Mobile phone is iPhone 4 Mobile phone is iPhone 4S Mobile phone is iPhone 5 Mobile phone is iPhone 5C Mobile phone is iPhone 5S	Group list by mobile phone
Preferred tablet	Tablet is iPad 2 Tablet is iPad Air Table is iPad Mini	Group list by tablet
iPhone 5S	Mobile phone is iPhone 5S
iOS version 7.0	iOS version is 7.0

Step 3

These lists give you a quick view of which devices your customers prefer, so you know which devices you need to support. In addition, you can take proactive actions on these customer lists with the MailChimp Create app or SurveyMonkey Campaign app.

List name	Recommended actions
Preferred mobile phone Preferred tablet	Email when there's a new update to your app Email when Apple makes an update to iOS
iPhone 5S	Survey your biggest iOS enthusiasts.
iOS version 7.0	If you know there's a bug identified for a specific app version release, you can proactively reach out and alert these customers.

The next recipe in our in our Customer-centric Cookbook is Gather customer info for every support request.