Continuing effective customer support during a pandemic or natural disaster

Available on all Support plans

Due to natural disasters or other disruptive local or regional events, you might need to alter how you use Zendesk to support your customers. This might include turning specific channels off or directing customers to use more self-service options while there is a disruption to your service. To help you, we’ve compiled some recommendations to help you get the most out of your Zendesk products during these times.

This article contains the following sections:

Alert customers during high volume
Temporarily disable live channels
Improve collaboration for remote teams
Surface high-priority tickets
Implement and improve self-service options
Optimize your Chat and Web Widget (Classic) setup
Monitor your metrics and high-priority tickets
Ensure agents have what they need
More resources

Alert customers during high volume

If you're dealing with an increased volume of tickets, it's a good idea to keep your customers informed. Add alert banners or send messages to let users know that you're dealing with a high volume and there might be a delay, but you're doing your best.

Try these things:

Update your notification triggers for received requests to let customers know you're experiencing high volume. Be sure to point them to self-service resources in the meantime, if you have any. See How do I edit the automatic response sent to someone who submits a ticket.
Edit your pre-chat form to customize the greeting during high chat periods. See Enabling the pre-chat form.
Add a notification banner to your help center to let users know you are experiencing high volume. You might also use a banner to highlight important resources or FAQs related to the ticket spike. See Adding a notification banner to your help center. (Zendesk Suite Growth and above, Zendesk Support Professional and Enterprise only)
Adjust your business hours or operating hours to set customer expectations if you have limited agent availability. See Setting your schedule with business hours and holidays and Creating a schedule with operating hours for Chat. (Zendesk Suite Growth and above, Zendesk Support Professional and Enterprise only)
Improve your customer communication in tickets by balancing brevity, thoroughness, and personality. See Enhance your customer communication with media.

Temporarily disable live channels

If you are unable to continue offering your customers live channels due to unforeseen events and possible staff shortages, you might need to temporarily disable those channels or let users know there might be delays.

Live chat

You might need to disable the channel to temporarily suspend live chat.

For Web Widget (Classic), you can turn off the Chat channel in the Web Widget (Classic) settings and turn it back on when you are able to staff the live channel. See Configurable Web Widget (Classic) components (Chat).
For the Legacy Chat widget, you can modify your offline form settings to manage customer expectations in the following ways:
- Turn on the offline form to receive offline messages while you are away.
- Select the “Hide when offline” setting so the widget is no longer visible on your website/help center.
- Customize the offline form text to mention why live chat is currently not available.

For help reconfiguring your offline forms, see Managing offline form settings.

You can remove either widget from your help center by toggling it off, then toggling it back on when you’re ready to chat with customers again. See Removing Web Widget (Classic) from your website or help center or Disabling Legacy Chat in Guide.

Talk

For your phone calls, you may want to record a new greeting to let callers know that there are ongoing disruptions in service and hold times may be long or completely unavailable. See Creating a custom greeting and assigning it to numbers.

You may also want to disable the Talk callback option in the Web Widget (Classic), if it’s enabled, when you won’t have access to call back your customers in the foreseeable future. See Configurable Web Widget (Classic) components (Talk).

Messaging

If you’re using messaging in the Agent Workspace, you can turn off messaging in the Web Widget. See Disabling messaging for web and mobile channels.

You can also update the initial response received by customers requesting a messaging conversation to reflect current conditions. See Customizing the default messaging response for more information

If you are using bot-enabled messaging, you can create a custom bot (or edit an existing one) in a Bot Builder flow that would direct the visitor to submit a ticket instead and to expect a longer response time compared to normal response times. See Editing an existing bot.

Improve collaboration for remote teams

You might be used to working with distributed teams, but even the most experienced virtual teams are probably facing added challenges if your workforce is 100% working from home now. It's important to make sure they have the tools to collaborate and communicate effectively.

Try these things:

Use CCs, followers, and @mentions to add internal and external users to your ticket conversations. See Using CCs, followers and @mentions and CCs and followers resources.
Use side conversations to get more people involved in a ticket. This enables agents to pull in other people, or even a specific group or department, for an issue or process and centralize communications within the ticket. See About side conversations. This feature requires the Collaboration features for Support.
Install the Slack for Zendesk Support integration if your company uses Slack for internal communication. The integration enables you to interact with Zendesk Support tickets in your Slack channels. See Installing the Slack for Zendesk Support integration.

Surface high-priority tickets

While you're experiencing spikes in ticket volume, you want to make sure your team stays focused on high-priority tickets and that nothing slips through the cracks.

Try these things:

Create a view to surface high-volume ticket topics. A targeted view can help you quickly clear the queue of high-volume tickets when you experience a sudden spike in tickets. You can create a view focused on one kind of ticket so your agents can quickly power through. See Creating views to manage ticket workflow.
Use SLAs to prioritize your tickets and alert your team when tickets are about to breach an SLA. See Defining and using SLA policies and How to alert your team when tickets are nearing an SLA breach. (Zendesk Suite Growth and above, Zendesk Support Professional and Enterprise)

Implement and improve self-service options

If you aren't currently offering self-service for your customers, now is good time to get started to offset any ticket spikes you're dealing with. It'll enable customers to quickly get important information and answers relevant to this unusual time, without filing a ticket with you. And if you already have a help center for self-service, and you're looking to optimize your self-service, there are some tools that might help you with that.

Try these things:

Set up a help center so that customers can get answers without filing a ticket, if you don't already have one. You can set up a lightweight self-service offering with important articles, announcements, and FAQs for this peak time period. Don't worry if you don't have a beautifully customized help center or a robust selection of articles. You can do that later. See Getting started with Guide.
Create a specific announcement article or community topic in an existing help center to answer customer questions. Customers might need a place to ask general questions or read what your business and others are doing. Be sure to promote the link on your help center home page, company website, ticket notifications, social media, and so on.
Embed a Web Widget in your website so that your customers can self-serve, if possible, or reach out to you using any of your supported channels, all from one place. You can quickly enable Web Widget (Classic) with a basic configuration and add it to your website or help center for now, then customize it later when you have time. See Using Web Widget (Classic) to embed customer support in your website.
Enable autoreplies with articles to answer customer questions with articles and reduce the ticket volume for your agents. Autoreplies with articles use machine learning to answer tickets with articles from your knowledge base.
Use Content Cues to analyze support ticket trends and determine which articles to create or update to improve self-service and address ticket volume. See Reviewing suggested support topics in Content Cues. (Zendesk Suite Enterprise and Enterprise Plus, Zendesk Support Enterprise only)

Optimize your Chat and Web Widget (Classic) setup

During periods of high visitor traffic, you should update your widget configuration to optimize performance for high chat visitor traffic.

Try this:

Use the connectOnPageLoad Web Widget API setting to optimize chat for better performance. This setting defers the chat connection until visitors interact with the Web Widget (Classic). By deferring the connection, the volume of concurrent chat connections across your website is reduced. This helps ensure a better experience during periods of high traffic.
There are some trade-offs and potential impacts to consider when deferring the chat connection, so be sure you understand the best configuration for your use case. See Optimizing chat and Web Widget (Classic) performance and ConnectOnPageLoad configuration best practices for common chat use cases.

Monitor your metrics and high-priority tickets

While you're experiencing spikes in ticket volume and working with a remote team, it's more important than ever to keep an eye on your daily metrics to see how things are going and make adjustments as needed.

Try these things:

Review the Explore pre-built reporting dashboards daily to monitor critical data for all your channels and your team. See Understanding dashboards.
Analyze key Support data and make adjustments to improve your metrics. Keep an eye on areas where you are exceeding expectations or areas that might need some work. Understand how to interpret the important metrics and know what to do based on what you're seeing. See Using the metrics that matter to improve customer support.
Create a custom report to compare ticket volume from one day to the next. A common request we've been receiving, as things continue to change rapidly during this pandemic, is how to compare the volume of tickets between two date ranges. You can create an Explore report to do that, and you can modify the query for other data to suit your own business needs. See Comparing today's ticket volume to yesterday's.

Ensure agents have what they need

Your agents are on the front lines, and a lot of them are adjusting to dealing with customers all day while being in a new environment. We have a few agent tips to help them adjust. We're sure there are more — so please share agent tips in the comments.

Try these things:

Use the Support and Chat mobile apps to work from anywhere. You might not have the perfect work setup right now, or you might not always be able to get to your laptop, so agents can use the mobile apps for Support or Chat wherever they are. See About the Zendesk Support mobile app and How does the Chat mobile app work.
Set your chat status when you're available or away. If you're a chat agent, be sure to set your status to indicate when you're available, away, or invisible. See Setting your chat availability status.
Set up your home work office. A key ingredient in your home setup is your headset. We have some recommendations based on our experience. While you're at home, you might want to forward calls to a personal phone instead of using your browsers. See Preparing to use Zendesk Talk: Choosing the right headset and How do I take calls on a personal or desk phone.
Broadcasting a message to your agents. If you need to shut down your channels and get your staff to safety, you can use the following methods to communicate with them (assuming you don’t use an internal communication tool such as Slack or Microsoft Teams).
- Chat. You can use agent-to-agent chat in the Chat dashboard by selecting a signed-in agent from the side navigation and starting a conversation. The agent will receive messages from the Chat dashboard and Chat mobile apps. See Chatting with other agents.
  
  Note: Agent-to-agent chat is not applicable to customers using the Agent Workspace.
- Support. You can use the Agent Notification app to message all or specific groups in your account. See Installing and using the Agent Notification app.

More resources

In the documentation

On the Zendesk blog