Recently the Community hosted a virtual event aimed at helping you prepare your retail business for the busiest season of the year. We sit down with members of our Customer Success and product teams, where they presented their best practices for adjusting your Support and team for the holiday rush. We also shared updates on AI & Machine Learning and addressed questions in our live Q&A with our panel of in-house experts.
Video Recording
Questions from the Q&A
Q: What is Zendesk doing to prepare for the holiday rush?
A: We leverage many of the tactics described in Best practices to prepare for a busy season. You can also find more info in the Busy season tips video series and in this video about dealing with an influx of support calls.
Q: How it's possible to manage Zendesk for the agents that are on the holiday?
A: You can use the Out of Office app to reassign tickets from agents who are on holiday to other agents who are still in the office. This app creates triggers in your system to automatically reassign tickets from OOO agents into a parent group so that other agents can pick them up.
Q: Should we communicate in advance with customers the holiday schedule of the team?
A: Letting customers know that your holiday schedule differs from normal can help set expectations about your response times during busy periods. However, instead of emailing this info to your customers (whose inboxes are likely already full of other holiday-related updates), you might choose to update your schedule with your holiday hours, create holiday-specific auto-responses when a support ticket is received, update your live chat availability, configure your site's bot to account for your schedule, and route incoming support calls based on your schedule.
Q: Is there a way to organize workloads as they come in from customers to go to the correct place based on a topic, not just language, without having to manually move tickets to the right location?
A: Automated triage and skills-based routing are two great options for achieving this.
You can use the automated triage feature to automatically detect what a ticket is about (it's the intent). If you use automated triage, you can create views based on ticket intent and let agents pick tickets out of these views, or you can create triggers based on ticket intent that automatically assign tickets to the groups or agents best suited to handle them.
Alternatively, you can use skills-based routing to set up "skills" associated with individual agents. For each skill, you also define a set of ticket conditions. Then you configure a view that identifies which tickets match the skills of whoever's looking at it.
Q: What is the best way to utilize the reporting functionality in preparation for the holidays?
A: You can use Explore to create reports that help you identify what your customers are asking about, as well as how many agents you might need to staff.
To find out what customers are asking about, report on the most common ticket areas. Running a report like this on data from the last busy season is a great way to stay one step ahead of the next busy season by knowing what your customers are likely to need help with. Before things start to get hectic, you can make sure that you have the right self-serve resources and agent training to address your customers' most common requests.
Explore can also help determine how many agents you need to staff, especially during the busy season. You can report on solved tickets and look for trends over past busy periods to see how many tickets you're likely to receive. Similarly, you can report on your team's backlog to get a different view of how the team kept up with the workload during past busy seasons.
Q: Is Smart Assist available now?
A: Smart Assist is in a closed EAP right now. It will be made available for customers in the closed EAP at the end of September.
Q: What is the Smart Assist Panel? mentioned in the Sandy Shores demo?
A: It's a new functionality that's included as part of the automated triage feature. It shows a ticket's predicted intent and language, along with some suggested macros. You can learn all about it in this article.
Resources from the event
Presentation Material:
Future Events & Opportunities
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