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Now that you have an overview of Zendesk Suite, you can begin planning how you’ll roll out your Zendesk support solution to your team members and then your customers.
Because Zendesk Support is the hub of Zendesk Suite and all of the Zendesk products are designed to work with Support, you’ll want to set it up first.
Get started by adding your team members, organizing them into groups, assigning admin user roles, creating any custom user profile fields that you need, setting up organizations, creating your support email addresses, and adding custom ticket fields and ticket forms.
Then, set up the support channels you want to provide your customers. Set up messaging, live chat, voice channel, etc. Determine which agents will staff your channels. Determine how you’ll handle support requests during non-business hours and set up a business schedule.
With your channels in place, you can set up your automated workflows using views, triggers, and automations.
While setting up new channels is a relatively easy task, an important consideration is when to make channels available and for whom. Limiting availability at first can help you to gauge demand and assess training and staffing needs to ensure a responsive customer experience.
To start, it’s a good idea to set up a self-service channel using Guide to create your help center. Create knowledge base articles for common support issues so your customers can resolve many of their issues independently. Having a knowledge base also sets you to provide better service through other channels such as email, chat, and messaging, which can use those articles to automate responses to support requests.
You can then begin deploying live channels like live chat and voice using a phased approach. For example, you might start using voice to make outbound phone calls on particularly complex tickets or by implementing proactive live chat on your website so that you have better control of the flow of chats and the need to have live agents available to respond to them. This gives you time to assess important metrics such as your average length of calls and chats and how much time agents need after calls and chats to wrap things up. These metrics will provide the necessary data to determine staffing levels and training needs.
To help you understand and manage the steps involved in launching your Zendesk support solution, your next step should be to refer to the Launch guide for Zendesk Suite. There, you’ll find step-by-step instructions, best practice advice, and videos to help you successfully roll out support to your customers.
Continue to Part 14: Additional features.