Delivering great customer service with Zendesk

Customer service can significantly contribute to your business's success or failure. If you’re using Zendesk’s products, keeping your customers happy should be one of your primary goals.

But what is customer service? How do you know if you provide good customer service? And how can you use Zendesk products to give the best possible customer service?

In the following sections, you’ll learn how you can supercharge your customer service with Zendesk:

What is customer service?
Setting yourself up to deliver great customer service
Delivering successful customer service
Helpful resources

What is customer service?

Customer service is a crucial differentiator between companies, a top consideration for customers, and a profit-generating force in its own right. But what is it?

This Zendesk blog post defines customer service as “Consistently meeting customers’ expectations. Great customer service is quick, easy, personalized, and empathetic. Companies that deliver excellent customer service take the time needed to understand the needs of their unique customer base.”

Many companies go the extra mile to provide excellent customer service. For example, Dominos will give you a free pizza if delivery takes longer than 30 minutes.

The growth opportunities are significant for companies that implement successful customer service. For example, customer service provides:

A direct link with business performance.
A positive impact on a company’s growth
Improvements to customer retention
Increased ability to cross-sell

This article uses the following definitions for customer service:

The company's assistance and advice to those who buy or use its products or services
Giving people the tools and information they need to be successful with your products or services
Building a healthy relationship with your customers

Setting yourself up to deliver great customer service

Customers want to connect with you on the same channels they use to talk to friends and family. Being able to help a customer on their preferred support channel is one of the best ways to create an excellent customer service experience. Channel preference can vary based on the issue type and customer need. Some customers start a conversation on one channel and want to finish it on another. Make sure to monitor which channels are in use.

Before you start using the suite, think about the support you currently offer, what you need, and how you can be flexible enough to adapt whenever changes happen. The following sections will help you:

Choose your channels

If you have metrics for your current solution, you can get an idea of which Zendesk Suite features you want to implement. Suite supports several channels including:

Email: Customers contact you via email addresses that you create. If you already have a support email address, you can redirect emails to your Zendesk account. See A complete guide to understanding email in Zendesk.
Help center contact form: This web form is included in your help center. You can use the standard contact form or create custom ticket forms. See Optimizing your ticket forms for a better agent and end-user experience.
Messaging: Messaging enables conversations that persist across devices and sessions. You can embed messaging into your help center and your websites. See Getting started with web and mobile messaging.
Voice: Provide support telephone numbers to your customers so they can contact you. Customers can leave a voicemail when agents are unavailable or during off hours. Voicemails are captured as recordings in new tickets. See Enabling Talk and configuring general settings.
Social messaging channels: You can connect several social messaging channels to your Zendesk account. Messages sent through private channels, such as Facebook Messenger and X (formerly Twitter) DM become tickets, and agents can respond to messages from these channels. See Getting started with social messaging.

Here are some ways in which the Zendesk Suite can help you:

One of the Explore recipes shows the percentage of tickets generated by each support channel. The recipe can help you allocate agents and resources to the most needed channels. Additionally, you can use it to spot trends, for example, an increase in the use of social media channels. See Percentage of tickets created by channel.

Almost every form of interaction you have in Zendesk, whether calls, emails, or chats, ends up in a ticket. Make sure you and your agents are up to speed with ticketing and how it can benefit you. Start by reading Getting started with Zendesk Support.

Train your agents and admins

Companies with high-performing customer support teams understand the need for more training, more empathy, and more investment to reduce churn and empower their people.

Consider developing a tiered training plan that starts with basic technical skills, including product knowledge, and then advances agent knowledge regularly.

Here are some ways in which Zendesk can help you:

Zendesk offers many online training courses (often free) and certification exams to help your agents prove their skills. Start here to browse the available training.
For new admins, the onboarding wizard provides information in the help panel to get them up and running.
Our very own documentation library (help center) has a wealth of resources to help you through every aspect of using the suite. Start at this landing page, then browse, or search for what you want.

Don't forget the value of leveraging your more experienced agents to help "buddy" with new agents to teach them what they need to know or to help devise internal training.

Integrate with other systems to provide more context

Integrate customer service and CRM platforms like Salesforce to enable agents to get all the customer information they need in one place, helping them to deliver great service. Sharing data between these platforms can lead to agents discovering personalized, relevant solutions to customer issues they wouldn’t otherwise consider.

Here are a few examples of how Zendesk Suite can help you integrate other systems:

Customer relationship management (CRM): Salesforce
Social media: Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram
Messaging and email: Slack, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Sunshine Conversations
Product development: JIRA
Retail: Shopify
Other: Trello, Magento,

and many more. To get started, see Integrations.

Help customers help themselves

Imagine that you could deflect many customer tickets without having to answer a ticket, chat, or pick up the phone. The suite provides the resources you need to do this.

Here are some ways in which the Zendesk Suite can help you:

Create a knowledge base where customers can find the necessary information and support without opening a ticket. A customer-facing knowledge base can also increase your agent's efficiency if you create an internal knowledge base where agents can find the answer to common questions and share answers with other agents.
Zendesk bots, Zendesk's chatbot product helps customers quickly find the answer to their questions. Zendesk bots use machine learning to search your knowledge base to find articles that match your customer's questions, enabling them to self-serve to solve common issues). See Understanding everywhere you can use Zendesk bots.

Delivering successful customer service

Now that you’re set up and running, that’s just the story's start. You need to continuously monitor your customer service and be ready to adjust depending on circumstances. For example:

You introduce a new product or service, and customers are struggling to get up to speed with it.
You’re approaching a busy holiday season.
Staff are absent due to illness or vacation.
You get multiple tickets because of a fault with a new product or service.

Zendesk has the tools and advice to help you keep up with the inevitable day-to-day hurdles you might encounter.

Before you get started, make sure that Explore is activated. Take some time to familiarize yourself with some of the built-in reports.

Automate repetitive tasks

What if you could go home in the evening knowing that your customer support could continue even though nobody is present? The suite offers automations to help you do just that.

If you can Identify and automate the most repetitive tasks, you'll free up agents’ time and improve performance.

Here are some ways in which Zendesk Suite can help you:

Triggers run when a ticket is created or updated. Triggers contain conditions and actions. For example, you could create a trigger that automatically emails notifications to the customer about the progress of a ticket, resulting in a more predictable and reliable experience. See About triggers and how they work.
Automations run once an hour and execute on tickets that are not closed. Like triggers, automations contain conditions and actions. For example, you could use an automation to close tickets x number of days after they were solved. See About automations and how they work.
Macros streamline your workflow for support requests that can be solved with a single, standard response or action. A macro saves agents the time and effort of manually responding to multiple customers with the same issue and gives customers reliable and consistent answers to their questions. See Creating macros for tickets.
Knowledge helps agents to create or request new help center articles directly from the Agent Workspace. Agents can create help center articles from a blank article or a template. This helps agents to respond fast to customer feedback by creating or updating articles to help them. See Creating and requesting articles in Knowledge.

Collaborate with others

No one agent knows the answers to every question and a good agent will know when to bring in other people to help.

Here are some ways in which Zendesk Suite can help you:

Add followers to tickets so that they can receive updates to a ticket without the customer being aware they are following. Followers enable knowledgeable insiders to see and comment on tickets to help get them solved as quickly as possible.
CCs enable you to include end users and agents in ticket notifications bringing more experts into the conversation. CCs can respond to ticket notifications publicly or privately. See Using CCs, followers, and @mentions.
Side conversations can help agents to resolve tickets faster by bringing other SMEs into the ticket to discuss the solution privately from the ticket requester. See About side conversations.
Conference calls enable agents to bring a third caller into phone conversations when they need some help from another agent to solve a problem. See Adding a third-party to a conference call.

Try to meet with your customers whenever possible. Zendesk, for example, holds regular community events where customers can hear about the latest product features and ask questions. Customer feedback is invaluable to judge what customers think of your product or what they might need. Keep an eye on the community section in the documentation to see what’s coming up.

Get tickets to the right agent fast

Clearly, getting tickets to the right person to solve them can lead to faster resolution times and a more satisfactory experience for the customer.

Here are some ways in which suite can help you get tickets to the right agent:

With skills-based routing, you can set up "skills" and associate each one 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 who is looking at it. This helps agents immediately see which tickets they are best suited to tackle and therefore help the customer faster. See Using skills-based routing.
Omnichannel routing enables you to direct tickets from email, messaging, web form, and API to team members based on their availability, capacity, and ticket priority. This helps to spread the workload around your team and help customers faster. See About omnichannel routing.
Intelligent triage uses artificial intelligence to enrich your tickets with actionable information without the help of agents or admins. by predicting the intent and language for new tickets. You can use this to set up views for your team and automate replies and actions.
You can also use intelligent triage to increase your support team’s efficiency by configuring triggers that reply to tickets with public or private comments. See Automatically detecting customer intent, language, and sentiment.

Measure customer happiness

Feedback from your customers provides your company with valuable insights into how they feel about your business. You can use that information to make better customer-centric decisions and improve products, services, and internal processes. Best of all, it can help you build stronger customer relationships.

You can collect customer feedback through various channels, including customer surveys, social media posts, and support tickets. Your agents are on the front lines and can tell you what customers say and how they feel about your company, products, and services. Not all feedback is positive, but negative feedback can also be valuable, as it enables you to implement changes that’ll make your business better.

Here are some ways in which Zendesk Suite can help you:

Customer satisfaction ratings (CSAT) prompt end users to rate the support they received by answering a brief survey to indicate whether they were satisfied or not. This gives you a quick and easy way to see what customers think. Explore features reports that help you to see how you’re doing. See Enabling and using CSAT.
Zendesk Gather adds community forums to your help center, meaning customers can quickly interact with you and each other giving you a good idea of how happy customers are. See Getting started with Gather for your community.
Integrate social messaging apps with Zendesk. Many customers like to use social messaging apps to connect with companies. You can integrate your Zendesk account with your social media accounts to see and respond to your online feedback in your tickets. It’s a great way to gauge how your customers feel. See Getting started with social messaging.
Use an "About" field to look for trends in your tickets. You might need to update your documentation or product if something is affecting many customers. Because the ticket subject is free-form, sorting problem tickets into the same category can be challenging. Consider using what's known as an "About" field, a custom field to help. For example, you might create a field named "Camera problems." You can create an Explore report to display only tickets with this item selected from the About field. For an example, see Reporting on custom ticket fields.
Track article views using Explore to see which are most popular and more importantly, which might need some extra attention. See Analyzing your knowledge base activity with Explore.

Provide fast response times

Most customers expect an immediate response when they contact a company. While that's not always possible, you should try to respond as quickly as possible, even if that reply is "Sorry for the delay. We hope to address your query within 24 hours."

The first reply time metric is a significant measure of the success of your support. First reply time is the time from when a ticket was created to the first public agent response. If that time is fast, it's a great way to get off to a great start with your interaction.

Here are some ways in which Zendesk Suite can help you:

The Efficiency tab of Explore's built-in support dashboard displays information about how quickly your agents respond and how fast tickets are being solved. Check this dashboard regularly to monitor agent performance and make sure you are meeting customer expectations. See Analyzing your Support ticket activity and agent performance.
Service level agreements (or SLAs) are agreed-upon measures of the average response and resolution times your support team delivers to your customers. Providing support based on service level ensures that you're delivering measured and predictable service. The Explore recipes feature several SLA-related recipes, including a great recipe that compares your performance to specific SLA targets. See Reviewing SLA performance.

Give customers a personalized experience

Your agents have access to valuable customer information that they can use to improve the customer experience. It's an excellent experience for customers when the agent knows who they are and their support history without the customer repeating the information they've already supplied. Customers will also spend more with companies that personalize their customer service.

Here are some ways in which the Zendesk Suite can help you:

You can view all of a customer's recent activity from their user profile. This can help your agents be well-prepared to address their issues. See Viewing user profiles from Help Center.
Customer context helps you to provide better, faster, and more personalized responses to customers. You can view customer context in a ticket, including contact details, recent tickets, recent articles viewed, and more. See Viewing customer context in a ticket.
You can use placeholders to personalize automated responses to customers. For example, if a customer opens a ticket from an email, you can set up an automated response that includes the ticket number and the customer's name. See Using placeholders.

Tools like these enable you to know a lot about your customer well before you reply to their requests.

Customer care is an afterthought for some companies, and many consumers know it. But it can mean the difference between buyers coming back or leaving for good.

Make a good impression by enabling your support agents to go the extra mile. Chewy offers one of the most endearing customer-centric examples. When the company heard that a customer’s two dogs had passed away, the customer service team sent the customer a sympathy gift to show their support: a portrait of their pets.

Helpful resources

A single article can never cover every aspect of delivering good customer service. However, in this section, you’ll find links to some more valuable resources.

If you're looking for technical help, start by looking at the documentation library.