On August 29, we hosted an event on Zendesk Messaging and covered how to provide more proactive, personalized, and engaging conversational experiences. Members from Zendesk’s product team shared how using some of our newest releases, like agent status, omnichannel routing, and skills in conjunction with Messaging, can deliver the desired experiences customers expect. Nick Price, Manager of Customer Operations from Angi, also joined us and shared their experience of moving from live chat to Messaging, highlighting key insights and performance improvements from their Messaging adoption. The links below include all of the event resources, including the complete recording, presentation deck, and the top 10 questions from our Q&A - take a look and share with your team!
Video Recording
Top 10 Questions from the Q&A
Q1: Is there a Best Practice workflow for when a customer takes too long to answer?
Training agents should set the status to pending after 5-10 minutes of no response. The benefit of this is it will free up their capacity to take new messaging tickets and will be set up much more quickly than hourly automation.
Q2: What are some best practices for handling large volumes of tickets with Messaging?
Improve Deflection: Use reports and collaborate with your team to identify opportunities to increase automation and reduce the number of tickets. Can you improve your answers or articles to help automate answering the most common requests?
Prioritize Effectively: Enable omnichannel routing to assign inbound messaging requests based on priority. As part of this configuration, we recommend setting up Support triggers to set the correct priority based on data collected in the answer flow and/or customer data.
Review Staffing Model: Based on your inbound ticket volumes, are you staffing to the proper channels at the right time? A workforce management tool like Tymeshift can help with this analysis. To work through a huge backlog, you may need to schedule dedicated all-hands-on-deck time (above and beyond your typical staffing) to work through tickets.
Enable Agents to Work to Capacity: Many times, agents aren't working to full capacity for messaging, especially in situations where an end-user has stopped replying. Train your team to set a ticket to pending if they haven't heard back from an end-user in 5-10 minutes to free up their capacity. Keep an eye out on the roadmap for features that will help better manage agent capacity and inactive conversations.
Q3: What are the best practices for prioritizing messages received when our agents are not available or offline?
Turn on Omnichannel contact center and utilize Messaging activity routing. This will keep the inactive/offline conversations in the queue and route all messaging tickets via Accept.
Q4: What are some best practices for creating agent performance metrics for Messaging?
Assignee activity in Explore over Zendesk Messaging provides guidance. Other agent metrics are part of real-time reporting and Agent Status / Capacity dataset. We are also planning to add more metrics in the future.
Q5: I'm starting with messaging for one brand but not another, so I'm curious how this works in practice. What are the practicalities of omnichannel communication?
Opting into Messaging by the brand is a good practice. Agents can seamlessly switch from messaging to email as part of the same ticket, ensuring they can follow the customer on the channel convenient for them.
Q6: Is there a best practice for handling or staffing according to the different sources of tasks for the agents?
You can have omnichannel routing assign out tickets to agents, or you can have them pull from a view. If you use assignment methods, limit the maximum number of working tickets per agent so the first agent doesn't get all the overnight tickets at the start of the day.
Q7: How can we send "We haven't heard from you in X days" messages with the message going into the Messaging conversation instead of going to email notifications?
Currently, this would require using either Sunco (sunshine conversations) API or, if you're looking to get proactive with it, you have a proactive trigger. In the long term, we will give you access to more trigger options for messaging.
Q8: I want to end the Messaging conversation to allow the customer to contact me on a completely different issue in a new thread.
We recommend setting up an automation to close Messaging tickets after a few hours. This hands control back to the bot and spin up a new ticket on handover.
Q9: What are the best ways to define Messaging SLAs?
We recommend you start with First Reply Time, Next Reply Time, and Resolution Time SLAs.
Q10: How have Angi's customers interacted with messaging? Have they seen it as equal to chat, so more live and in-the-moment responses are expected?
We at Angi launched it with the intent of using it similar to live chat, but we have persistent conversations turned on in a couple of brands. Customers generally treated it the same way, though where we have it embedded in the app, we see some users treat it async. Early on, we closed tickets soon after solving to make it behave more like live chat.
Presentation Material:
Future Events & Opportunities