Zendesk on Zendesk: Maintaining an internal IT Zendesk to provide company-wide support
by Douglas Redo and Christopher Christen
This Zendesk on Zendesk session, hosted by Doug Redo, senior IT specialist in our San Francisco office, is about how our IT department maintains an internal Zendesk instance. Topics we'll cover include creating an effective internal Help Center and managing tickets for company-wide support.
See all of our Zendesk on Zendesk series discussions here.
At Zendesk, we have a few internal-only Zendesk instances that departments use to provide support to the rest of the company. For example, we have an HR and Facilities Zendesk and a Training Zendesk. You can learn more about our all of our internal Zendesk instances in this Fine Tuning discussion.
Today, I'll be focusing specifically on our IT department's Zendesk instance, which we use to provide support across our global offices
Ticketing
When someone at Zendesk is having an IT issue they need help with, submitting a ticket to IT's Zendesk is one of the most popular and fastest ways to get help. Over the past seven days, our team has handled 579 tickets with an average 27 hours solve time.
Triaging and assigning tickets
When a ticket is submitted or an email is sent to the IT alias, everyone in IT is notified. In general, the first person to touch a ticket assigns it to themselves. I also go through our tickets frequently to make sure they don't sit unassigned for too long.
All of our IT team is capable of addressing the majority of tickets that we get. However, if someone has been working a lot recently or is particularly knowledgeable about one area, such as new hire setup or streaming live events, we'll assign that ticket to the natural owner.
Ticket features
At our current volume of tickets and team size, we've found it's practical to assign tickets manually on a case-by-case basis as they come in. Accordingly, we don't rely heavily on triggers and other business rules in our instance.
One important feature we use is ticket sharing. Some tickets that come in apply to multiple departments and areas. For example, if someone's changing desk locations and needs to set up their new equipment, both Facilities and IT might need to be involved. We also sometimes get misdirected requests that should go to another department completely. Since only Zendesk IT uses our instance, setting up ticket sharing has been crucial to seamlessly working with other departments.
Another useful feature for us is macros. IT members can quickly insert answers to common questions and update ticket fields accordingly. This also helps assure we're giving consistent responses to some of our most frequently asked questions.
Help Center
Our Zendesk IT team uses the Help Center to create articles for our internal employees as well as our IT team. Having a central location for our team to learn more about applications and processes helps minimize redundancies. It also frees up time to help users with “walk-up” questions and allows us to spend more face time with users experiencing issues.
Keeping content up to date
When I first joined Zendesk as part of the IT team about 2 years ago, we were in the beginning stages of building out our internal Help Center. We had a handful of articles but overall they were irrelevant or outdated. This created an unnecessarily large learning curve for me as a new IT employee and wasn't helpful to other teams at Zendesk. It took time to sift through the information and grasp what was accurate and what was erroneous.
As we began to build our IT team, we committed to making updates to our Help Center a priority. This has helped deflect tickets as well as drastically improved our onboarding process as new hires have an immediate abundance of information at their fingertips. It also helps deflect tickets by giving accurate, clear information to common questions.
Every single person on our team updates or creates articles when needed. If someone notices a change that needs to be made, that person usually makes the update themselves. This draws on the combined expertise of our team and helps updates to happen faster.
General content guidelines
Our Help Center landing page has a section that includes some of the most commonly viewed articles. We created this section so new hires would have a place to get tips and tricks, familiarize themselves with our IT tools, and give them confidence that Help Center as a great resource.
As is true with most knowledge base content, we’ve found that including screenshots, bullet points, and numbered steps is the best way to display content. This allows for the user to have visual guides on how to solve their issue and allows them to quickly read the article and pull out the information that is most important to them. Utilizing paragraph breaks and bold words help add visual weight and importance to crucial information. We also make sure to always add labels to our articles so they're easier to search for.
IT-only content
In addition to company-wide articles directed at all Zendesk employees, our Help Center contains internal articles only IT can access.
The company-wide content contains useful articles for all employees about common issues like resetting your computer password, troubleshooting VPN connection problems, and connecting to a printer in the office. The internal IT-only content allows us to include more technical, complex solutions to our teammates without confusing our internal customers.
Maintaining this IT-only section has drastically improved our onboarding process, as new hires have an immediate abundance of information at their fingertips. When a new member joins the IT team, they spend a great deal of time during their first few weeks referencing the HC to learn how to solve tickets. This allows them to be more self sufficient when learning about processes and greatly reduces the amount of time other employees spend training them. This increases productivity and boosts morale as the new employee can feel confident that they are making an immediate impact. Like many other tech companies, there are a great deal of different applications that are used daily across different teams. This can be very overwhelming for a new IT member who may not be familiar with all of these apps, but the Help Center provides an easy way for them to familiarize themselves. We encourage new members of IT and all new hires to spend sometime just reading through the HC to get a better understanding of the applications that they will be using.
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Hi everyone,
This discussion is now live! Join in by leaving your questions and comments for Doug and Chris below.
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We're wondering how you handle tickets that have more than one touchpoint such as the onboarding tickets. So, for example, a new hire is set to start on Wednesday. We need Email, desk&phone, computer, zendesk agent setup, timesheet setup, training plan creation, etc. All these things are handled by different agents. How do you handle those types of tickets?
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Hi Heather.
That is a great question and is something that we do see a lot of. What we do here is we have our provisioning team pull the new hire information from HR and create all of the necessary accounts for the new user. Once this is complete they will then create a ticket that will go to our IT team to get the new users equipment set up. Some of those things you mentioned above are handled by IT and others are handled by Facilities. So when that ticket is created and is picked up by one of our IT agents that agent will then Ticket Share with Facilities so they then have visibility into the new hire request in their Zendesk Instance. Once this is shared with the Facilities they are then able to add notes in the ticket stating desk location etc.
Regarding the different IT requests we may have different agents who specialize in certain areas so what we will do is CC these other agents on the ticket and put in a Private Comment asking them to complete the follow.
The major features that we use in order to complete a request that involves multiple agents and or multiple departments is Ticket Sharing and CC'ing agents. Private comments are then used between agents in order to inform the others of the work that they have completed .
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Can you go into detail on what your "IT Toolkit" consists of? What products you're using internally, hardware or software and how do you go about making the decisions for which products you're going to use? Which of these tools are you integrating into your Zendesk?
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Hi Ari,
Here at Zendesk we use a wide range of software and hardware. When it comes to software there is probably around 100 different types of software that we can issue to users/teams. These range from productivity tools to video conferencing applications. We believe that allowing teams to use the tools that work best for them is better than limiting them to only using certain tools.
When it comes to these different software tools we have a Vendor Application process that will go through Security and Legal before we allow a team or user to start using a specific application. Sometimes we may approve an application but will include some restrictions depending on what the application is used for.
As far as hardware goes we have standard equipment set ups that consists of mainly Apple products, Dell monitors, Logitech headsets and a few one off PC items. We are about 90% Mac with some users in Finance that use PC's. Similarly to our idea about letting people using software that they think best suits their team. We will order specific hardware equipment for users with manager approval. When it came to selecting our standard equipment this was a bit of a process. We tried out a few different products and had users provide feedback on their experience before settling on specific headsets, MiFi's, external monitors etc.
When it comes to IT's software integration into our Zendesk instance we do not do too much of this currently. The only software that IT has currently integrated into Zendesk is Zopim Chat. This is our chat service that allows for users to live chat with one of our agents about their issue or question and then have a ticket auto created once the chat is closed. I can only speak on what IT has integrated at this point. We may have other teams within Zendesk that have integrated some other tools that I may not be aware of such as our Support team for Customers.
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Hi Douglas,
Is your IT Help Centre an independent, full Zendesk instance, separate to your Zendesk Support one?
We also have a private area on our help centre, populated with internal content which is set by category/section visibility 1) agent-only - all staff, 2) agent-only and specified agent groups - departments/teams.
One thing I'm always conscious of is that we have a lot of knowledge in our knowledge base, so presenting that in a helpful way is the next hurdle. We decided that it works better when we have one central resource for everything, rather than keeping IT separate, so it's interesting to know if you guys work the other way to us :)
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Hi Samantha,
Great question here as well. Our IT Help Center is a completely separate instance from our Support instance. We have set this up in this fashion because our Support team has a pretty large HC as well that has all of their articles related to helping external customers on the Zendesk product.
The Support teams HC is something that is external facing so people outside of the Zendesk Org are able to access and read these articles. The IT HC is something that is only internal facing and is really only related to the employees of Zendesk.
We have found having these two HC's separate has been beneficial for those two reasons. First being that Support has their own very large HC with articles relating to Support tickets and external customer issues. Secondly IT's HC is internal only with articles relating to Zendesk employees only. Our employees do know that we have one central location for all questions relating to IT needs for the business. We then have a separate location that has all things related to Support that lives in their own Support Zendesk instance.
Hope that helps explain how and why we have set our HC's up in this fashion.
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Hi
We have many users of our instance who are customers but are also agents in the same spoke. As an example, we have many IT teams (devs, ops, support etc) using our spoke but sometimes they need to log a ticket to us (support) - and we live in the same spoke.
The issue we have is that as an agent we can't direct them to forms in HC, instead all links force them to create a new ticket within the Zendesk agent interface. This means 2 user experiences and also all our documentation and instructions have to be created twice for staff: 1 set for of instructions for agents and 1 for end-users. Is there any way to direct agents to HC forms without having them launch an incognito browser session (which treats them as an end user)?
Thanks!
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