Fine Tuning: Effective team communication in your support organization

11 Comments

  • Yaaz Dabiri

    Welcome to this Fine Tuning discussion! Please post your questions and comments below and I'm happy to answer them! 

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  • Mike Lynch

    These are helpful tips. But when will agent "notifications" be extended beyond just email? For agents who already live in the Zendesk browser app, why is there not a visual representation of accumulated notifications in the taskbar like all other apps they are accustomed to (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)? I'd love to be able to adjust triggers to add an in-app notification for agents when certain events take place.

    I'm eager to hear at 2PM about the possibilities of notifying teams that are not in Zendesk. We built a custom Slack integration to Zendesk that's working great, but have non-Slack, non-Zendesk users that need to be roped into ticket conversations once in a while.

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  • Sam Chandler

    These are really great tips, Yaaz! Another thing to consider when determining your notification schedule is audience and intention. Who are you notifying and why? 

    If you need to remind an agent to check up on an aging ticket, one-off email notifications are great. However, if you audience is a senior leader within your org you'll probably want to summarize your points as much as possible. Ex: Instead of sending them a single email every time an SLA is breached, schedule a weekly/monthly report of your total SLA breaches. 

    Summarizing the data in this way helps managers is more impactful because it tells them the whole story at once and allows data to drive your organization's decision-making process.

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  • Yaaz Dabiri

    Thanks for your post Mike! We'll have more information coming from our Product team regarding your notifications roadmap question. 

    In the meantime, here are some potential avenues for setting up notifications within Zendesk.

    1) Our SMS channel is in beta! SMS Targets will be available by Q2 and there's a beta you can sign up for!
     
    2) We have new Facebook messaging options as well as our mobile app which has in-app notifications. 
     
    3) Two ways to compile messages within the interface:
            - Notifications App (Promotes messages to your agents at the top right)
            - If your agents are getting messages about tickets or tasks, could they create a "My Tasks" custom View and compile their messages there

    Also, Section 3 has been posted so you can check that out now!

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  • Erin the mentor

    Hi Mike,

    Each and every time I observe an agent using Zendesk, I die a bit inside when I see they have Zendesk up on one monitor and email up on another—all to make sure they see important Zendesk notifications come into their inbox. We definitely need to do better.

    I've been doing some high-level thinking on the use cases that we most need to cover, and am hoping to get a project off the ground in the not-super-distant future. We are likely to start with some sort of in-product notification system that focuses (at first) on the really common events in Zendesk that agents need to know about - like being assigned to a ticket, a new comment coming in for their tickets, @mentions, etc, before getting into more customizable trigger-based notifications.

    Would you be interested in talking with me more about your needs over a call? Just say the word, and I'll reach out via email to arrange.

    Best,
    Erin

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  • Nadia De Vriendt

    We've been using the notifications to targets for some time now, and they've proven really useful already. The only thing I was wondering about, is there a way to make sure that when such a target responds to the email they receive via this notification that their reaction is NOT added as a public comment to the Zendesk ticket, but rather as an internal comment?

    We've had some rather awkward situations where the team replied to the email with internal information and the end user was informed of this as well. Currently the teams all know their replies go to the end user as well, but if there is a way for some more "internal" conversation even between teams that don't have access to Zendesk, that would be great.

     

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  • Yaaz Dabiri

    Hi Nadia, 

    Thanks for your question. There area a couple different ways you can make sure the response is added as an internal comment and not a public comment:  

    • Through the Mail API
    • By turning off the "Agent comments by email are public by default" setting which can be found at Settings >> Tickets >> Comments

    Hope that helps and let me know if you have any questions! 

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  • Mike Lynch

    Sorry, a late reply -- but Erin, if you're offer still stands to discuss by phone some possible notification features, I'd be happy to do so. Just drop me an email and we can schedule a time.

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  • Nadia De Vriendt

    @Yaaz thank you for the quick response. I've been reading up on the mail API and it looks very interesting.

    But I'm afraid it won't be a solution for the question I raised yesterday since in this particular case the triggers go out to external email targets and not Zendesk agents. :-(

    Is there another way to accomplish something similar for non Zendesk agents?

     

     

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  • Jessie Schutz
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Hey Nadia!

    When you've got people commenting from outside Zendesk and those people aren't Agents, their comments are always going to be public because they're considered End-Users. End-Users can't add private comments to a ticket.

    What you might consider using are Light Agents. They're not available on Plus plan, but if you moved over to the Professional plan, you'd be able to get Light Agents as an add on.

    I'd recommend looking carefully at the feature differences between the two plans and talk to your Account Manager to make sure everything is perfectly clear before you make the switch. But it might be exactly what you're looking for!

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  • Nadia De Vriendt

    ok, thanks Jessie. I'll look into it

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