Customer Love! — Send a Personal Follow Up

Here at Magoosh, we show our customers love by following up personally. By taking the extra moment to write a personal follow up after a customer reports an issue or problem.

For some time, we had an automated follow up that sent out a form email to the customer after a couple days. But this wasn't always the best experience. One of our newest employees, Anne, came up with this idea. She didn't feel that the automated message was enough and wanted to do more. It turned out to be a great way to show customers you really care about what they are going through.

With a few tags, a new target, and an automation or two, you too can show your customers love. :D

What's the problem?

We wanted an easy way to remember to follow up with our students after a certain amount of time.

Solution

We add a tag to the ticket — personal_follow_up — mark the ticket as pending, and then after a set amount of time, it opens back up with a private comment reminding the agent why the ticket has re-opened.

How To

STEP ONE: URL Target for Leaving a Private Comment

For our purposes, we wanted to be able to leave a private comment on the ticket. It saves time when going through Open tickets assigned to an agent. They don't have to spend as much time trying to figure out what they are supposed to do. You don't need this step for this to be successful, but if you'd like this to be part of your process, here's how:

1. Check the API Settings for your account:

Go to Settings > API and copy your username as listed under "Token Access" (e.g.email@somedomain.com) and the "Active API token".

Note: this to work, "Token Access" and "Password Access" must be enabled. You may need to change some of the steps below if you're settings are different.

2. Create a URL HTTP Target:

Go to Admin > Extensions > Targets and click "Add Target." Select "URL target"

Here's the setup:

Note: for URL, you'll need to change what I have to something like this:

https://subdomain.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets/{{ticket.id}}.json?ticket[comment][public]=false

Replace subdomain with your Zendesk subdomain.

Under Basic Authentication, the Username should be the username from step 1 plus the API token: email@somedomain.com/token

With everything in place, choose "Test Target" at the bottom of the page and click submit. If there are not errors, then it's time to celebrate! It worked.

But not too much. You still need to set it live. Select "Create Target" and click Submit.

STEP TWO: Create an Automation

Head over to Admin > Automations and click add Automation at the top. Here's how we set up our automation.

We decided on using personal_follow_up for our tag. This is what agents will use to trigger this automation.

You will want to decide what is the best follow up time for you and your customers. For us, we set it at 5 days (120 hours) and that's work out well.

Now, with the conditions set, here are the actions performed.

We are setting the ticket to Open and using the Target we created to leave a private comment on the ticket.

Also, we are removing the personal_follow_up so that the automation doesn't get triggered again. We also add personal_follow_up_sent to the ticket so we know that the automation triggered.

And for added measure, we send an email to the agent as well. Just in case they aren't checking there open queue regularly, they'll be able to see it in their email inbox.

And that's it! :D

Your customers will feel loved and appreciated when you start sending personal follow ups. You'll end up with response like this:

Jennifer Rowe

February 24, 2016 20:37

Zendesk Documentation Team

I love this tip. Thanks for sharing, Kevin!

Kevin Rocci

February 24, 2016 23:50

Thanks @Jennifer! :D

February 25, 2016 00:04

And I forgot to tell you: we're going to feature your tip on our blog on 3/8. Be sure to check it out!

February 25, 2016 00:22

Wow! I am flattered! That's so cool! I'll be sure to check it out and share. :D