Preface

Today, mid-March 2020, when COVID-19 is on the rise and many companies are affected, we need to support each other even more than usual. We all are facing very special management and productivity challenges doing customer service these days. And I think that knowledge is the best weapon against those challenges.

That's why I decided to share another piece of my professional knowledge with the community. Last time I posted about my approach to set up or optimize Zendesk using Customer Journey idea. I know this post might sound a bit too theoretical - so I would like to share more practical stuff today.

I have been doing professional Zendesk consulting for the last 9 years. One of my best-selling services is Zendesk Health Diagnostics. I have diagnosed many Zendesk accounts – from small one-agent accounts to big enterprise-scale ones – and collected a lot of cases. But all the time I was facing the same repetitive issues/optimizations.

The Checklist

The checklist is a great tool to organize any activities. I have organized all optimizations into groups based on the area of Zendesk and/or functional type of optimization. But technically you can follow them in any order you like.

For almost all points I have placed the links to Zendesk Help Center articles where you can find the details of the implementation. Sometimes you will find the screenshots with real examples of discussed setups which allows you to reproduce them easily in your Zendesk.

BRANDING

Add avatars in agent profiles
Looking more human is better than a no-name Support Agent. You can use your real photos or create custom avatars using tools like this. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/avatar-maker/ofknlbikfofijlcjkfcihomkedmchfbn?hl=en
Add signatures in agent profiles
Signatures are useful for providing branded contact details, links, etc. They add a bit more personalization to your customer service. You can add individual and branded signatures and design them very differently using Markdown. I always suggest keeping them short until you don't need to have long ones for some specific reason.
Add your brand name to the Email template
Default Email template in Zendesk has a footer placeholder like "This email is a service from YourZendeskName". You can remove it or replace it with your own text like "This email is a service from BRAND X".
Change Help Center address to branded one
Starting from the Zendesk Support Team plan you can set up a branded Help Center address instead of BRAND.zendesk.com/hc. You can use more official support.BRAND.com or more friendly help.BRAND.com as a custom address. And you get a free SSL for this address!
Add SPF and DNS records to verify your branded emails
This may sound too technical but actually is very easy: just add several records in your domain management system (like GoDaddy). One SPF record (details here), 4 CNAME records (details here), and one TXT record (details here). You can do it yourself or ask your IT professional. It takes up to 5 minutes.

WORKFLOWS & CHANNELS

Use grouping and sorting in Views
Views are a great tool to organize tickets in your Zendesk, especially when you group the tickets by some attribute and sort them inside this attribute. I usually suggest using Priority for grouping tickets and "Next SLA Breach" attribute to sort them. Look at this Unassigned tickets view and its settings examples. This way you have a well-prioritized tickets queue reflecting different importance of tickets (= customers) for your business.
Categorize tickets by topics
Tickets categorization has a lot of benefits for automating different areas in Zendesk based on topics via triggers: (a) route tickets to groups/agents, (b) assign Priority, (c) assign SLAs, (d) get reporting for customer experience analytics. Organize your topics in forms or multi-level dropdown fields depending on your Zendesk plan. Download this Excel file with my 'ultimate' list of categories for E-commerce brands (and instructions about how to create a field).
Use more Priority levels in tickets
Zendesk allows you to have 2 or 4 levels of ticket priority (you can change them on ticket field settings in Admin > Tickets Fields > Priority). Having more levels allows you to reflect all gradients of tickets' importance considering multiple conditions (like category, channel, tags, etc). Otherwise, you have too many just High priority tickets where some are really more urgent than others.
Enable On hold status in tickets
By default, this status is not enabled in Zendesk. But this status is very useful for many cases when a response is needed from a third party (not the requester or the assignee). You can set up special views to track those tickets and exclude them from other views (using condition Status IS NOT On Hold). Go to Admin > Tickets Fields > Status to enable the status.
Set up SLAs to track KPIs and manage the queue
Sometimes SLAs are not used even if this feature is available because they are considered as an enterprise-like story. In fact, you can use SLAs to have more internal control over tickets queues in terms of prioritization and reporting (remember Views setup in p. 1 above). I usually suggest adding at least 2 metrics – First Reply Time and Next Reply time in Calendar or Business hours. Look at this screenshot for a real setup example.
Add Web widget to Help Center / Website
Web Widget is a great way to receive tickets because unlike emails you have much more control over the submission process and results. You can define mandatory custom ticket fields to collect the required details for further workflows (see p. 2 above). Check other useful resources for setting up and customizing Web Widget.
Make Request theme field visible and editable for customers
This point is one of the actions related to pp. 2 and 5 above. Since you have a clear and simple categorization system you can make it mandatory by ticket submission and get the correct categories in most cases upon ticket creation. It allows you to get all the benefits of tickets categorization from p. 2. Naturally, you benefit even more if your customers use this channel over others (like email or social media) where they don’t have to select a request category.
Use macros in tickets and/or shortcuts in chats (more and more again)
In my opinion, Macros is the main productivity tool in Zendesk. Macros allow agents to insert predefined responses into the comment box and apply multiple ticket fields values automatically. Sometimes companies avoid using macros to provide more personalized, non-templated customer support and service. For me this attitude is not completely correct: macros just help you to save time for manual typing and field filling. What would be the final reply depends on your agents (who follow your guides and SOPs). Macros are just a tool; people decide to be humans or 'robots'. Check what the normal macros usage rate is below (in the 'KPIs & Reporting' section).
Activate CSAT Surveys if possible
If your Zendesk plan allows you (Professional and higher) to have CSAT Surveys, use them. They allow you to collect valuable customer feedback (ratings and comments) and track your agents' performance in terms of support quality. And don't forget to activate collecting the bad scores reasons too. Look at this screenshot with typical settings. Below (in the 'KPIs & Reporting' section) you will find the details about building a report for CSAT Comments in Explore.
Activate ССs and Followers feature
ССs and Followers is a pretty new feature (introduced in 2019) and is not actively used yet in old accounts I encounter. Actually, it is very beneficial to separate public and hidden recipients because the Followers feature works like BCC in normal emails. In most cases, you use automatic migration which takes just a few minutes (see how here).
Activate Schedules to track KPIs within business hours
Starting from a Professional plan you can set up schedules in your Zendesk. Multiple schedules allow you to track groups'/agents' performance reflecting the time zones where they are working (their group/individual schedules). This way you have a more detailed performance picture (within the calendar and business hours).
Activate 'Auto-assign tickets upon solve' setting
This small setting allows you to automate ticket assignments in one click (you can build a more customized trigger for the same process). Go to Admin > Tickets > Assignment section and check the box (don't forget to save the changes).
Activate the 'Include attachments in emails' setting
This setting is located on the same page and allows you to include actual attachments in outbound emails instead of links that might be just missed by customers. Go to Admin > Tickets > Attachments section and check the box (don't forget to save the changes).
Activate Automatic Redaction in tickets
As Zendesk states "Selecting this option enables automatic redaction of credit card numbers from all customer-submitted text in tickets to protect sensitive data.". Go to Admin > Security and check the box (don't forget to save the changes).
Activate 'Include unpublished posts' in Facebook page settings
If you run Facebook ads campaigns you can get them as tickets in Zendesk too (with some limitations described here). Check the setup process here.
Install apps for online shops, delivery systems, and other integrations
Zendesk Marketplace has a lot of great free and paid apps. Ecommerce companies might install apps to integrate with online shops (Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon), delivery systems (Shipstation, Shipup), and other apps.

TRIGGERS & AUTOMATIONS

Auto-solve Pending tickets to avoid backlogging
Very often pending tickets never get a reply from the customer. It makes sense to solve them automatically to avoid tickets backlog growth. You can also include 'Email user' action into this trigger to kindly notify the customer about a pending ticket awaiting the customer's reply. You might build a sophisticated process for this case following Zendesk's Bump Bump Solve tip.
Autoclose Solved tickets
Since this rule is not mandatory you can use it to keep your tickets queue clean from solved cases that probably will never be reopened again. You can send an educational notification about a closed ticket and ask to provide a new request via the preferred channel. In some cases, this is the main reason to use this rule.
Notify agents/managers about bad CSAT ratings
Being immediately notified about bad ratings is good not only for customer-obsessed brands. Might customers give you fair bad ratings or from misunderstandings, you have a possibility to follow up and try to solve the initial issue and ask the customer to change the rating to a Good one. Use this basic example to create a trigger for your needs.
Deactivate duplicate notifications
By default, Zendesk provides you many triggers that are doing the same thing - notifying you about new or updated tickets. Consider deactivating some of them to reduce clutter in your email box. If you have one or two agents you can deactivate triggers to notify groups and/or all agents. You can reactivate them anytime later once you need those triggers again. Go to Admin > Triggers and check what you have.
Collect customer reviews following up Good CSAT ratings
You can easily improve your ratings on different marketplaces if you collect reviews from satisfied customers. In case you use CSAT in Zendesk you can create a trigger sending an email asking to leave a review for your products/services. It should be created in a way similar to the p.3 above, but put another condition for Satisfaction (Good or Good with comment).

KNOWLEDGE BASE (HELP CENTER)

Add (more) articles to the 'Promoted articles' section
With Promoted articles feature you can put some of the articles from your Help Center on the Home page. It should naturally help your customers find them and self-service. Check regularly your Knowledge base views stats using default Reporting (or using Google Analytics with filtering only effective visits) and update this list of Promoted articles accordingly (check how to promote an article).
Make Search box bigger to stimulate self-service
This task requires some IT skills but is very easy in general. Default search box parameters are pretty fine; nevertheless, I always suggest making it even bigger. Recently I discovered an amazing example of the Help Center by GoSpotcheck with the search box taking the whole first screen.
Add quick links under the Search box to stimulate self-service
The same Help Center example I provided above has this option added. In addition to the Promoted articles, this makes the likelihood of self-service even higher. You should place up to Top 5 quick links there (better 3). Less is more here.
Put the Customer Support team on the Main page
It depends on your privacy policy and guidelines. You can put the collective photo (like GoSpotcheck) or individual profiles (like KissMyKeto here). It makes your customer support much friendlier and helps with your assisted service.
Provide multiple Contact options and expectations
Depending on your customer support strategy (more reactive or proactive) you can put contact options on the Home page. You can manage expectations by adding Operating hours and expected reply time for each support channel (like KissMyKeto here).

KPIs & REPORTING

Check your main Support KPIs against benchmark data
Zendesk collects and analyzes anonymized data about the customer support performance of thousands of companies around the globe. And this benchmarking data is available for free. Visit this page when you ask the question "How do we perform compared to the industry average?'.
Install and use Time Tracking app (Professional plan and above)
Speed is one of the most important dimensions of customer service performance (along with volumes and quality). Time Tracking app allows you to track time spent per each ticket update when the agent directly works with the ticket. Setup is very easy and there are detailed articles about building the reporting. Here is a real example of the report to track Update Time by Agents.
Check your Views/Tickets rate in Help Center
Self-service is an important part of any customer support strategy and system. With proper setup, this might save your company a lot of resources for providing excellent personalized assisted support. Having HC Views and Tickets stats (tickets created via Help Center) you can calculate the Views/Tickets rate. It gives you a clear picture of how much self-service you have. A good rate is about 10:1, but it varies for companies depending on the audience's habits and service strategy.
Check your Searches to Tickets rates in Help Center
It is the same story as in the point above but here we look at Searches/Tickets rate. Since customers can rephrase search requests multiple times and you can have a well-filled Knowledge base this rate may reach 50:1 proportion (recently I have seen that one), but usually it is lower. In simple words, it means that only 1 ticket is submitted when 50 searches are made.
Track articles linking activity by agents
Placing links to Help Center articles is a good option to promote your Knowledge base and stimulate self-service. Zendesk allows you to track this activity in the default Explore dashboard (available on Guide Professional and above) and provides a great Knowledge Capture app to link articles. Look at leading rates and coach other agents to reach them.
Build CSAT Comments report in Explore to track feedback topics
With new Explore reporting the old Satisfaction report is removed but you will not find the report with CSAT comments there. This point may be obsolete in the near future, but you can use this report example to get this in your Explore.
Track macros/shortcuts usage by agents
This report is essential since macros are an important productivity tool in Zendesk. Zendesk suggests you build the report using tags. It supposes you need to tag all your tickets and build a tags-based report (in Explore). A good rate is about 80%, which means you use 8 macros in 10 tickets on average. And again it varies from company to company. We (at Pythia) provide advanced Macros Reporting in our Macros Reporting app.

I hope you enjoyed the checklist and optimized your Zendesk.

And safe and happy support to everyone!

P.S. Check my other tips on Zendesk Community:

🔥🔥🔥 Good news!
Now you can easily optimize your Zendesk with an interactive web tool called Zendesk Health Check!

Andrei Kamarouski
Zendesk Expert, Pythia Co-Founder (we build productivity apps for Zendesk)