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Dan Cooper

Joined Apr 15, 2021

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Last activity Feb 07, 2025

Community Moderator

I've been a Zendesk admin since 2013. I started as a leader needing a ticket solution and found myself loving being a system admin. I got Zendesk certified, became a Zendesk community moderator, and found myself propelled into a the tech sector based on my work with Zendesk. Over the years I've learned tons of tips and tricks, built several internal Zendesk apps, and have built and maintained ~20 Zendesk instances. Glad to be here!

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ACTIVITY OVERVIEW

Latest activity by Dan Cooper

Dan Cooper commented,

CommentEnd-user guide for Help Center

We aren't seeing that our help center has been enabled for semantic search, reading through the example, we would fall into a category where we are covered for some use cases, but only planned for others.  Does semantic search have to get to a point where it covers all of our use cases for it to be enabled, or will there be an option for a phased release in supported areas of our help center?

 

For us, federated search/external content is our big gap, but that is also a gap with keyword based search today in some channels (e.g. request page).  If federated search/external content becomes covered in the SERP channel, would we expect to be able to enable semantic search on that channel in advance of using it on the request page?  

 

Do we have any control/option to ask to be included for semantic search or are the covered/planned support options listed in this article requirements to move forward?  

View comment · Posted Sep 12, 2024 · Dan Cooper

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Dan Cooper commented,

Community commentAnnouncements

I've been running into a few issues with the new theme: 

  • I can't see attachments I've added to requests.  The first time this happened, I thought it failed so I uploaded again, and the support agent had to tell me that they had all the files.  
  • I'd like to be able to CC folks from my team on the requests page. 
  • Text areas should auto expand or be user expandable on the requests page.  The comment box here is expanding as I type, but the requests page doesn't do that.  
  • On the right sidebar on the request page, under Status there is an Id that doesn't seem to reference one of my orgs, and the Organization name just shows as “Org name”.  Looks like some placeholder values might have snuck in. 
  • The font size gap needs to be reeled in.  I need to zoom my browser to read comments, but that blows up all the big text too. Changing the comment line height to 1.5 and dropping header font size down to 44px does a world of wonders to even things out. 
  • Comments should show more per page.  I got several pages into this and when clicking the vote button, I was prompted to login and lost my place the comment flow and was sent back to page 1. 

Overall things are looking good for what feels like a pretty large update. 

View comment · Posted Apr 02, 2024 · Dan Cooper

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Dan Cooper commented,

Community comment Feedback - Ticketing system (Support)

This has been the most common piece of feedback we've received since enabling Agent Home earlier this week.  Agents like being able to click into a list of their CSAT responses and can't do that anymore. 

View comment · Posted Jan 31, 2024 · Dan Cooper

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Dan Cooper created a post,

Post Feedback - Help Center (Guide)

Please give a quick overview of your product feature request or feedback and note who in your org is affected by this issue [ex. agents, admins, customers, etc.]. (2-3 sentences)

The Guide API has some significant gaps related to being able to view team publishing statuses, archived content, and being able to manage owner/template status.  As you go deeper with Guide you start needing more powerful workflows and while most of Zendesk has a rich API, Guide doesn't give many options to fill in gaps.  Some specific issues we've run into over time include not being able to set owners or templates on articles, not being able to properly assign content updates to staff (you can only notify the assignee and there is no comment history), we can't systematically archive/restore content, and we can't establish custom workflows that allow us to manage review status for content teams that don't directly work in Zendesk but collaborate with Zendesk users. 

What problem do you see this solving? (1-2 sentences) 

It would be great if Zendesk could solve all of our problems, but priorities happen, and it would be great if we had the ability to build solutions that allowed us to capitalize on the things that Zendesk has done right. When Zendesk can't prioritize some features, we can.  In a conversation of build vs buy, sometimes the only option is buy elsewhere. 

When was the last time you were affected by this lack of functionality, or specific tool? What happened? How often does this problem occur and how does this impact your business? (3-4 sentences)

This used to be a daily issue for us, but there has been so little movement that we've had to move onto other workflows that are worse because of it.  We want to use Zendesk, but it's difficult to onboard teams that aren't Zendesk primary and we don't have great options to fill in the gaps to allow those teams to really get into Zendesk content management.  This has lead to many conversations with teams to load content into Zendesk that have fizzled out or become stagnant because the built in workflows don't cut it.   

Are you currently using a workaround to solve this problem? (If yes, please explain) (1-2 sentences)

Most of our primary use cases just don't use Zendesk despite an attempt to do so.  We have to have staff chase down content updates and owners over time because owners and notifications aren't easily maintained in a way that is effective for us. 

What would be your ideal solution to this problem? How would it work or function? (1-2 sentences)

Give us new endpoints to do what we can today, but with a path for us to build the workflows that work best for us. 

  • Article endpoints should include the ability to read and set the owner and template
  • Add team publishing endpoints for Set Article Review Status, Assign Article, List Tasks
  • Add Schedule article publication endpoint
  • Add List/Restore/Delete Archived Article endpoints. 

These would give us the ability to create workflows that can let us establish consistent Zendesk workflows around owner and templates used in a UI that we control.  We could allow for article content to be pulled into another system for review workflows with non-Zendesk teams and allow for us to push status updates back to Zendesk.  For article assignment, it would give us the ability to track comment threads on an article absent an option in Zendesk. 

I understand there are other initiatives in progress at Zendesk that may negate some of the pain points above, but it would be great to see some API level options for past and new Guide features to let us do more with the product. 

Posted Dec 12, 2023 · Dan Cooper

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Dan Cooper commented,

CommentAnnouncements

Will these changes also include API level access?  Some areas like the ability to read/set the owner, template, and team publishing status still don't seem to be available via the API.  Some of the gaps around collaboration are more on the notification front and it would be nice to be able to pull a list of tickets where the review status is "Ready for Review" and notify the respective owners in an external tool of our choice. 

View comment · Posted Dec 08, 2023 · Dan Cooper

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Dan Cooper created a post,

PostZendesk Support EAP - Triggers on Custom Objects

I'm looking to create a field on an object that counts the number of times the customer has used a product.  I'd like the ability to increment or decrement a number field value.  

Expanding beyond the object triggers EAP, this would also be available to ticket triggers as well and ticket triggers could be used to increment a number field on an object. 

Posted Nov 15, 2023 · Dan Cooper

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Dan Cooper created a post,

PostZendesk Support EAP - Triggers on Custom Objects

I'm trying to set an object trigger condition against a date field on the object and the Is within the previous/next options are expecting a date value instead of an integer.  If I try to set a condition for "Is within the previous | 30", the "30" is cleared and a calendar is shown instead to pick a date. 

Posted Nov 14, 2023 · Dan Cooper

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Dan Cooper commented,

CommentViewing and using dashboards

It's great to see some progress on getting data out of Explore.  Are there plans to include Guide datasets as part of the beta?  We currently use API access to pull much of our data into BigQuery, but Guide doesn't have the same API coverage as ticket data so we'd appreciate more export options for that data that would allow us to better track knowledge KPIs for our content and teams.

View comment · Posted Sep 25, 2023 · Dan Cooper

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Dan Cooper commented,

Community comment Discussion - Tips and best practices from the community

Sarah Seiwert it looks like Ronald was able to answer your question about how to use dynamic content.  It's not a necessary step, but it helps clean up the errors and allows you to reuse the same dynamic content placeholder in multiple triggers that require the same logic.

View comment · Posted Jun 06, 2023 · Dan Cooper

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Dan Cooper commented,

Community comment Feedback - Ticketing system (Support)

What works well today with the SLA feature?

  • The concept for setting them up is very clean.  It's great that Zendesk business rules largely follow the same patterns for how they are setup and configured.  

What limitations do you hit while using it?

  • Group SLAs.  We need a way to measure first and next reply time for a group assignment.  
  • Manager resets.  We get a lot of requests to reset an SLA timer due to an accidental fulfillment.  This may be due to a non-support member (but still agent) commenting on a ticket, a first reply that doesn't meet the "spirit of a first response" (e.g. a substantial comment vs a "Let me check into this" comment).
  • Agent "customers" fulfilling SLAs.  We have internal teams that submit tickets to us in Zendesk.  SLAs don't always apply for them as they either don't activate or resolve based on their comments. 
  • Schedule clarity for business hours tickets.  It would be good to have better displays as to the business hours a ticket is adhering to.  Agents ask questions when ticket timers don't align to published SLAs and customers can submit tickets out of business hours which can result in confusion if a ticket normally comes in fresh with a 24 hour timer, but a ticket submitted 5 minutes earlier before business hours starts is due only 8 hours later. 

What do you wish it would do differently for you? Why?

  • When a ticket is transferred to a group, I'd like the new Group SLA feature to count down to first reply.  Optionally, count down to next reply.  It would be good to have the option to require the reply to come from the ticket assignee to avoid fulfillment from other staff. 
  • Allow for reply time metric fulfillment to be restricted to the ticket assignee.  This would address scenarios where internal staff members are the requester on a ticket and SLAs either don't activate or fulfill based on their comments.  In addition, it would solve a lot of manager reset scenarios where a manager needed to make a quick comment but isn't owning a ticket, or the agent as a customer scenario mentioned above.
  • Give us ad hoc SLAs.  These could be one time SLAs that can be applied in addition to current SLAs that allow for scenarios where an SLA was accidentally fulfilled and we need an update within the next few minutes/hours.  Managers could trigger an additional ad hoc metric that provides a timer, but doesn't impact other SLA metrics that are being tracked. This way we can still control when responses happen in scenarios that fall outside of standards SLA metric flows.  Treating ad hoc SLAs as another target can help in reporting as well to allow a team to see how often they are manually intervening. 
  • We need more granular breach notifications.  I should be able to notify for an upcoming breach in the next 15 minutes.  The hourly automation cycle is far too slow. 

What is the impact on your business?

  • We have a lot of SLA hacks in place to address issues with non-support agents impacting SLA fulfillment, setting timers for group transfers, and we have page earlier than necessary to not miss SLAs.  These lead to complex process docs that take time to enable staff on and slow down ticket processing.

View comment · Posted May 26, 2023 · Dan Cooper

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