This interactive "Full circle" session will provide best practices on how to optimize views in your Zendesk account. When views are setup correctly, you can instantly increase agent productivity and have more visibility on what tickets need to be responded to first. In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Prevent tickets from falling through the cracks
• Focus each teams’ efforts on the tickets most meaningful to them
• Help your team respond to tickets faster

Answering your questions in the comments below are members of our Customer Success Team.

Part 1: Understand what type of views are available

Using views is much more than an inbox folder. Views allow you to organize tickets in a meaningful way, within the context of your business needs.

To better understand how views work we need to understand the three different types of views:

Default Views - When you created your Zendesk account, there are a number of predefined views that are provided. These views are created by default as they are used in most support teams, but if they don’t work for your use case you can always, edit, deactivate or delete the view.

Note, the suspended and deleted ticket views cannot be edited or removed from your list of views.

Shared Views - Admins can create unlimited views accessible to all or groups of users. However, only 12 views are visible on the sidebar.

Personal Views - Agents or Admins can create unlimited views that are only accessible for that agents use. With personal views only 8 are visible on the side bar.

Part 2: Organizing views

Agents can get distracted when there are a lot of views, you can help minimize the noise by cleaning up their workspace. When organizing views determine how many appear in your agent’s interface and how many of those views they’re using in their daily routine.

Best practices when ordering your views:

• The ones that are most used most often used and/or are urgent should be placed near the top.
• Ones that are infrequently used or that deal with low priority tickets can be placed lower down.
• You can deactivate or delete views that are no longer required. Pro tip - there’s no coming back after deleting a view. So, if you might need it in the future, I always recommend deactivating first just in case you need it back.
• If you’re running low on space in your sidebar, consider consolidating views. You can use the grouping and sorting function to subcategorize tickets instead of creating new separate views.
• If you’re looking to track trends or see the status of tickets at a higher level, consider creating a report in Explore, instead and sharing it with your team or managers.

Ordering your views is simple, click here to see how.

The simple act of reordering can:

• Reduce agent downtime, because they don’t have to maneuver around Zendesk to find the right view to work from.
• It reduces the noise - Helps your agents focus on the tickets that need their attention.
• With more visibility to tickets you’re able to improve your agent’s overall response times.

Part 3: Pro tip - Highlight views with Emojis

Sometimes words just aren’t enough. Use Emojis in your view titles to draw attention to certain views and a fun way of customizing your agent workspace.

To do this: Use the free Emoji app in Zendesk and copy and paste emojis into the ticket title.

Use can use emojis to highlight:

• Urgent tickets
• Specific channels
• Product
• Services

Part 4 - Optimize agent views

When you create a view, you can add a total of 10 columns. That doesn’t always mean that you have to use all 10 fields, Real estate is key here - adding too many columns makes the screen cluttered and difficult to read. Consider the ticket fields that are most relevant to the view.

Below are some best practices to follow: 

• Consider the ticket fields that are most relevant to the view. Let’s look at my screenshot as an example. This view is filtered to only show all my unsolved tickets. Since these are unsolved tickets, it’s not valuable to have the Satisfaction or the Solved columns.

• Another common best practice  is to add the “Next SLA Breach” column if you are using  the Service Level Agreement feature in Zendesk. You want to have that breach countdown visible to all of your agents so they can prioritize tickets. If you want to learn more about this feature and how it works, our team is hosting a webinar on SLA’s in September.

When you’re creating a view don’t forget the configuration settings on the bottom of the page:

• You have the ability to group tickets. Some examples include status, category or assignee.
• Ensure that tickets are ordered correctly. If you’re handling tickets by oldest to newest, make sure that your order is by Request Date, latest update, or Next SLA Breach.
• Finally, determine if these need to be shared. Don’t default to All Agents when only a specific group is needed. Keep your agents focus on what’s important to them!

By providing the relevant information to your team, you can:

• Increase agent efficiency, giving them a head start before diving into the ticket.
• Increased ticket view allows you to assign it to the right agent in less time.
• Easily see what tickets haven’t been assigned yet.

Part 5: Pro tip - Creating shared views for individuals

As an Admin you want to ensure that your agents have access to the right views, but also have a balance where your agents don’t have to create a lot of personal views cluttering up their workspace.

One way of preventing this is creating shared individual views.

In my example below, I need to create a view to show my agents their Satisfaction ratings. You can do this without creating individual views for each of your agents.

Use dynamic conditions (example here would be “current user”) to change the view based on the agent who is logged in.

When you create shared views, you’re able to create standard views for your agents that presents best practice information while also limiting the number of personal views your agents have to sort through.

Part 6: Tools to respond to customers faster in Zendesk

Bulk Edit

We all know faster response times lead to happier customers. So, coming up with ways to be more efficient is key. In Zendesk, you can bulk edit tickets using views making a bulk ticket update in a couple of clicks.

For example, bulk assigning multiple tickets at once is a breeze within views. You can also update ticket fields, delete, merge and mark tickets as spam.

With this feature you can bulk edit up to 99 tickets at once, decreasing response times and agent clicks.

Play Button

Also, don’t forget to press play. The play button helps minimize agent cherry-picking by serving up the next available ticket that isn’t being addressed by an agent.

After addressing the ticket, clicking submit will update it and automatically move your agent to the next available ticket.

You can also set up Guided Mode that is only available on enterprise accounts. Here, you can restrict agents to only use the play button. Agents can choose to skip a ticket but can be prompted to provide a reason.

See how Zendesk implemented play mode and the benefits that we saw from implementing in this article.

Apps

It can take a lot of time to access a number of views. Good news is, there are apps to make this easier! 

• Quickie - is a handy top bar menu that gives you instant access to all views from anywhere within Zendesk. It also organizes the app in a folder hierarchy which improves
• Lovely Views - is an app that allows you to categorize your views into cascading folders on the left sidebar. In addition to organizing views, the app also includes ticket previews, ticket merging, and a bulk editing interface.

Bringing it “Full circle”

Tim Ferris once said “Focus on being productive instead of busy”

Being busy feels good. It makes us feel like we’re getting a lot done. But in reality, we’re not. Here at Zendesk we put a priority on productivity over busyness. Using views correctly and efficiently allows you to keep your team on task with what is truly important and avoids the treaded “busyness” trap.