Winning customer experiences is the foremost thing for your business. And it solely depends on how your customers feel your team is treating them. A good customer support service comprises fast replies to customer queries on their preferred channels. If your customers have to repeat themselves or wait on hold while being redirected to different departments, this will negatively experience them.
Customer service software like Zendesk has been of great help in providing excellent customer support. However, a professional and accurate Zendesk training must be given to your customer service agents to ensure seamless customer support and loyal, happy customers. They must be trained in every aspect to handle Zendesk efficiently and avoid complaints from the customers. Here is a quick guide on Zendesk software training for the customer support team.
Zendesk as a Customer Service Representative
To win customer loyalty and trust, you must offer them a top-notch support service. For this, you must provide your customer support agents with the most dynamic and powerful software tools like Zendesk.
Zendesk Support serves as a perfect customer service representative by efficiently tracking, prioritizing, and solving customer support tickets. It is an all-in-one software solution that offers every needed customer service resource to your agents, right at their fingertips.
Here are some features of Zendesk as a customer service representative that take your business to the next level:
- Effective tools for automation, collaboration, and information gathering.
- Online messaging for seamless customer communication.
- Live chat and voice support.
- Quick access to incoming tickets for your agents.
- Customer self-help portal allowing customers to easily access the information themselves, which saves time for your support agents.
- Multitasking tools for handling multiple tickets and preventing backlogging.
Zendesk offers more useful features and exceptional benefits that boost your support service and business simultaneously. Let us help you understand how you can get started with Zendesk with simple steps.
Basics of Zendesk Support
Zendesk Support software offers a collective solution that arranges and tracks all incoming requests from customers, through any channel. Before diving deep into Zendesk support training, let’s understand the core concepts of the software.
Navigation
The following are some main navigation features that your team must know to get started with Zendesk.
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Dashboard: A summary page where you can check summary information and essential statistics.
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Getting Started: A step-by-step checklist for configuration. Follow the steps and configure to initialize and run.
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Views: Views define a grouping of tickets as per a set of criteria. You can generate and use views to gather tickets into one area, such as “Recently solved tickets” or “My open tickets.”
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Reporting: Analytics about your support activities and performance. You can create custom analytics reports for your business or use pre-built reports. Analytics reports give you an idea about the performance of your support team and your customers’ satisfaction.
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Admin: Settings and manage pages. You can browse and install apps, handle user profiles, ticket fields, views, macros, account security settings, business rules, etc.
Roles: Zendesk Users
For better security and confidentiality of user data, Zendesk sets limits on information use depending on different roles. Here are details of different user roles and types of information they can access and tasks they can perform.
- Owner
Owner is a person who created your Zendesk and is a type of administrator. There can be only one account owner for a Zendesk. The owner can access areas of your Zendesk that other administrators can’t, such as payment options, invoicing, and benchmarking for the account. If needed, an owner can reassign the account ownership to another administrator.
2. Administrator
Administrator is a person in charge of your Zendesk with privileges to customize and manage the software. Apart from managing tickets, administrators can perform tasks like changing settings, editing business rules, etc.
3. Agent
Agents are the actual support personnel at your organization who handle tickets. They are responsible for interacting with customers and resolving support issues.
4. End-User
End-users are your customers who can create support requests from different support channels. They can submit and track tickets and converse with agents publicly.
Ticket
A ticket is a record of all support request conversations from different channels. Zendesk manages support requests by generating a ticket for each customer support request. Generating a series of recorded actions attached to one ticket allows end-users and agents to stay on the same page and promptly resolve an issue. Check out the entities related to tickets in Zendesk,
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Ticket: It is a support request from customers with issues. When support requests are received from any of your channels, they convert into tickets and are assigned to support agents.
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Ticket Fields: They are fields for entering information about the ticket, such as Email, description, type, status, priority, tags, etc.
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Custom Ticket Fields: You can create custom fields that are visible to both agents and end-users. They are generally used to collect more information regarding a customer support request.
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Status: It is the current situation of a ticket. Five values are used for showing ticket status, i.e., New, Open, Solved, Pending, and On-hold.
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Type: It is a category of support requests. Tickets are categorized into four types, such as Question, Problem, Incident, and Task.
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Priority: Tickets are assigned priorities using four values: Low, High, Normal, and Urgent.
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Tag: They are words related to tickets to categorize them.
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Requester: A person who generated the support request.
Channel
Channels are the means through which you can receive support requests and engage with customers to solve the queries. The channels can be Email, Chat, Help Center, Mobile SDK, Talk, Facebook, Twitter, or Web Widget.
How to Update and Solve the Ticket
It is essential to understand how to handle tickets to make the customer-agent relationship smoother. During every ticket’s lifecycle, often, there are further requests and questions for clarification by both the handling agent and customer. Thereby, the ticket’s status can change several times. Your customer support team must know how to handle ticket status changes and when to add which status label.
Understanding Status Values
As mentioned earlier, there are five values used to update the ticket status:
New: This status indicates that the ticket is new, and no action has been performed. Once you change this label, you can never set it back to New.
Open: This value indicates that the ticket is assigned to a support agent and is waiting for action. All open tickets can be viewed using the Open tickets view.
Pending: This value indicates that the support agent is waiting to receive more information from the requester. Pending tickets can be viewed using the Pending tickets view.
On-hold: The label indicates the agent is waiting for action or information from another person than the requester.
Solved: The label indicates the agent has resolved the customer query or submitted a solution.
How to Submit Updates and Change Ticket Status
The Submit button can be used to add any updates made to the ticket, such as status changes, internal or external comments, etc. It also allows you to choose the ticket status.
- Click the Submit button to submit updates to a ticket without changing the status
- If you want to submit ticket updates and change the status then,
- Click the arrow button to open the status label menu
- Choose the status you want to apply after submitting the ticket.
Solving and Closing Ticket
Once you have solved the customer query, you can update the status to “Solved” by clicking the submit button. The Solved status means that the requester is satisfied with your solution, and you are done with the ticket. However, a requester can still open the ticket even if it is set Solved by submitting a new comment or responding back.
After Solved, the next status is Closed, which can not be set manually. It can be set as Closed using a predefined business rule called automation created by the administrator. An administrator also determines how long the Solved status remains before they are closed—the ticket status changes to Closed automatically four days once it has been solved.
Once a ticket’s status is changed to Closed, the requester can’t reopen it. However, both requester and agent can create a follow-up request for a closed ticket.
How to Work Efficiently with Zendesk
As a reliable organization or business, you need to ensure superior support service and the success of your Customer Support team. You must look for ways to increase the productivity of your team when working with Zendesk. Below are a few Zendesk tools and tips that can help your agents work more efficiently and make customers happy.
Using Customer Context Tools
When there is an omnichannel environment, support agents require customer information at their fingertips to quickly respond to customer queries without having to search for information in another database or make customers wait. Using the right Zendesk tools, your agents can get essential and relevant customer context quickly.
Omnichannel Solution
Different customers have different preferences to communicate their queries. Therefore, it is essential to offer an omnichannel solution to your team. It lets your customers reach your support team through their preferred way, be it web, Email, mobile app, voice, or chat. With an omnichannel solution, your agents can work seamlessly without switching back and forth between tabs.
Measuring Customer Data
The best way to boost your customer is to use your customer analytics and support data. This helps to boost the overall customer experience. For instance, analyzing and measuring all channels’ usage can help you identify channels that are likely to be busier during particular periods so that you can assign the agents accordingly.
Using Collective Knowledge of Your Support Team
Encouraging your support team to assemble their collective knowledge and improve it over time can boost self-service outcomes and knowledge base. You can use the latest tools to help your team to contribute the latest and helpful information easily from the agent interface.
Final Closure
Once your support team gets pro at Zendesk, no one can stop your business from winning existing customers’ trust and attracting more customers. Just ensure you provide appropriate Zendesk training to your entire team with professional assistance.
