Zendesk: Putting the Help Desk On the Web
No matter what side you sit on it, dealing with a support desk can be a frustrating process - hard for the company, hard for the customer. Making the process a little less painful is ZenDesk, the web 2.0 application for help desks and customer support. Simplified, easy to intuit forms make the ZenDesk a timesaving platform for enterprise, and the customer.
To start with, let’s walk through a set up for a company. As with any setup, there are a number of steps to take, so let’s take it in the order that ZenDesk recommends on their start page. The first thing recommended by Zendesk is to set the access for our customers by setting up email whitelists and blacklists, a custom user registration message, whether users can download attachments without logging in, and if users can use OpenID to access their account. Next we can personalize ZenDesk by uploading logos, changing colors and even uploading a favicon for bookmark branding. After that we can enable SSL, change the html email setup, and set up our default reply email. We’ve had a lot of choices so far, but it’s not as bad as it seems in text - ZenDesk has spread these options among three pages and there’s always a link to Zendesk support on every page. Next we can set up our users and their rights, setting permissions and roles for our help desk participants. Now we’re ready to start submitting tickets. If we want to change any of these settings later, all of them are under a single tab, the Manage tab.
As we fill in a ticket, let’s take the role of one of our company’s agents, who’s filling in a ticket for a customer. If the customer had logged into the system they could have entered in their own details, but let’s go through it. After filling in the name and contact information, we can set an agent to be assigned to the ticket, then set the Status (New, Open, Pending, Solved), Type (Question, Incident, Problem, Task), and Priority (Low, Normal, High, Urgent). Zendesk will assign a ticket score of 1 to 100 based on the Type, Priority, age, and Assignee to help evaluate the overall priority. Once we add in a description of the issue the tag field at the bottom will automatically fill in tags from the description, which can be changed as neccessary. Were we a customer, we would be prompted to sign in, fill out a quick form, and attach any files we thought appropriate.
When we want to review our tickets there are two tabs, Recent and Views, that let us see what the open tickets are. We can see them in table, list, or by tags, and export them as csv or RSS. Various views to see tickets by unassigned, working, and updated tickets are also under this tab.
Customers can access their tickets by logging in and seeing responses or see a knowledge base or FAQ. Zendesk calls these Forums because there is the option to allow comments, which is only one part of the forums. Forums can be created for agents only, used for announcements or feature requests. Other options include pinning a forum topic to the home page, attaching files, and tagging answers for better searching.
Agents will like the macros available with Zendesk that allow users to create rules for certain actions (such as a customer not responding) for automatic messages, and triggers allow for automatic responses to conditions the user sets (like when a ticket is created, a message is sent. Automations allow for time based triggers such as when a ticket is closed, to change the ticket status. All of the automatic functions are easily found under Manage tab. Also under the Manage tab we can also configure our Service Level Agreements, letting us set what percentage of tickets must be solved within what time frame.
ZenDesk also offers reports for tracking your ticket and resolution of them, including visual charts, number of high priority tickets, incident evolution, resolution time, and ticket priorities.
The downside to Zendesk would be the simplicity of the tickets themselves, which may be too simple to coax customers into giving the right information, but this can be remedied with adding custom fields under the Manage tab.
Zendesk is an easy to use help desk with a range of options for enterprise users. API, widgets for adding html to the homepage of your desktop, and html email templates all are added into the versatile Zendesk to make it a pragmatic approach to help desks. Find Zendesk and similar programs under the Listio search: business+helpdesk.
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Tags: business, email, helpdesk, manage, rss, tags
Posted in: Help Desk | Respond
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