Increase Agent Efficiencies in Zendesk for Better Customer Experiences

 

Are you seeing your Zendesk ticket volumes continually climbing day on day, with agents getting more and more frustrated and stressed-out that comes with dealing with angry customers not getting their enquiries answered?

 

The simple solution is to hire more customer service staff to smash through the backlog of tickets, however in this climate of uncertainty, getting the budget for new hires is often out of reach.

 

That's where you may need to look at your Zendesk platform for answers to drive better efficiencies. Zendesk is built by design to provide great Agent experiences alongside efficiencies in dealing with customer enquiries, but we often see that some of those super-charged tools are overlooked in the never-ending quest to reduce ticket backlog.

 

Zendesk Macros are an excellent way to speed up ticket responses. We typically see that more than 40% of customer enquiries can be effectively handled with a repeatable response. If your agents are continuing to hand-type the same responses day after day, they not only get disengaged from servicing the customer and focussing on more important issues, they are also not being productive.

 

What's more, when macros are written well with good tone of voice, on-brand and targeted to specific demographics, it drives up customer satisfaction and customer loyalty increasing overall business success.

 

Zendesk labs released the KCS app in 2018. I regard this app as the most important to super-boost your customer service. The KCS app provides knowledge to your agent, right within a ticket. It will automatically search for answers from the ticket subject and present options. If the article is available for the customer to read, the agent can then select and push the article URL into the public response, thereby promoting your customer to self serve. If the article is internal to the agent only, then the agent can copy parts of the text to paste into the customer response, or at a minimum follow the article instructions providing consistent processes for all agents to follow with no exceptions!

 

With a good set of knowledge articles, you will find that less experienced agents can begin answering much more complex queries and the more senior agents can focus on the seriously difficult issues or can spend more time creating knowledge for the organisation.

 

The other point about the KCS app is that you can set up templates within the solution so that agents are able to create draft articles directly whilst working on customer issues, thereby capturing the exact information that the customer is experiencing, and writing up the article while being very close to the customer. Articles created in this manner have a much better chance of being customer-relevant, in the right language that should be easy to locate next time the issue comes up.

 

One last thing I would say about knowledge is that if it is in the head of individual agents, that knowledge leaves your organisation when the agent leaves, so you need to capture it in an article and continually review and improve it. 

 

Many organisations have a whole bunch of 3rd party apps that are separate from Zendesk but no less important to solve out customer issues. These include Order Management Systems, Customer Relationship Systems, E-Commerce platforms, and other business-specific software. 

 

I like to hold a stopwatch against a typical ticket and capture the amount of time the agent spends finding additional information in these 3rd party apps, I believe you would be shocked to see a very significant chunk of time going into searching for order information, payments, stock etc from these other apps.

 

Our approach at successCX is to try and reduce any of this time we call "swivel-chairing" between systems in order to get the response to the customer quicker and get onto the next ticket by using the Zendesk side-bar app facility.

These apps are typically presented to the agent on the right-hand side when a ticket is opened, which search and present information from those 3rd party systems. These apps can be built not only to present back information to the agent, but can also update information bi-directionally. A simple URL link within an app, back to an order record in the external system can save the agent up to 1 minute per ticket, which is a massive saving over hundreds of tickets worked on in a week.

 

As there are limitations on the sizing of these apps, they can be built to display discrete amounts of data within separate tabs, making it more manageable to the agent.

 

Zendesk is designed to provide efficiencies for your customer service teams. By looking at refining and building on your Macros, knowledge and apps, you can take the efficiency to the next level. This in-turn keeps your agents more engaged with their customers, driving up speed to reply which ultimately drives better customer satisfaction and better customer loyalty, which is great for growing your business.