Zendesk Essentials

What is Zendesk?

Zendesk is a customer support platform that facilitates communication between FareHarbor’s support team and our clients. Equipped with features that allow Supporters to receive, analyze, and respond to support requests accurately and efficiently, Zendesk is an important part of FareHarbor’s celebrated 24/7 customer support services.

Agent Dashboard

Zendesk’s main user interface is the Agent dashboard.

The navigation bar on the left is where you will sort through tickets, groups, and views.

At the top you can see a row of statistics, including the number of open tickets that you personally have, the number of open tickets that your group has and ticket statistics like the total number of tickets solved over the past week as well as your satisfaction statistics.

The majority of the page is taken up by a View called Tickets Requiring Your Attention. A view is a listing of tickets that meet certain criteria, and this view is a default setting that comes on every Zendesk account, based on support best practices. You can work from this default view, or from one of your custom-created views.

In the upper-right corner is your profile icon, which is how you access your agent profile. This menu also has a few useful options such as Get Help, Give Feedback, and Keyboard Shortcuts—which will help you move around Zendesk quickly, allowing you to answer tickets more efficiently. You might want to download the keyboard shortcuts as a PDF, print it, and set it next to your keyboard so that you can memorize all of the most useful shortcuts.

Views

Locate the Views section (icon looks like a filing cabinet) from the navigation bar on the left side of the agent dashboard. This is where you will spend a lot of time as an agent. The way Zendesk views work is that if a ticket meets the specified criteria, the ticket will show up in that view—thereby grouping tickets together in a way that will allow you to deal with them most logically and efficiently. This is a feature that is used day-in and day-out to manage tickets within your Zendesk.

Every Zendesk comes with certain default views.

Because views organize tickets based on that ticket’s properties, it is important to understand that a ticket can appear in more than one view at once. For example, a new ticket can appear in Unassigned tickets, All unsolved tickets, New tickets in your groups, and Unsolved tickets in your groups, because a new ticket meets all the criteria for each of those views.

To create a personal view for yourself, follow the steps listed here!

Search

The search function allows you to search an entire Zendesk account if you are looking for information, tickets, user profiles, etc. Find the magnifying glass in the top righthand corner and click on it, then search what you are looking for.

Search in Zendesk is done in tabs at the top of the screen. This way, you can run a search, switch to a ticket you were working on, and jump back and forth while referencing the search, allowing for a smoother workflow.

Notes

Another useful feature of Zendesk is the internal notes option. Agents should be using the notes section to write down any important information about the customer to improve internal communication (e.g. “spoke with her on the phone 2 weeks ago and she was very upset about the GC setup”).

Reporting

The bar chart icon in the lefthand sidebar will take you to the reporting tools available in Zendesk. Here you can see all kinds of statistics and trends for what channels end-users are using, average reply time, etc. The second tab under reporting is the Leaderboard, which shows a ranking of all the team’s agents based on certain criteria. The leaderboard can also be viewed by group.

Ticket Lifecycle

There are multiple channels for ticket creation—but regardless of how a customer contacts you with a support request, that request will be converted into a ticket. Once converted into a ticket, the support request will start its progress through the Ticket Lifecycle—each step of which is identified by a different ticket status.

Ticket statuses are probably the most important thing that agents working in Zendesk need to learn, because statuses communicate where a ticket is in its lifecycle to the customer and to other agents on your team, making sure everyone is kept in the loop.

Most tickets will be marked with the New status when they first come into Zendesk. New indicates that the ticket has not been triaged or assigned to an agent.

Once it is assigned to an agent, the ticket will have the Open status, which indicates that the ticket is waiting for an agent to move it forward in its lifecycle. If you are an agent looking for a ticket to work on, Open or New status tickets are what you want.

From Open a ticket can move in a few different directions. Often, it will move to the Pending status, if more information is needed or if the customer needs to try some troubleshooting steps. Pending essentially means that the agent is waiting on the end-user (the customer or client) to take some necessary steps. From Pending, once the necessary steps have been taken, the ticket will automatically be moved back to Open, indicating to the agent that it is his or her turn to keep the ball rolling.

From there, once the issue has been figured out, you can move the ticket to the Solved status. When a ticket is labeled as Solved, it can still be reopened and edited. If, for instance, the customer recontacts Support after a few days and the previous issue is recurring, the ticket can be reopened and worked with again. By default, Solved tickets will be automatically moved to Closed status after four days. Once a ticket is marked as Closed, it cannot be opened and edited.

Create a Ticket

Whether an agent creates a ticket or an end-user creates a ticket, the steps are going to be pretty much the same. To create a ticket, follow the instructions outlined here.

Respond to a Ticket

If you are going to pick a ticket out of the queue and take ownership of it, you should change the assignee field and then submit the ticket as Open. This tells everyone else on the team that you are working on that ticket and that steps are being taken to move it forward.

The assignee field is in the upper lefthand corner and marks the agent or group that is assigned ownership of the ticket. You can either type in your name or select it from the dropdown menu. The “take it” button on the left side of the screen is also a quick, timesaving way to claim a ticket by auto-populating it with your name and default group.

The CC field is how you can loop additional people into the conversation. If you CC an end-user, he or she will get email notifications when public comments are added to the ticket. If you CC another agent, he or she will get notifications when public or private comments are added to the ticket.

Once you have claimed the ticket, click Submit as Open.

After a ticket has been assigned to you, it’s up to you to flesh it out with some default fields and comments. On the lefthand side, you will find default system fields and custom fields created by your team’s admins.

The first two fields are Type and Priority, which will tell your teammates what type of issue the ticket pertains to, and how urgently it needs to be solved.

Type

There are four different Types you can choose for a ticket: Question, Task, Incident, and Problem.

Question is the most basic and is used the majority of the time. Question-type tickets are simple questions that can be answered easily, such as “how do I perform x function.”

Task is the type that should be selected when a ticket has a specific due date. When you select Task, a new field appears and asks you to enter the due date for the ticket. Ticket due dates can also be used as a custom view under Views.

The last two options, Incident and Problem, are related and will be used in conjunction with one another to track issues that are associated or that connect back to one root cause. You will create one ticket as a Problem, which will track the root cause of the issue, then you can link-up multiple tickets as Incidents—where the support request stems from the initial ticket marked as Problem. This allows you to keep track of the relationship that exists between these support requests, and enables you to deal with them more quickly.

This is one of the tougher things to grasp when you are new to Zendesk. If you notice that multiple tickets pertain to the same issue, you can group those tickets together as Incidents. Assign the ticket to yourself or your group, marked as New.

You can then create a Problem ticket. With Problem tickets, you don’t want an end-user’s name in the request field or else the end-user will get updates on everything that happens with all Incident tickets grouped together into the Problem. Fill in the summary and description for the ticket. Set the ticket Type to Problem and assign it to yourself or your group. Once you submit the ticket as Open, your Problem ticket will have been officially created and assigned a ticket number.

Then, go back to your Incidents and link them to the Problem using that ticket number. When you return to the Problem ticket, you will have a new tab for Incidents all linked to the root cause. This will allow you to do bulk updates and respond to every requester at once.

When you submit a Problem ticket as Solved, you will see a popup saying “when you solve a problem that has linked Incidents, any Incidents linked to the problem will be solved automatically and any new comment saved as part of this update will be added to each linked Incident.” Once you accept this and finish marking the ticket as Solved, you will see that the response you wrote and submitted has been added to each individual Incident as well as to the Problem ticket as a whole.

Priority

In the Priority field for a ticket, you have four options: low, normal, high, and urgent. Setting the priority for a ticket tells all of the other agents how relatively important the ticket is.

Event Log

Another useful feature is the event log, which will show you all changes made to the ticket and who made them. You might not use the log on every single ticket, but it is very useful if you want to know who changed the Status or Priority of a ticket, for instance.

To see the event log, click on the clock icon at the top left-hand corner of the ticket. This will show you all of the different changes made to the ticket.

Finding Answers

There are certain tools within Zendesk that will help you solve problems as an agent.

For instance, you can search for past tickets. If there are common errors and you want to see how other agents have dealt with them, search for tickets related to that error.

Alternatively, you can assign the ticket to another agent instead of simply CCing them. This will move the ticket to the other agent’s queue instead of just sending a notification. If you have assigned a ticket to another agent, that agent can either respond with an internal note and assign the ticket back to you, or can deal with the requester directly.

Agent Icons

One thing you will see if you’re working with other agents is icons indicating what other agents are looking at the ticket. There are three different statuses you will see. An agent’s icon with a blue border means that agent is editing a ticket. He or she has the ticket open and has started making changes. A grayed-out agent icon means that the agent has opened the ticket, but is currently working on something else but is not actively making changes to the ticket. A normal agent avatar means that the agent has the ticket up and is viewing it but has not started making any changes yet.

Macros

Macros are pre-prepared responses that can be attached to a ticket. This is useful for responding to common problems or performing common actions. There are two ways to create a macro: from scratch, or from an existing ticket update. Agents tend to make macros from existing ticket updates while admins tend to make new macros from scratch.

To create a macro from an existing update, make the update to the ticket, then go to ticket updates in the upper righthand corner and click Create as Macro, which will take you to a page with all of the different possible options for the macro you are creating.

Here you can update the Common Description for the macro response by doing things like removing the initial requester and agent names so that the response can be applied to any requester by any agent.

When creating a macro, you can stipulate all sorts of conditions—such as default Types and Statuses—for future uses of the response.

Resolve a Ticket

Getting a ticket to the Solved state is the goal of all agents. The good news is that resolving a ticket is very simple—just go to the submit option and set the ticket to Solved.

Before you submit a ticket as solved, ask yourself a few questions:

• Have I solved the requester’s problem?
• Have I filled in any required ticket fields

Administrators can make certain ticket fields required—which will be denoted by an asterisk.

In the case of a Pending ticket, where the requester never responds, ask yourself if you have waited long enough to put the ticket to rest.

After four days, by default, Solved tickets will be Closed, although this setting can be changed by the team’s Admins.