Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking as a panelist for Support Driven’s Zendesk Fireside Chat to share my thoughts on Optimizing Your Agents' Experience. This is a topic I am passionate about, so I wanted to share my insights on my blog for those who are curious about how to improve their ticketing systems!
Why Should I Care About Ticketing Systems?
Ticketing systems are foundational software for all support teams. Whether you are part of an IT helpdesk team helping employees with their hardware or software issues or a customer support team helping ship scientific products, you are likely interacting with a team that uses a ticketing system to track customer inquiries and resolutions.
I am passionate about ticketing system setup and configuration – it’s one of my favorite parts of my job. I've helped to advise on designing ticketing systems in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, and Zendesk that optimize customer service agents' experience and customers' experiences through multi-channel support. My early leadership and involvement as a ticketing system stakeholder also helped me grow into my earlier leadership roles. I get energy from solving problems such as building new systems and processes to best meet our agents’ needs and provide frictionless self-serve experiences for customers. My recommendations below are focused on Zendesk's features and system configurations, but many of these best practices translate well to other ticketing systems.
Common Challenges for Your Team Members Using Ticketing Systems
When designing any system, you want to configure a system that is easy for your team to use. Team members (they are Agents in the context of Zendesk) have important jobs to do – helping scientists and customers with questions, issues, and more! It's best to design a system that seamlessly supports the daily work your agents need to do. My overall advice is to keep your system simple! Don't add hundreds of triggers, macros, automations, etc. You will end up having to audit and remove much of your work as your business changes.
Configure 2-3 Views In Your Ticketing System
A complex and hard-to-navigate interface can be overwhelming for any agent trying to get important work done. "Keep it simple" is my mantra! Zendesk has the option to build Views so that agents can view their current workload and tickets that need to be actioned. Build only a few views for your agents, each with a specific purpose. Here are three views that you can start with:
1) My Unsolved Tickets - This view displays all open tickets that have been assigned to the agent.
2) Unassigned Tickets - This view presents new tickets that require attention from agents.
3) All Tickets - This view exhibits all tickets, whether assigned or unassigned.
Views are intended to assist agents in easily evaluating the tasks they must complete, identifying the most urgent tasks, and gaining a comprehensive overview of all tickets. Views can be categorized and sorted based on key variables such as SLA, requested time, and prioritized customers.
Leverage Macros to Speed Up Responses
Macros are templated responses (like an email template) that provide standardized replies, apply system automations, and save your team time when handling customer inquiries. Identify and create a library of global macros that are most useful for the team. Encourage your team to also create their own personal macros that capture their common workflows and their personal tone. Keep it simple. Identify a handful of categories and don’t go overboard. If you end up with a library of 100-200 macros that are not organized, your agents will skip even looking for macros. I also recommend that you encourage your team members to create personal macros.
Use Labels, Integrations, Automations, and Triggers to Automate Agents' Work
There are many ways to help make your agents' lives easier using Zendesk's features and configurations. Use as many labels as possible; this will help you categorize data in Zendesk. You can hide labels from agents to reduce noise in Zendesk. Ensure you have all the standard integrations implemented in Zendesk that your team uses in their day-to-day work. This includes Jira, Time Tracking, and more. Leverage the Bump To Solve Automation that will remind customers to send a response and then close out a ticket if no response is received. This will help keep your team's backlog in a healthy state. Triggers are also your best friend. You can use triggers to route specific tickets to specific agents or groups. I also recommend that as you are building our labels, integrations, automations, and triggers, you keep good notes of what you created and why you created it (i.e., what was the business need?). Trust me, you will forget, or someone will leave and take that internal knowledge with them, leaving you with a configuration that is impossible to understand.
Empower Your Team To Use Your Ticketing System!
Both leaders and agents play an important part in interacting with and providing feedback on ticketing systems to keep them optimized as the support team grows and changes. Leaders, you play an important role in understanding your team members' strengths and challenges when helping them get their work done. Listen to your team members' feedback and empower your agents in Zendesk by using some of my tips and tricks above. Agents, advocate for how your system works. Be empowered to speak up and hold your leaders accountable to improve and modify the system for your needs! Ask your leaders if you can help implement the techniques below to make your ticketing system great for your whole team.
Create Great Training Materials
Ensure that you have developed in-depth training on how to use Zendesk as the new ticketing system. I recommend designing exercises and walkthroughs in the sandbox so that all agents feel comfortable with the new ticketing system they will use daily. Ensure training is included in agent onboarding.
Communicate Change Effectively
Zendesk is a highly customizable system with new features being released all the time. This can lead to change fatigue if there are constant updates and changes to the system your agents use daily. Build a strong change management process and communication plan to update changes in production every few weeks. Ensure your agents have a reliable form of communication to hear about changes before they are implemented in production.
Create a Feedback Loop for Your Team
Ensure that you create a feedback loop for your team members to share their ideas about how they use their ticket systems and how they could be improved. Your agents are your best resources for innovation and understanding any system pain points that come up. Involve your agents in UAT testing for new features and side-by-side shadowing with Zendesk admins so they can easily share their experiences.
Listen to your Customers Who Interact With Your Ticketing System!
Lastly, agents and leaders should listen carefully to customer feedback to identify opportunities to improve your ticketing system. A regular review of CSAT feedback is a gift of knowledge to be used to enhance the customer experience. Even something as simple as a messaging UI without a live chat experience from your team can cause frustration and confusion for customers. If you have willing customers, set up calls and create user groups to engage customers in their experience with your team and solicit feedback on how their interactions with the ticketing system could be improved. Many customers are looking for self-service and reliable communication, which can be facilitated by an optimized ticketing system.
It takes a whole team of engaged agents, attentive leaders, and detail-oriented admins to set up a system that works for both agents and customers. How have you been involved in setting up or configuring a ticketing system? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments!
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