This Fine Tuning session is all about agent productivity, and includes the following topics:

• Introduction
• Business rules, macros, and keyboard shortcuts
• 预先鉴定客户问题和问题
• Zendesk apps
• Measuring productivity

Sylviana Ho is a Customer Success Executive and was one of the early Customer Success team members at Zendesk. She comes with a ton of tech and customer support experience and loves helping customers optimize their Zendesk accounts.

To find more Fine Tuning articles, seeFine tuning resources.

Introduction

Customer support is not an easy job. As an agent, you need to balance being effective and efficient while keeping the customer’s issue and overall experience in mind.

This Fine Tuning session will help you optimize and measure your agent productivity while continuing to deliver the best customer experience. We'll give you with tips and best practices to improve your Zendesk instance and use reports to monitor your progress. Improvements that increase agent productivity translate to cost savings for your team, meaning your operational costs for your organization reduce also.

Business rules, macros, and keyboard shortcuts

Triggers and automations

Triggers and automations are known asBusiness Rulesand can remove much of the repetition from working with tickets.

• Triggersare event-based conditions that run immediately after a ticket is created or updated
• Automationsare time based, and run on a regular schedule.

There are many ways you can use triggers and automations to help make your agents more efficient. For example:

• Automatically assign tickets by channel- If you have a team or agent that's responsible for certain support channels like email or Chat, you can create a trigger that will automatically assign tickets to that team's group or agent whenever a request is received from that channel. This removes the manual work and potential errors from agents passing tickets around.
  
  Note:If you deactivated the default trigger “Notify group of assignment” you will need to add an action to “Notifications: Email group” to the trigger above.
• Automatically assign tickets by text or ticket field- If you need a specific team or Tier 2 support to handle certain issues, you can build a trigger to automatically assign those tickets based on the text in the form or custom fields that are selected (for more information about custom fields check outpart 2).
  
  Note:If you deactivated the default trigger “Notify group of assignment” you will need to add an action to “Notifications: Email group (assigned group)” to the trigger above.
• You can escalate important tickets with a specifictagby using the ‘Hours Since created’ condition with an automation.
• You can notify a team when a new ticket has remained unassigned for a certain number of hours by using the ‘Hours since created’ condition.
• You can notify the assigned agent or team when a ticket has been open for X number of hours without an update. We use the "Hours since assignee update(business)is" condition to take into account hours of operation.
• You can notify the customer after a certain number of hours or days when a pending ticket has not been updated (meaning they haven't responded to your agent yet). In this automation you would use theHours sincependingandHours sinceupdateconditions.

By configuring business rules that are appropriate for your organization, your agents can save time and energy, and focus on tickets that really matter.

Macros

Another timesaving feature for your agents areMacros. Macros perform a series of actions like adding a response and updating ticket properties at the click of a single button. This saves your agents time, and hence saves your organization money.

Example: Many customers submit tickets about the same issue and they all require the same answer. Instead of having your agents manually write out the same response for each ticket or copy/paste from Word, you can create a macro that will add the response, change ticket fields, and prompt the agent to submit the ticket in a certain status. A more specific example is a macro used for incidents where end-users cannot access their account. Our very own Support team uses a macro that helps guide the end-user through a password reset while setting the ticket to the pending status.

We understand that not everything is one size fits all in a support organization, so you can create both shared macros for the team and individual agents can create personal macros if they have slightly different workflows. Additionally, consider using的地方holdersto make macros even more useful.

Keyboard shortcuts

Last, but not least, keyboard shortcuts can shave time off of tickets by reducing mouse activity. You can take any action on a ticket without having your hand leave the keyboard.

My personal favorites are the hotkeys that allow you to submit and update the ticket status with the tap of three keys!

You can view afull list of keyboard shortcutsfrom your user profile in the top-right corner.

预先鉴定客户问题和问题

How great would it be if your agents knew what customers’ issues were before responding to the ticket? This would not only reduce back and forth responses, but also make the agent’s life easier by having all the information they need up front to solve the ticket and create a fast and positive experience for the customer.

You can do this in Support by usingcustom ticket fields(depending on your plan type, you must also be able to report on them). Custom ticket fields are customizable ticket fields that you can create to capture more information from your customers or agents and can be made visible to agents only or to both agents and end-users.

For example, you need the make and model of the product that your customer is having problems with. You can use a custom ticket field to request this information from the customer when they open the ticket meaning you don't have to waste time requesting more information from the customer and waiting for a response.

There are a variety of custom fields you can use. You can find the full listhere. I recommend using drop-down list and checkbox fields where possible because you can generate tags that can be used in automations, macros, triggers, views, and most importantly reports.

On Enterprise plans, you can also use ticket forms and conditional fields that take this concept of pre-qualifying tickets a level deeper. Ticket forms enable you to create multiple support request forms that display a unique set of custom ticket fields so that you can get the right ticket, with the relevant information to the right agents. Conditional fields enable you to show and hide fields in your tickets based on selections the customer makes.

Zendesk apps

Zendesk Appsextend the Zendesk functionality beyond what is out of the box. Installing an app is easy, seamless and fast. If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the Zendesk Marketplace, you can get guidance on building your own app by visiting theDeveloper Center.

A couple of (free) apps that I want to highlight that were built specifically to make an agent’s life easier are the following:

• User Data- This app allows you to surface customer information and ticket history right next to the ticket providing more context for the agent to get a holistic view of the issue. Not only does this prevent the agent from having to hunt for information, but they can also provide a more tailored response to the customer.
• Time Tracking- The Time Tracking app captures the time your agents spend on each ticket. This makes managing your team’s performance and support operations easier by identifying which customers submit the most complicated and/or most time consuming tickets. The best part of this app is that it leverages Insights so that you can create reports with the time tracking data allowing you to make informed decisions to optimize workflows.

我将结束应用程序部分这些强大的词s from one of our customers, Groupon, regarding apps:“Our agents save about 40% of time per ticket on average thanks to apps, they make us more efficient”— Dominic Pasta, Operations Manager Groupon UK

Help Centeris like the self check-in line at the airport. It enables your customers to self-serve by finding their own answers using various support options such as knowledge base articles and community forums. If they can’t find the answer through those avenues, then your customers can submit a ticket.

The knowledge base should be considered the source of truth, especially if it is customer facing - so make sure to keep it updated! This may input from all of your agents or hiring a dedicated Help Center content manager. You can make articles available both internally and externally so that your customers and agents can potentially have access to the same articles, but see additional content based on their role. It’s good practice to haveinternal articles with access restricted to your agentsto reference policies and procedures, and it can also help to minimize the time spent onboarding new agents.

Measuring productivity

无论你介绍的技巧和最佳实践to improve productivity, it's important to measure them. This is equally, if not more important than workflow enhancements, because numbers don’t lie, and can help build a case for staffing, workflow changes, organizational changes, and more. Below are some helpful metrics to start measuring:

• Tickets per agent by day/week/month- Tracking the number of tickets per agent is a simple yet effective way to measure if the workload is distributed evenly on the team and also to see who your top performers are. The insights gained from this information allows you to make decisions around staffing based on volume, training, and creating/updating knowledge base articles.
• Tickets per agent per channel- Similar to tracking the number of tickets per agent, measuring by channel helps to see volume by channel. You may discover that you need to add more agents to a particular channel or come up with ways to reduce ticket volume for those channels.
• Time Tracking App metrics - This app tracks time automatically. However, you will need to build a few custom metrics and reports withinExploreto analyze your team’s time logs. You should track total time spent, average time spent per ticket, and average time spent per update in order to gather a holistic view on how much time is actually spent on each interaction.
• One-touch tickets- These are tickets that are solved in one interaction. I consider one-touch tickets the slam dunk of tickets and have potential to be turned into a self-service opportunity. Make sure you track them!

Share with us how you optimize for agent productivity! What features and functionalities do you use to make your agents more efficient while keeping the customer experience in mind?