Product Overview
As many of you already know, Zoho Desk is a cloud-based customer service software. It is a support management solution that allows users to provide support to customers through ticket management and knowledge base resources.
Within Desk, there are a bunch of features that are included, such as:
- Automated Ticket Tracking – Efficiently manage and track customer support tickets, ensuring that all customer inquiries are addressed promptly and effectively.
- Self-Service Portal – Provide customers with a portal where they can access support articles, submit tickets, and view the status of their inquiries.
- 360 Customer View – Gain a comprehensive understanding of each customer’s history and interactions with your business, allowing for more personalized support.
- Automation & Workflows – Streamline support processes through automated workflows, custom functions, and triggered actions.
- Analytics & Reporting – Track the performance of your support team and identify areas for improvement with in-depth analytics and reporting.
- Multi-Channel Support – Offer support through various channels, such as email, phone, social media, and live chat.
Based on the video tutorial, here is a brief overview of all the key categories discussed.
Departments
Departments allow you to segment your help desk into the various major categories in which your tickets will come in as.
When asking yourself how many departments should you have? Generally speaking, that answer is each email you have set up that customers can send support requests to should be its own department. For example, support@zenatta.com, info@zenatta.com, billing@zenatta.com, etc.
Accessing Departments
To access this initial setup, click on the coggle to access Settings > Department.
Here you can see your various departments, both active and inactive, as well as create new departments. You will also notice a unique email associated with each department. You will want to set up forwarding rules to the corresponding emails for tickets to come in.
One thing to note, once a department is created, it cannot be deleted.
Assigning Agents To Departments
Similar to accessing Departments navigate to Settings > Agents (Under Users And Control).
Here you can Add, Remove, and Manage Permissions for all of your Agents in your organization.
Now that you know where to organize your agents, let’s get them assigned to various departments. To do this, let us backtrack to Settings > Teams. When creating a team, you will notice you have the department with a drop-down menu next to Teams on the top. Select your department and create a team to assign your agents to that can be done at the user, role, or team level.
Ticket Management
Now that you have your departments and agents set up, let’s dive into the core of Zoho Desk, Ticket Management.
Ticket management in Zoho Desk is the process of efficiently organizing, tracking and resolving customer support requests. By effectively managing tickets, support teams can deliver timely and high-quality customer service, improving customer satisfaction and retention.
Let’s take a look at the several features and tools that help you manage and customize your tickets.
Ticket Views
There are a variety of views in which tickets can be displayed, allowing agents to focus on specific ticket categories. Some examples include tickets that are assigned, unassigned, or overdue.
Some default ticket views include:
- Open Tickets: Displays all open tickets in the system.
- My Tickets: Shows tickets assigned to the logged-in agent.
- Unassigned Tickets: Lists tickets that have not yet been assigned to an agent.
- Overdue Tickets: Highlights tickets that have not been resolved within the specified SLA timeframe.
Additionally, agents can create custom ticket views by applying filters based on ticket criteria, such as status, priority, or department.
Customizing Ticket Fields
Customize ticket fields enables you to collect and display information relevant to your organization’s specific needs. To customize ticket fields, open Settings > Ticket Fields to add, modify or delete ticket fields.
Some common custom ticket fields include:
- Product: A dropdown field that allows customers to select the product they need help with.
- Severity: A field indicating the urgency or impact of the issue.
- Custom Tags: Tags that can be used to categorize tickets based on specific criteria relevant to your organization.
Ticket Templates
Ticket templates in Zoho Desk help standardize the information captured in a ticket, streamlining the support process and ensuring that all necessary information is collected.
To create or edit ticket templates, open Settings > Ticket Templates.
Automation for Ticket Management
Lastly, Zoho Desk offers several automation tools that can help streamline ticket management.
These automation tools include:
- Assignment Rules: Automatically assign tickets to agents or departments based on specified criteria, such as the ticket’s subject, priority, or custom fields.
- SLA Policies: Define service level agreements (SLAs) for your support teams, setting response and resolution time targets based on ticket priority or department.
- Workflows: Create custom workflows to automate ticket actions, such as sending email notifications, updating ticket fields, or escalating tickets based on specific triggers or conditions.
Knowledge Base
On the backend of things, your Knowledge Base (KB) is where all of your articles and resources live. This repository is used to provide customers with self-service support but can also be utilized by agents in resolving support issues.
Articles are an excellent way to reduce the overall volume of support tickets while improving the end-user experience. These articles can include text, images, videos, and other media, such as PDFs.
When it comes to nesting to organize your support, Desk provides a two-tier system with Categories and Subcategories. Administrators can also easily make these categories as well as articles private, public, or restricted to certain user permissions.
Best of all, once your KB is built out, it integrates seamlessly with various support channels such as email, live chat, and social media.
Automation
Zoho Desk has a robust set of automation that can be used and configured within the application. When navigating to Settings > Automation, here is a brief rundown of each selection’s use case.
- Assignment Rules: There are two different kinds of assignment rules, Direct Assignment and Round Robin. With these, you can assign various rules to be applied to the creation of a ticket.
- Notify: Here, Desk provides an extensive list of Notification Rules to toggle on or off for email and some SMS. Additionally, Feed Preferences for Team Feeds can be turned on and configured under the Notify section.
- Workflows: Create custom Rules, Alerts, Tasks, Field Updates, or Custom Functions to trigger based on a variety of actions.
- Skills: Allow you to tag different tickets to push tickets to certain agents over others.
- Blueprints: Allow you to configure a specific process when handling and processing tickets that your agents must follow.
- Macros: Similar to Workflows, but exist as clickable buttons on either an individual ticket or a list view of tickets.
- Escalate (SLA): Service Level Agreements are used for creating a specified process for escalating tickets as necessary if tickets aren’t being resolved or responded to fast enough defined by your standards.
- Supervise: These rules are executed every hour inside of Desk based on the criteria of a particular ticket.
- Support Contract: Any contracts that you set up for your accounts will appear here.
- Schedule: Similar to workflow rules, you can choose the frequency of the schedule function.
Integrations & Marketplace
When it comes to the Zoho Desk integrations, it probably reigns supreme over all of the Zoho Applications. With excellent native integrations to the various applications, Zoho also provides a barrage of extensions for Zoho Desk to further its capabilities. Not to mention the hundreds of other extensions out there for third-party connections made by other developers.
For more resources on Zoho Desk, be sure to visit our Resource Library, and if you have a question, visit Club Zenatta and tune in weekly Wednesday Morning to AZAAZ (Ask Zenatta Anything About Zoho).
