Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan

Transcription

1 Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan In this guide, you will learn how to setup Zendesk in an enterprise environment. Large companies typically need their help desk to handle situations where many departments must work together to serve and support their customers. Because of all these moving parts, processes can get complicated. By the end of this brief set-up guide, you will know how to use Zendesk to keep a large support team in sync, fine-tune the different support roles you have, and achieve a highlevel understanding of your support work flow. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 1

2 For managers transitioning from Plus+ to Enterprise This guide is written for support managers in enterprise companies who have been using Zendesk in either a trial or production environment. It will help the support manager transition from the Plus+ account to the Zendesk Enterprise account. While it will discuss the main features of the Enterprise plan, it focuses on getting you up and running quickly with those features. For a more in-depth look at the Enterprise plan, review the Zendesk Enterprise User Guide. The Zendesk support team is also available 24/7 to answer any questions and help in your setup. Contact us at support@zendesk.com. This assumes the reader knows Zendesk already to some extent. If you don t, read through the basic Getting Started Guide first. Setting up the Enterprise support team Build custom agent roles During your trial, you will be using the Zendesk Plus+ plan. In this plan, all of your agents have essentially the same role in your system. (For more on user roles see, The Three Types of Users in Zendesk in the Getting Started Guide. You can limit their access to certain support tickets and allow them to make only private comments on tickets. Some teams need more fine-grain control, however. With the Enterprise plan you can custom build agent roles - picking and choosing what parts of Zendesk each agent type can use, access, and control. For instance, our example company MondoCam is an international manufacturer with hundreds of support agents across the world. To manage a team of that size, the support manager divides their team into agents who handle tickets and those who moderate forums. By defining two custom roles, the support manager can ensure that agents in each category are limited to those areas when they log in to Zendesk. Let s see how to do this. Step 1 Go to Manage > People and click add role in the upper right. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 2

3 Step 2 Choose and modify the permissions and access for the agent role you re configuring. This page gives you access to all the potential responsibilities your agents could access, change, and create. In this case, we want to create a Forum Moderator role. We will disable the agent s ability to assign tickets, and give them access and full permissions to all our forums, and restrict access to other areas of our help desk, including business rules and user management. The configuration looks like this: support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 3

4 Click create role at the bottom of the page. Step 3 Now we will assign one of our agents to the Forum Moderator role. If you are not there, click Manage > People and click browse agents. This will show you a list of all your agents. To make one a Forum Moderator, click edit next to their name. In the agent s profile click the Roles & Groups tab. Simply choose the role you wish to assign to the agent. TIP You can bulk update agent roles by selecting the check box next to the names of the agents you wish to update and click the change role link at the top of the list. This will reveal a box where you can choose a new role. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 4

5 You ll notice a few other roles available to you - these are default Zendesk roles which you can use or delete as you see fit. To view, edit, or delete these go to Mange > People and click the browse roles link underneath the search box. Note that you can also assign roles when you add a new agent. Leverage your whole company within support The larger and more varied your company is, the more likely a customer s question will require a particular piece of expertise or knowledge to resolve. It is also likely that that knowledge and expertise resides in departments that aren t your traditional support roles. With the Zendesk Enterprise plan, you can tap into that knowledge easily. For example, you may require occasional assistance from legal or fiance on billing issues; or technical input from your engineering department. All Enterprise plans include unlimited internal usage with Light Agents. You might add Light Agents from legal, finance, or engineering who may occasionally need to comment on a ticket or approve a decision. It s a way to intimately connect your support team to the rest of your company without making everyone in your company a support agent. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 5

6 To add a Light Agent, follow the steps below. Light Agents work just like other roles in Zendesk, and you ll assign them the same way as we did in the previous exercise. Step 1 Add a Light Agent just as you would any other user in your Zendesk. Go to Manage > People and choose add user in the upper right. Step 2 Fill out the user details for the Light Agent you want to add. In our case this is one of the MondoCam engineers. In the Role section choose Agent (as opposed to end-user) and then select Light Agent. Click the create button at the bottom of the page. Now, when a question comes in that would benefit from the engineer, our support agent can CC them on the ticket, and ask for their help privately. The engineer responds just as if it were , but their comment is included on the ticket, keeping the whole conversation in one place with input from the right people. Just as in the previous exercise, you can also change existing users into Light Agents if you wish. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 6

7 Support multiple brands If your company maintains several products, services, or brands, you may wish to use several support portals, support s and knowledge bases which reflect these brands. Behind the scenes, however, you may have just one team that responds to all tickets, regardless of where they came from. Centralizing as much of the work flow as you can helps maintain your various portals efficiently; as well as makes it easier for the support manager to better understand the enterprise s total support load across brands. For example, take our example company MondoCam. They are a global camera corporation, with a number of subsidiary brands: including a consumer level camcorder brand called MiniCam. They want the customer support experience of that brand to be distinct and reflect the branding, but internally, they have a single unified support team for all the brands. Subsidiary Brand Zendesk support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 7

8 Parent Company Zendesk The Zendesk Enterprise plan gives your company the ability to link all of its support environments together. It s called Multi-Brand Help Desk; you create a master help desk to which all your support environments automatically route their tickets, even when they come in through different portals or addresses. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 8

9 Once Multi-Brand Help Desk is set up for our example company MondoCam, any ticket created within the MiniCam support environment will automatically be routed to the central MondoCam account. It will be tagged as a MiniCam issue, and the agents will address it as they do any other ticket. When the agent replies, it will be routed through the MiniCam site so the customer s experience remains rooted in that brand s identity. Note: this assumes that your company has multiple Zendesk environments. If you have multiple brands, create a separate Zendesk for each brand or environment you need. They only need the one admin account, however. All your agents will be in your central account. To setup Multi-Brand Help Desk, contact us at support@zendesk.com or by calling +1 (415) You may also follow the instructions in the Enterprise User Guide. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 9

10 After setup Now anytime a ticket is sent to or created within our branded account MiniCam, it is automatically sent to our central account at MondoCam. Our agents receive it alongside all of the other MondoCam tickets. When they respond to the customer it will be sent from the subsidiary address; every brand the customer originally communicated with will be the brand they continue to communicate with. Because we tagged the ticket, however, we can also handle it differently in our central account: You might want to create a view (or ticket queue) specifically for all the subsidiary tickets. For more views, read this Create a custom role (using the steps from earlier in this guide) for your subsidiary brand experts, and automatically assign tickets from your branded help desk to them. (For more on automatic assignment, read this) Optimize your work flow, but create a separate set of of predefined responses (or macros) specifically for tickets from this subsidiary (for more on predefined responses, read here) support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 10

11 Advanced work flow analysis Large companies deal with a lot of complexity. In this guide we have discussed building custom support agent roles; leveraging non-support departments within your support strategy and integrating multiple brands or support environments into one central help desk. With all that and more, there will be times when the wires get tangled so to speak. Managing complex systems requires a regular audit of those systems as well as a troubleshooting tool when the system is operating sub-optimally. With your Zendesk Enterprise plan, you can use Business Rules Analysis to see under the hood of your help desk. As a support manager, you build out automations, triggers and pre-defined responses to streamline your work flow. For example, in our MondoCam support environment, we have built triggers to automatically assign certain tickets to certain agents based on keyword, we have multiple predefined responses to frequently asked questions, and we auto-escalate tickets if they don t receive a response within 24 hours. The larger we grow, the more business we rules we add. This ups the efficiency, but also the complexity. We can use Business Rules Analysis to ensure all those rules are as efficient as possible and resolve any unexpected behavior. For instance, the support manager notices that the Mobile Development group is getting overloaded with support requests that really should have been routed elsewhere. One misrouted support ticket is easy to pass along - but when each engineer is receiving a couple s every day which ultimately doesn t pertain to them, it starts to affect their productivity. It could be the case that an outdated trigger is sending these unnecessary s. Perhaps the trigger was created a while ago when the support situation was different. We will use Zendesk s business rules analysis to figure out which trigger is firing the unnecessary so we can fix it. To do this go to Manage > Triggers & mail notifications in the top menu bar. This will list all the triggers which operate on your help desk. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 11

12 If you don t have many triggers, you might be able to search through each one individually. For enterprise companies with complex work flows, you can access the rules analysis by clicking the Property analysis for triggers, automations, views and macros in the right column. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 12

13 This brings you to the Rule analysis page. There is nothing to set up here, but it can be helpful to understand what this page is showing you. The Rule analysis page shows you each element of your help desk which is affected by your business rules the agents and groups who get assigned tickets, the channels on which tickets come in, the tags which get appended to tickets, etc. For instance, MondoCam has a trigger which automatically assigns tickets to the Sales group when the ticket comes in via a particular address. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 13

14 MondoCam have a number of triggers (including the one above), which impact the sales group in some way. On the Rule analysis page, MondoCam can see how many business rules (including triggers) affect the Sales group... support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 14

15 ...and click through to see them all in one place Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 15

16 We are looking for any rule which might be sending s to our Mobile Development group and so we look under Group Assignment and click on the Mobile Development group. Now we see every business rule which affects our Mobile Development group. From here we can zero in and find the one that is causing all the unnecessary . We can go in and edit the trigger right from this page by clicking the edit link on the right Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 16

17 Where to Go Next This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as Rule analysis is concerned. This gives you a landscape view of your entire help desk work flow. Some ways to use Rules analysis include: Audit your rules when your organization changes. Is a member of your team moving to a different role? See which macros and rules currently affect them. Don t remember if you have any rules set up to run when a ticket comes in via Twitter? Review all the business rules that affect your various support channels. Reduce redundant tags. Make sure that you aren t assigning redundant tags to your tickets through various triggers and macros. By having a streamlined tagging system, you make organization and reporting much easier. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 17

18 Security and compliance Archive all your support communication While the life of a support request may be over once the customer s issue is resolved, you may need to keep all your support communication around and accessible for your record-keeping needs. If you are complying with Sarbanes-Oxley, or have a corporate policy about your outbound communication, you know the importance of storing copies away in a separate system. Zendesk itself gives you access to your whole support history as long as your account is active, but with the Enterprise plan you can set also set up a direct download of all outbound communication into an outside address. This feature is called Archiving. It is easy to setup. Go to the Tickets page under the Settings tab in the top menu bar. Near the bottom of that page is a text field to enter the address where you want to archive your outbound support communication. Enter an address where you will have easy access and long-term storage and click the Save tab. With that done, Zendesk will now import all outbound communication into that account. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 18

19 Restrict access to your help desk In some support scenarios, you may wish to restrict access to your support web portal. If you provide support internally and don t want people outside your company to see your knowledge base, for instance; or if you want to ensure that no one outside your office building can reach the agent login screen. With the enterprise plan, you can restrict access to your support portal through IP restriction. IP restriction essentially looks at the address of the computer trying to access your site. If it is within the range you ve okay-ed (i.e. all computer s on the company network), they can reach the site; if not, they are turned away. If you would like to setup IP restriction, work with your network administrator to establish the IP range you would like to allow. Then go to the Manage > Security and click on the IP Restriction tab. Enter the range that describes the users you would like to allow in. Note if your agents use any of the native Zendesk mobile apps, you will want to check the enable mobile access box. This will ensure that they will be able to access your Zendesk even if they are outside the approved range - i.e. if they are out of the office and solving tickets from home or while visiting ad client. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 19

20 Enterprise support Enterprise support can be a complex affair. This guide has gone over a few of the ways the Zendesk Enterprise plan can help you company better manage that complexity: Build out your enterprise-level support team with custom roles that fit your team; as well as granting access to experts and other stakeholders within your company without making them full support agents. Manage the support for multiple brands from within one central help desk. Understand your work flow with Rules analysis. Of course should you have any questions or want to talk through some best practices, the Enterprise plan also comes with increased support from the team here at Zendesk. We provide 24/7 phone support and a one-hour response time on support tickets. Visit our support site at support@zendesk.com; or phone: +1 (415) We also offer in-depth 2-day Zendesk trainings for support managers on their team. To learn more and sign up for a training, go to And for more on using Zendesk to the fullest, check out the Using Zendesk guide. For more on Getting Started with Zendesk, check out the Getting Started Guide. support@zendesk.com Getting Started with the Zendesk Enterprise Plan 20