practical zendesk administration

www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Praise for Practical Zendesk Administration “In today’s ever-changing business world, sustaining your competitive advantage comes down to maintaining great customer relationships. The Zendesk customer service platform has helped Box provide outstanding customer service, and the best practices in this book are a useful tool to help your organization do the same thing.” —Aaron Levie, Co-Founder and CEO at Box “I can think of none more qualified to write this book than Stafford Vaughan. Not only is he an expert in Zendesk best practices, but his hands-on experience in using Zendesk and teaching Zendesk training courses means you’ll learn valuable tips that will save you time and eliminate error. No Zendesk administrator should be without this book.” —Zack Urlocker, COO at Zendesk “A lot has changed in customer service with recent advancements in communications technology. However, what made you great before these recent changes is STILL what will make you great today - but only if you have the right tools, mindset, and training. Zendesk, for many businesses, is emphatically one of those ‘right tools,’ and Stafford is the guide who will show you how to make the most of it.” —Micah Solomon, Bestselling Author of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service “This book is the must-have resource for Zendesk Administrators. As we’ve discovered while building the GoodData training program, Stafford has a real gift for being able to distill concepts into easy to follow best practices, and this is apparent in the quality of this book. At GoodData, we leverage Zendesk to provide customer service across many time zones, and as the needs of our customers increase, so does the complexity of our customer service operation. A best practices book like this one not only simplifies the administrative process, it also helps with getting the most value from the Zendesk tool.” —Cliff Cate, VP Customer Success at GoodData www.it-ebooks.info “Cloud, mobile and SaaS are driving radical changes in technology business models. Customer support models and expectations have changed too, and you need to be ready. Stafford has led hundreds of top companies to successful next-generation customer support. You won’t find a greater expert on practices and approaches for Zendesk-driven customer support. If you’re responsible for a Zendesk deployment, get this book now.” —Carson Sweet, Co-Founder and CEO at CloudPassage “This book comes at the right point in time. We have already been using Zendesk for more than a year and a half, and feel we have a very good knowledge of the system, but this book provides additional hints and fresh insights into the system that have been really helpful. Due to the rapid evolution of Zendesk, such a book is ideal for beginners as well as old-timers.” —Axel Focht, Head of Customer Service at Groupon UK, IRL & DK “Eventbrite has grown leaps and bounds in no small part due to word of mouth and world class customer service. Use of Zendesk has been a key component to our success. Stafford’s book provides impressive additional insight into how we can use Zendesk even more efficiently to assist our customers and will be a great resource as our service organization grows.” —Kevin Hartz, Co-Founder and CEO at Eventbrite www.it-ebooks.info Stafford Vaughan Practical Zendesk Administration www.it-ebooks.info ISBN: 978-1-449-34364-4 [LSI] Practical Zendesk Administration by Stafford Vaughan Copyright © 2013 Stafford Vaughan. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://my.safaribooksonline.com). For more information, contact our corporate/ institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or corporate@oreilly.com. Editors: Mike Loukides and Andy Oram Production Editor: Christopher Hearse Cover Designer: Karen Montgomery Interior Designer: David Futato Illustrator: Rebecca Demarest October 2012: First Edition Revision History for the First Edition: 2012-10-10 First release See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9781449343644 for release details. Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O’Reilly logo are registered trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Practical Zendesk Administration, the image of the European nightjar, and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O’Reilly Media, Inc., was aware of a trade‐ mark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and authors assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. www.it-ebooks.info This book is dedicated to my mother, Rosalind, who slipped away too soon but I know that she would be proud. It’s also dedicated to my son Ty, who is always in my thoughts. www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Table of Contents Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi 1. Introduction to Zendesk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Explanation of the Zendesk Plans 1 Terms and Definitions 3 User Interface Experience 6 Steps to Administer Zendesk 8 Internal Versus External Customer Service 8 2. Initial Setup. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Creating a Sandbox 11 Web Portal Branding 12 Customizing the Zendesk URL 14 Internationalization 16 Administrator Interface Language 16 Setting the Time Zone 16 Multi-Language Support for End-Users 17 Dynamic Content for Text Translation 18 Outgoing Email 22 Email Notification Sender Address 23 Personalized Email Replies 23 Sender Policy Framework (SPF) Settings 25 3. Security. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Social Media Logins 27 Suspended Tickets 30 Public Creation of User Profiles 32 Blacklists and Whitelists 34 Password Strength Policy 35 v www.it-ebooks.info Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) 36 Enterprise Security and Compliance 37 4. User Management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Administrators 40 Agents and Roles 41 Groups 41 Agent Signatures 43 Adding an Agent Account 44 Enterprise Agent Roles and Light Agents 44 Configuration Options for Agent Roles 46 Adding an Agent on the Enterprise Plan 50 End-User Access 50 Creating an End-User 51 Merging End-Users 51 Suspending End-Users 53 Organizations 53 Shared Organizations 54 5. Channels. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Incoming Email 58 Adding Incoming Email Addresses 58 Agent Forwarding 59 Voice 60 Adding Phone Numbers 60 Call Center Configuration 62 Recording Greetings 63 Call Activity Dashboard 63 Feedback Tab 64 Creating a New Feedback Tab 65 Publishing a Feedback Tab 66 Managing Existing Feedback Tabs 67 Chatting 68 Setting Up Chat 68 Chatting from a Ticket vs a Feedback Tab 69 Twitter 70 Selecting a Twitter Handle for Zendesk 71 Authorizing a Twitter Handle 72 Linking in Tweets 73 Saved Searches 74 Facebook 75 Authorizing the App 76 vi | Table of Contents www.it-ebooks.info [...]... very large, you will typically have one Zendesk instance The domain name of the instance will be something like mycompany .zendesk. com That is one Zendesk instance, and all of the settings discussed in this book can be applied to that instance Explanation of the Zendesk Plans There are four different Zendesk Plans, the features of which will be applied to your entire Zendesk instance: Starter The name of... list of the administration menu options on the left side of the screen, grouped by category After opening one of the administration menu items, the options for that section of the product will appear on the right side of the menu Figure 1-1 shows an example of the Zendesk administration screen, the toolbar on the left side of the screen, the administration navigation beside it, and the Apps administration. .. the Zendesk URL The URL, or web address, of a new Zendesk instance will be based on the subdomain selected during the setup process For example if your company name is “Blue Skies”, your Zendesk URL might be blueskies .zendesk. com For the purposes of this example, let’s assume that the company’s main website is blueskies.com While Zendesk would love for all of their customers to have the word zendesk ... the globe to configure and administer Zendesk He has helped hun‐ dreds of businesses use Zendesk to transform their own customer service operations Stafford has taken the furniture that is Zendesk, and through his passion and dedication, placed it in a beautiful surrounding and given it additional purpose I couldn’t imagine a better person to write a book on Zendesk administration than Stafford Reading... in Zendesk never ceases to impress us Passion is what drove Zendesk s founders to build the product before you today But it is the success of our customers that built our company More than 20,000 organizations around the world rely on Zendesk for great customer service and engagement We be‐ lieve Stafford has been very central to this success and is the best man help you suc‐ cessfully implement Zendesk, ... Overviews Chapter 1, Introduction to Zendesk Before diving into the Zendesk product itself, this chapter explains the most im‐ portant concepts of the tool By the end of this chapter, you’ll understand many of the terms used in the product and the benefits of implementing Zendesk as your customer service solution Chapter 2, Initial Setup There are a small set of tasks that every Zendesk administrator should... permanently User Interface Experience www.it-ebooks.info | 7 Steps to Administer Zendesk There’s no single set of steps that every Zendesk administrator must follow, and there is no specific order in which the steps must be taken to configure your Zendesk instance successfully It’s quite possible that your production Zendesk environment will leverage the default configuration available out of the box,... using Zendesk If you decide to use Zendesk to support a team internally within your organization, and all of the people at your organization are end-users and your support team are the only agents in Zendesk, there’s not really going to be a big difference from the standard use of the product On the other hand, if you give your employees—who are the people submitting tickets—agent profiles in your Zendesk. .. a framework for how to deliver customer service, some of the features of Zendesk may already be familiar to you For example, Zendesk uses the incident and problem relation‐ ship for convenient resolution of a large number of issues at once Two of the three Zendesk founders are ITIL Foundation certified, and when they created Zendesk, they included many of the best practices from ITIL in the product... will be unique, and based on your production environment URL If your Zendesk instance is available at .zendesk. com, the sand‐ box URL will be something like 1325888214 .zendesk. com That URL includes a numerically incrementing number, unique to every sandbox created To visit your sandbox next time you log in to Zendesk, you can select the “Go to sandbox” administrative action The . Eventbrite www.it-ebooks.info Stafford Vaughan Practical Zendesk Administration www.it-ebooks.info ISBN: 978-1-449-34364-4 [LSI] Practical Zendesk Administration by Stafford Vaughan Copyright ©. Zendesk best practices, but his hands-on experience in using Zendesk and teaching Zendesk training courses means you’ll learn valuable tips that will save you time and eliminate error. No Zendesk. www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Praise for Practical Zendesk Administration “In today’s ever-changing business world, sustaining your competitive advantage comes down to maintaining great customer relationships. The Zendesk customer