practical zendesk administration, 2nd edition

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.” — Micah Solomon Bestselling Author of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service “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 www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Stafford Vaughan and Anton de Young SECOND EDITION Practical Zendesk Administration www.it-ebooks.info Practical Zendesk Administration, Second Edition by Stafford Vaughan and Anton de Young Copyright © 2014 Stafford Vaughan and Anton de Young. 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: Nicole Shelby Copyeditor: Jasmine Kwityn Proofreader: Rachel Monaghan Cover Designer: Randy Comer Interior Designer: David Futato Illustrator: Rebecca Demarest October 2012: First Edition May 2014: Second Edition Revision History for the Second Edition: 2014-05-09: First release See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9781491900697 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 picture of a 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 trademark 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. ISBN: 978-1-491-90069-7 [LSI] www.it-ebooks.info This book is dedicated to Zendesk’s founders—Mikkel Svane, Morten Primdahl, and Alexander Aghassipour—for dreaming up and building a simple yet powerful customer service platform. It has been our pleasure to teach people how to best use Zendesk for successfully providing support to their coworkers and customers around the world. www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Table of Contents Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii 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 9 2. Initial Setup. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Creating a Sandbox 11 Help Center Branding 12 Customizing the Zendesk URL 13 Internationalization 15 Administrator Interface Language 15 Setting the Time Zone 16 Multilanguage Support for End Users 16 Dynamic Content for Text Translation 17 Outgoing Email 21 Email Notification Sender Address 22 Personalized Email Replies 22 Sender Policy Framework (SPF) Settings 23 Digitally Signed Outbound Email 23 3. Security. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Social Media Logins 25 Suspended Tickets 28 Public Creation of User Profiles 29 v www.it-ebooks.info Blacklists and Whitelists 32 Password Strength Policy 33 Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) 34 Enterprise Security and Compliance 35 Email Archiving 35 Audit Log 36 Agent Device Management 36 4. User Management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Administrators 38 Agents and Roles 38 Groups 39 Agent Signatures 40 Adding an Agent Account 41 Enterprise Agent Roles and Light Agents 42 Configuration Options for Agent Roles 44 Adding an Agent on the Enterprise Plan 48 End-User Access 48 Creating an End User 48 Bulk-Importing Users 49 Merging End Users 49 Suspending End Users 51 Assuming an End User’s Profile 51 Organizations 52 Shared Organizations 53 Multiple Organizations 54 Customer Lists 55 5. Channels. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Incoming Email 58 Adding Incoming Email Addresses 58 Agent Forwarding 59 Voice 59 Adding Phone Numbers 60 Call Center Configuration 61 Recording Greetings 62 Call Activity Dashboard 63 Feedback Tab 63 Creating a New Feedback Tab 64 Publishing a Feedback Tab 66 Managing Existing Feedback Tabs 67 Chatting 67 vi | Table of Contents www.it-ebooks.info [...]... your customers In this book we use the phrase Zendesk instance, which refers to the Zendesk environ‐ ment of your organization, and presumably the environment you’ll be administering Unless your organization is 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... 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 Although Zendesk would love for all of its customers to have the word zendesk in their Help Center URL, most customers prefer to change this to hide the Zendesk name, in favor of their own company name in the... of the settings discussed in this book can be applied to that instance Explanation of the Zendesk Plans There are five different Zendesk plans, the features of which will be applied to your entire Zendesk instance: Starter The name of this plan suggests that it’s well suited to customers just getting started with Zendesk, which is true, but it’s also a great fit for smaller shops with limited customization... de‐ fined in Zendesk more tangibly, and when this happens, they are termed business rules Business rules These are the automated processes that are defined in Zendesk Business rules can be agent rules (such as views and macros) or global rules (such as triggers and automations) Other rules can also be configured through the administrator inter‐ face of Zendesk User Interface Experience The Zendesk user... link There’s no way to make these hover operations visible on the page permanently 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 you must take the steps to configure your Zendesk instance successfully Your Zendesk instance might leverage the default, out-of-the-box config‐ uration with only minor changes... address 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 Once it’s been created, you can visit your sandbox by signing in to Zendesk and selecting the “Go to sandbox” administrative... examples of Zendesk instances with attractive interface customizations, including: • School of Rock • bettercloud • charity: water • Rockstar Games • box CSS and JavaScript customization instructions are not covered in this book, but the Zendesk site has a useful post, “CSS Cookbook for Help Center,” that provides all the details Customizing the Zendesk URL The URL, or web address, of a new Zendesk instance... 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 is a small set of tasks that all Zendesk administrators should... Zendesk URL www.it-ebooks.info | 13 customers to predict the URL of your support site Your customers are far more likely to visit the support.blueskies.com URL to get support from Blue Skies than to visit blueskies .zendesk. com, which would require them to have prior knowledge that the Blue Skies company uses Zendesk Portability If, at a later date, you decide that you’d rather not continue to use Zendesk. .. publicize that they’re using Zendesk as their support portal, some or‐ ganizations prefer to white-label their use of Zendesk, meaning that the support portal looks similar to their website but doesn’t use the word Zendesk The benefit for the company is that it keeps a cohesive brand throughout the website, without the appearance of many technologies connected together Fortunately, Zendesk is very good with . DK www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Stafford Vaughan and Anton de Young SECOND EDITION Practical Zendesk Administration www.it-ebooks.info Practical Zendesk Administration, Second Edition by Stafford Vaughan and Anton de Young Copyright. 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. 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