11 tips for reducing the number of incoming support requests with Zendesk
Let’s get one thing straight from the very beginning: COVID-19 has changed the way we do business forever. Companies that are not quick to react to change, are quick to disappear. I’d much rather you were on the flexible side and adapt quickly.
For this purpose, I have written the below to serve anyone who is struggling with a surge in the number of incoming tickets within the Zendesk Support system. Backlogs are never easy, so I am laying out some steps you can take to reduce that number down. Please keep in mind that there’s quick fixes and there’s fundamentals; I touch on both.
Businesses I’ve noticed that experience the greatest surge:
Companies that activate within the financial sector, the recent bull market has definitely given you a big headache.
Retail experiencing a surge due to a successful product launch.
Companies that have recently scaled.
The COVID-19 has forced you to move more of your business online.
TO HELP YOU DURING THIS DIFFICULT TIME, I’VE PREPARED A LIST OF THINGS YOU CAN DO TO MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER DURING THIS DIFFICULT TIME.
Deflect tickets
USE ANSWE RBOT
Offer article suggestions based on the keywords that the users type into their request description or in the subject line of the webform.
Or Chatbot - setup flows for end-users to go through the most frequent types of requests. Some of them will be able to find what they are looking for. For those who don’t they can just request a chat or submit a request.
Here is a link so you can read more about Answer Bot.
2. USE THE KNOWLEDGE BASE CAPTURE APP
This app is so easy to install and use. Here it is 👉 link 👈
The Guide Knowledge Capture app leverages your team’s collective knowledge. It enables your agents to search and link articles into tickets, provide quick inline feedback on articles to aid in content improvements, and create new articles while answering tickets using a pre-defined template directly in the Zendesk Support agent interface.
However, in order to be efficient, you need someone in your team dedicated to using it. I’ve seen so many instances where the app is installed but no one uses it because no one is taking ownership of it.
3. INSTALL THE WEB WIDGET
Use it on your main website and allow users to search the Knowledge Base, submit a request and also request a chat and/or a call with you. This will help deflect some 20% of your tickets. The better your knowledge base is document, the more that percentage can increase!
Read more about the Web Widget.
4. Categorise your requests
Are your incoming requests well categorised? Maybe your agents are taking too long in mitigating the support issues amongst themselves before someone jumps in and actually answers the request. If you have a well defined categorisation for your incoming requests, chances are you are routing your requests to the appropriate people to deal with them, thus reducing agent response times.
If you’re having tickets slip through — and as a result a low first time reply — then there’s definitely room for improvement.
Categorising your requests is no easy task. It all starts from how well you understand your business. If you sell digital products, physical products or services it makes no difference. You need to have your business flows laid out somewhere so you can start categorising your requests. As a result, when a support request comes in and it is already categorised, you are able to route it to the appropriate team and apply the proper prioritisation to it. This way, you deal with it in the fastest time possible and reduce the probability of receiving a negative customer satisfaction and the biggest culprit: a secondary, third, fourth (frustrated) request of a client trying to get their initial issue sorted. A more complete picture on this topic in another article dedicated to this topic here.
5. Start building your Knowledge Base
90% of incoming requests are all the same, so if your knowledge base covers the answers to these 90% incoming requests, your clients can help themselves and thus reducing incoming requests, thus reducing agent time, thus saving you money.
Notice the importance of having a good knowledge base in place and how it ties in together with all the steps above. You have the requests categorised, you create a Knowledge Base around those requests and then you can just encourage your user base to self serve. You save agent time, save time for the end user and overall, you save company money and build loyalty around a strong documented product.
I dive deeper into this topic in this article here.
Save agent time
6. DO AN ACCOUNT HEALTHCHECK
Optimise your Zendesk system by doing an account audit. In this article I describe how to go about creating an account health check and I also provide an example.
The system improvements deriving from this are invaluable as this can really muster a lot of improvements to your system that you didn’t even know you needed.
7. BULK SOLVE TICKETS
Find the most recurring tickets and bulk solve them. Link “Incident tickets” to a master “Problem ticket”. Whenever you update the “Problem” ticket, all incident tickets are updated with the same reply.
Or create an Automation and identify similar tickets with a tag, request date, etc and follow up on these requests and bulk solve them. Get rid of some of that backlog. You don’t have to worry , humans tend to be forgetful and not care that they’ve reached out to you. They forget to follow through, especially if the issue got resolved in the meantime. They won’t let you know they’ve gotten their issue solved.
8. PENDING CHASE FLOW
Create a flow along the lines of: if a ticket in in Pending status in Zendesk for longer than 4 days, email the user letting them know they’re due to follow up with you. If they want to continue to be offered support, they should reply to the Automation. If they don’t, their ticket will be set to solved. Now you wait an additional 2-3 days and if they don’t get back to you during this time either, you solve that ticket. Boom, this is how you get rid of a chunk of tickets.
Sure, you have to be very gentle on how you deliver the message. Some people are quick tempered and although it is in their interest to follow up and provide the information you require in order to support them better, the vast majority that will have completely forgotten about their request. You will just let that ticket be Solved and get rid of some of the tickets.
9. DIRECT USERS TO YOUR WEBFORM IN THE GUIDE
What if you redirected your clients to use the webform so you could categorise their requests? Use Zendesk custom fields and conditional fields and ask users to categorise their requests themselves. The more data you have about the support request, the better you can assist. Some examples of categories:
What is their request about,
Where are they writing from,
Product type etc
These are a few examples of information that can be very useful when assisting someone. Not to mention you can create routing rules based on the ticket categorisation and you save agent time. Agents don’t have to dig through the unassigned que, the cue comes directly in their inbox.
Save company money
If you do the above, you make sure you don’t hire new people. Unless you really need to hire new people, which is also totally reasonable. Let me share how you really know if you are understaffed. Keep reading below 👇
Reporting
10. MAKE SURE YOU REPORT ON THE RIGHT METRICS
How do your reports look like? Do you report based on the types of requests you’re getting?
Do you report on location? Or language?
Do you report based on the types of products you offer?
It might be that you need to create more documentation for a certain product so the users can just find their answer by reading an article within the Zendesk Knowledge Base. They can just Google search for their issue and that would save you so much time, rather than having your agents respond to them on by one. Self serve is what 73% of people prefer rather than talking to you.
However, the most important takeaway here is that if reporting is done right, you can identify problems with your product and fix them right away. Whether it’s fixing a quick bug, updating your website with critical announcements, or a product tweak, you want to pay close attention to what your users are reaching out to you about.
Remember what I said above about having a good documentation about your product? Well, we’re closing a loop! A well documented Knowledge Base is soooo important!
11. AGENT EFFICIENCY
On top of the prebuilt Zendesk metrics for the agent efficiency, you can go a step further and install the time tracking app and see how much time your agents need to solve certain types of requests.
Reporting can be the true indicator should you actually be understaffed. Team leaders can feel overwhelmed and ask for additional resources all the time, but reports don’t lie.
Bonus tip
Activate your community and allow users to help themselves. The most active users in your community, albeit some 3% of them, are interested in your product and can become moderators or product ambassadors. In general, people are good and are happy to help others overcome the same issues that they have had in the past. So why not empower them to do just that? Use Zendesk’s features to their maximum potential!
I hope the above makes sense to you. If it doesn’t, I’d love to schedule a call and clarify.