10 Essential Zendesk Features Every Customer Support Team Should Utilize

When your business scales and your customer base grow, so does the number of customer queries, complaints, and feedback. The constant notifications of incoming messages from hundreds of customers can turn pretty overwhelming for your customer support department.

While you may have a qualified and trained in-house support team, they might not be available outside business hours to attend to your clients. That’s where an advanced CRM solution, such as Zendesk, comes into play.

Designed to improve your customer experience, Zendesk has grown into a full-fledged customer relationship management software featuring robust collaboration, multi-channel communication, integration, and ticketing system (to name a few) solutions to enhance your user journey with your business.

Many businesses, from small-and-mid-sized organizations to multinational corporations, have chosen Zendesk to streamline their help desk. This cloud-based customer service management tool offers excellent versatility, as it works for businesses across multiple industries.

Whether you have a retail store, an eCommerce platform, or provide after-hour call center services, Zendesk is an ideal way to manage the most crucial aspect of your business – your customers.

In this post, we’ve rounded up the best features of Zendesk that make it a dominant player in the CRM market. Let’s take a look.

• Ticketing System
• Automation
• Analytics and Reporting
• Multi-Channel Support
• AI-Powered Chatbots
• Live Chat
• Integration Capabilities
• Collaboration
• Knowledgebase
• Zendesk Sell

If your support system doesn’t have a proper ticketing system, your customer queries will get lost in the hundreds of requests. Besides, it’s easier to lose track of these queries and prioritize them based on the time and severity of the issues raised.

Zendesk’s core feature is its advanced and automated ticketing system that converts each customer query into a ticket, assigns it to the dedicated support agent (based on their qualification and availability status), and offers a neat dashboard to manage each ticket effortlessly.

The ticket is basically a unique ID assigned to each customer query. This ticket moves through different cycles before they are marked resolved by the support agent. Here’s what Zendesk’s ticketing module looks like:

• Tickets Raised: Customers can raise tickets through their preferred support channel, such as social media, email, SMS, chat, and phone.
• Ticket Management: Zendesk’s ticketing system organizes tickets based on priority, assignee, and status. The support agents can see each ticket’s status on a single dashboard. They can also update customers about the ticket’s status and give an estimated resolution time based on its complexity.
• Assigning Tickets: The tickets are either manually or automatically assigned to an agent, depending on their availability and specialization.
• Escalation: If the assignee is unable to resolve the ticket within a predetermined time or the customer’s concern is too complicated for the support team, the ticket will be escalated to a higher-level manager.
• Feedback System: Once the ticket is resolved, the customer is asked to leave feedback sharing their experience with the support agent. You can use their rating and feedback to determine the agent’s performance and customer’s satisfaction with your business.

For a help desk service provider, automation is the key to efficient services. It streamlines repetitive tasks, such as routing tickets to the most qualified and professional agent. Zendesk’s smart automation software frees up your customer support team’s time carrying out tasks that do not require manual work.

For instance, the software automatically identifies the right agent to resolve a customer’s concern based on the nature of the problem they report. It also helps send automated follow-up emails, escalate queries to supervisors, and manage other support solutions.

From your employees’ standpoint, automation in ticket management and other routine tasks frees up their time, allowing them to focus on the core areas of business. Simply put, your agents can focus on handling the activities that technology can’t be used for.

Saving your employees time assigning tickets to different agents, escalating issues when needed, and tracking the status of each ticket will boost their productivity.

For your customers, Zendesk’s automation feature ensures faster response time and a high-resolution rate. You can use chatbots to help your customers get instant answers, regular reminders, and excellent response time. Improved customer experience through automation will help you achieve customer conversion, retention, and loyalty.

Tracking customers’ experience throughout the support journey, their engagement, conversions, and other metrics is crucial to providing them with a seamless user experience. Zendesk’s reporting and analytics tools help with this.

The tool integrates different support channels into a single dashboard. You can track customers’ interaction with your brand, the frequently used channels to connect with you, and their experience with your support team. The whole purpose of the reporting and analytics feature is to identify the areas that need improvement. It’s easier to monitor your employees’ performance with metrics like ticket response time, ticket volume, resolution rate, and customer satisfaction rate.

Zendesk’s reporting and analytics dashboard helps you get detailed insights into your employees’ performance and customers’ experience with your team. Based on this, you can make data-driven decisions and improve customer support.

Zendesk also supports a dashboard collaboration feature, which enables businesses to share their reports and analytics dashboard with their teammates and supervisors. This keeps your team up-to-date with the historical data and latest trends in the CRM industry.

Your customers prefer different communication channels to connect with you. They might raise their questions on social media or use your chat service to speak with a professional customer representative and get instant answers. Some customers prefer emails, as they allow them to send detailed messages.

Your customers expect you to support multiple communication channels so they can reach out to you through the most convenient platform. Zendesk facilitates a multi-channel support system for your business, enabling your team to receive and respond to queries across different channels.

Incoming customer queries from different channels, including social media, phone, chat, emails, and more, are consolidated into a single, unified dashboard. This makes it easier for your support department to review each query, answer it, and take the required action without switching different support channels.

Zendesk supports:

• Email
• Live chat
• Phone
• Social media
• Messaging apps

Besides, Zendesk embraces new technology and emerging communication channels to facilitate the best support service to its clients. Regardless of the size and nature of your business, you can use Zendesk’s multichannel support to streamline your customers’ support experience with your business.

You may not have the time and team to respond to each customer immediately. However, customers expect quick responses. Plus, they want a personalized customer service experience where they are guided throughout their journey – whether it’s clarifying an issue or navigating your website. That’s where AI-powered chatbots come into the picture.

Zendesk has implemented these AI chatbots that give automated responses based on pre-determined templates and help customers find what they are looking for within seconds. What sets them apart from a typical human interaction is the level of consistency.

Chatbots will maintain the same professional tone throughout the conversation and won’t get frustrated if the customer asks the same question repeatedly.

Customers also feel more confident discussing their queries with a chatbot since the experience is not only personalized but also professional and consistent. They know they can ask anything, no matter how small the issue is, and get quick help.

While knowledge bases combined with AI chatbots answer most customer questions, they might fail to give a satisfactory response for complex issues. For instance, if a serious technical bug causes system downtime or a server crash, you need a professional human assistant who can address your concern as soon as possible.

Zendesk has a solution for that, too. Its live chat service allows your customers to get instant help from a live agent. They don’t need to wait for the ticket to be raised, submitted, assigned, escalated, and resolved.

Instead, they can join the live chat support, get in touch with the available agent, and receive real-time assistance.

This support feature works wonders for businesses, IT help desk support providers, and businesses in the technical industry. If your customers tend to face issues that can’t wait for a day or longer, then integrating live chat into your support system is the best way to provide them with real-time and professional support.

A CRM solution that comes with integration capabilities makes your life easier as an IT service desk provider or a business manager. Zendesk is one of the most versatile solutions, offering more than 1500 integrations.

This enables businesses to integrate this help desk software with several third-party apps and tools to streamline their workflow, manage customers, handle accounts, and manage other business operations efficiently.

To get the latest integrations, check out the Zendesk marketplace for third-party integrations and the company’s native apps. It supports third-party integrations in accounting, HR, reporting, eCommerce, shopping carts, and other categories.

Let’s explore a few popular Zendesk integrations.

• FreshBooks: Integrate FreshBooks, a popular invoicing tool, with Zendesk if you are an IT company that charges customers for support services. Once integrated, the data between the ticketing module on your Zendesk and Freshbooks will be synced, allowing you to create automatic invoices.
• TypeGenie: Integrate Zendesk with TypeGenie to improve your agent’s response time. This smart typing tool predicts the text you might type based on your previous replies, saving your team time to type longer texts.
• Jira: Jira is a project management and issue-tracking tool. Jira and Zendesk integration enable businesses to build a seamless connection between the development team and the support department. If a customer raises a ticket that requires technical investigation or bug-fixing on Zendesk, it can be easily transferred to Jira.
• Zoom: Zoom integration with Zendesk facilitates video conferencing features for your agents and customers. For technical issues or problems that require critical investigation, your agent can initiate a Zoom call directly from the Zendesk ticketing system.

These are only a few. Zendesk supports multiple integrations that improve your customer service.

Zendesk’s collaboration feature supports seamless coordination between your support agents and other departments. Your support team can connect with other in-house IT members or third-party vendors and business partners to speed up issue resolution.

The ticketing system has an “Internal Notes” functionality. Using these notes, your agents can contact each other within individual tickets and get help from other agents to resolve complex issues faster. Your teams can also use the @Mentions feature to invite specific agents for certain customer queries.

The collaboration feature also supports knowledge sharing. Your agents can record the most frequent issues that most of your customers report and share the best practices for resolving them. They can also make this information public by adding it to the FAQs and knowledgebase.

The collaboration between the internal and external teams makes Zendesk an ideal customer service solution for IT help desks and other businesses that need to improve their support departments.

Zendesk has a self-service portal that consists of a knowledge base and forums. Using the self-service support system, your customers can find answers to their general questions on their own.

Now, your support representatives no longer need to attend to each query, and your customers don’t have to contact the support team for simple questions, the answers to which are available on your website.

The help desk solution encourages businesses to create a knowledgebase section with detailed articles, FAQs, and guides (including videos). This makes it easier for customers to use the self-service repository for service-related and other concerns.

It also frees up your agents’ time answering queries or troubleshooting common issues. They can utilize this time to respond to customers facing technical bugs and other severe issues that require personalized assistance.

Zendesk Sell is designed to help businesses improve the productivity of their sales team and make customer management easier. The feature records each customer’s details in a centralized place, enabling the sales representatives to pull up the information they need in a few clicks. With Zendesk Sell integrated with your CRM solution, you can track the entire customer journey easily.

From the initial conversation to the deal closure, get a detailed report on each stage of the customer’s buying journey. Its deal tracking and management function ensures that your sales team collaborates with other departments smoothly and is able to close deals efficiently.

Zendesk has received many positive reviews from businesses across different industries, including IT service providers, retail, and eCommerce. With a simple user interface, robust security features, and modern support solutions, this CRM software has outperformed many of its competitors.

They have neatly organized all customer management functionalities, like ticketing systems, reports and analytics, knowledgebase, and other services in a single centralized platform. Overall, it’s a great choice for businesses looking to streamline their customer service.