Why we use Zendesk for customer support

Providing our customers with support is a key focus at IDRsolutions, and as time progresses keeping track of all the various bugs/issues and questions can become overwhelming, unless you have the right tool for the job. In our case the tool we have been using has been Zendesk, and I’m going to run through the reasons why we use it:

Highly Customizable (Fields, tags, views)

With Zendesk you are able to create a variety of different customization options to fit your use case. You have the choice of different custom fields, tags and views. This means that information that your business uses on a daily basis can be stored, categorized, and viewed when and where you need it. For example we are able to keep track of a tickets priority with our own custom field allowing us to organize our requests accordingly (how we do this is in our FAQ).

Powerful Automations

Zendesk provides a way to run automated tasks depending on what you need, they provide both “triggers” and “automations”. Triggers occur when you update a ticket and automations will run every hour, both of which use the same concept. They have certain conditions needed for the ticket and then you can choose to do certain actions (e.g. sending an email, updating a field, etc.). We have been able to use these to great effect to make sure that our team are notified of any updates/changes, and to fit in to our company’s workflows.

Macros

The ability to change all common fields and prepare a draft for you in seconds? What’s not to love? Macros can be a very powerful tool when it comes to providing support, they can help save you time meaning that you can help out more people, leading to quicker response times – all without having to degrade the quality of the information you provide. When you run into repeated issues, a macro can help provide the information that customer needs in a much shorter amount of time.

Integrations with Other Systems

Zendesk provides an app marketplace which is full of all sorts of integrations with different systems. There are a lot of choices available so its likely that you can integrate it with the systems that you are already using. We personally use the JIRA integration app a lot to make our life easier to raise cases for our developers to work on. Rather than having to open up a new tab for JIRA to raise a new case, we can create one while still having the ticket in the background. As mentioned in one of our more recent posts, the integration ability is one of the reasons we’re moving to Hubspot.

Requests from Multiple Channels (Emails, Facebook, Website forms, etc.)

When dealing with support requests, having different sources that you have to switch between in order to respond can be needlessly complex. Zendesk solves this issue with its support for various channels. All you need to do is configure it to let it know which channels you want to use, and then they’ll all come into the single system.

An Extensive API

If you ever feel like making your own custom tool or you need to integrate an application but there isn’t anything on the marketplace, then fear not because Zendesk also provides an extensive API for you to use (documentation for it can be found here). From my experience it provides more than enough to help you in achieving the behaviour you want, and also can make a pretty fun task to get something up and running.

In summary, zendesk provides a large variety of customization to make sure that it can fit the needs that you have for it. If you are happy to spend a bit of time tweaking it to your needs, you get an invaluable tool for your day to day work.