5 Ways to Automate Customer Support in Zendesk

How automation can transform your customer experience

73% of customers now say CX is the number one thing they consider when deciding whether to purchase from a company.

Automation is a way to improve your customer service capabilities without exponentially increasing costs or workload. It can help you:

• Reduce response times. Automation enables immediate acknowledgment of customer inquiries through auto-replies and triggers. You can also use workflows to prioritize and route tickets to the right agents, so everything urgent is handled as quickly as possible. 
• Provide 24/7 support. AI-powered chatbots and virtual agents can handle inquiries round-the-clock. They can solve some queries instantly, guide customers through routine processes, or gather information to ensure their cases are resolved faster. 
• Provide a consistent quality of service. Macros and similar tools are a great way to standardize the content of each answer and ensure that your customers get the same experience no matter which agent they interact with–although they don’t replace personalization. 
• Increase customer satisfaction. Quicker resolutions and a higher quality response typically correlate with more satisfied customers who are more likely to become loyal to your business in the long run. 

These outcomes are also all connected to each other. Automation reduces wait times and provides quick resolutions, leading to a 25% increase in customer satisfaction scores–so you can improve multiple areas of your support experience by investing in one thing.

Five practical tips to automate support in Zendesk

Build and launch an AI agent

AI agents, or chatbots, can handle many customer inquiries without human intervention.

Zendesk has offered a bot builder for some time, which was largely a rule-based chatbot.

They’ve now combined this with generative AI so anyone can build and launch an AI-based chatbot with minimal time investment. Most of the content used to generate its responses is pulled from Zendesk Guide, their knowledge base tool. You can then add additional answers manually or combine these with rule-based answer flows to have a sophisticated AI solution in place.

Because Zendesk’s API connection is quite comprehensive, and you can connect your own product API to it, you can use it to automate a number of cases from end to end. For example, Zendesk can identify a return request, match it up with the corresponding order via an API connection, and issue a refund or instructions for how to send in the return with an AI agent. 

It also comes with many of the most important chatbot KPIs to track, so you can measure your ROI over time.

As with all AI solutions, the value you get out of it depends largely on how much time you’re willing to invest in monitoring its responses, training it, and incrementally improving it over time.

Set up triggers for custom auto replies

Triggers are one of the most basic automation features in Zendesk. 

Zendesk has a few default triggers that are already set up for you the first time you log in, like notifying the requester of a comment update or of a newly created ticket. Because triggers can run every time a ticket is created or updated and meets a certain set of criteria, they’re often used to automatically categorize and route tickets.

Where many companies use a standard autoreply that essentially acknowledges that a ticket has been opened, Zendesk has the ability to send tailored auto replies as part of a trigger as well—essentially fully automating the resolution.

With the Zendesk Advanced AI add-on and intelligence triage enabled, you can create even more advanced email auto replies. These are typically triggered based on AI predictions regarding intent, language, and sentiment.

Custom auto replies are useful for:

• Tickets coming in via email or a web form.
• Relatively simple and unambiguous questions that can be identified via intelligent triage.
• Cases where you have the answer fully documented and available in your help center.

Create automations for customer feedback

The second core automation feature in Zendesk is—ironically—called automations.

Automations are different from triggers in that they are time-based rather than event-based. That means they run at regular intervals based on how much time has passed, rather than based on a ticket update. 

Automations provide a great opportunity to collect customer feedback (e.g. via surveys or follow-ups) and enable proactive support. 

Use cases for automations include:

• Triggering customer satisfaction surveys a day after a ticket has been closed.
• Identifying abandoned tickets that haven’t been updated for a number of days.
• Automatically escalate high-priority tickets to senior support staff if they remain unresolved for a certain period.
• Sending automated emails to customers about new features or updates when they submit tickets related to those features.
• Automatically create a follow-up ticket if a customer’s issue is likely to recur based on historical data.

Use macros to reduce handling time

Macros are predefined responses that can be applied to tickets with a single click. Many customer support teams are able to maintain short handling times using macros.

They’re most often used for addressing common issues that require similar replies.

But you can also use them in a host of other ways to improve the overall quality of the interaction as well:

• Personalized greetings. Each agent can have a couple of variations of a greeting that they can personalize for each customer. 
• Product recommendations. You can use macros to increase upsell or cross-sell opportunities by suggesting products or services based on customer inquiries in a systematic way. For example, if a customer asks about a missing variant of a t-shirt, you can immediately suggest alternative t-shirts with similar designs.
• Escalation processes. You can streamline the escalation process by having standard communication and automating the change in assignment with the same macro. 
• Internal knowledge sharing. Macros are one of the most accessible tools to your agents at all times, so they can house best practices or a checklist for agents to go through to speed up technical investigations or make it easier to leave comprehensive internal notes.
• Incident reporting. Having a standardized process to log and report incidents can make them significantly less stressful for both your customers and agents. Macros can be set up to trigger automations that connect to external tools and to inform customers of how they’re getting resolved.

Note that macros can also automate a series of actions on top of pasting text into the response window, which can help with ticket routing or connect to other triggers that you might have running in the background.

Zendesk also offers two additional features that help you get more from your macros:

• Suggested macros to agents to make it easier to identify the right macro to apply to a ticket.
• Macro suggestions for admins based on content in incoming tickets for which new macros could be created for.

Sync customer data using webhooks

The final way to automate support in Zendesk is using webhooks.

A webhook is a method for sending data between systems through an HTTP request to a specified URL. The receiving system can use the data to perform specific actions.

Webhooks enable real-time data synchronization and automation by triggering events in one system to communicate and initiate processes in another. They’re most often used for integrating different applications.

For example, say your sales team uses a CRM tool like HubSpot or Pipedrive.

You can use a webhook to send updates from Zendesk to sync customer data to their CRM tool, ensuring that your sales team can always access the latest information about that customer.

If you find your agents having to copy and paste data from one application to another quite regularly, that’s an immediate sign that you can automate some parts of that process. Other opportunities might be hidden in your macros or when agents have to send status updates manually.

Take your customer support to the next level

Automation doesn’t just increase the efficiency of your customer service team, it can also enable your team to focus on complex and high-value tasks, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

At Peak Support, we’ve helped hundreds of teams streamline their operations and provide amazing service.

We specialize in building and managing customer support teams tailored to your specific needs. Whether you require a small, agile team of five or a robust team of fifty, our approach ensures you receive personalized attention while benefiting from enterprise-level capabilities.

Contact us here today to take your customer support to the next level.