To close, or to not close the ticket? That is the question.
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Hey folks!
It's been a minute since I have used Zendesk and would be curious to ask how do you use the ticket statuses?
The ones I am specifying are when to mark a ticket as solved, and how long/why to keep a ticket as pending?
I'm currently trying to find info/articles/opinions on when to close tickets and what should be left as pending. I am in the camp that a ticket can be marked as solved ( to clear the inbox) if we are waiting for a customer to get back to us about an open issue and left as pending when we are waiting for an answer on our end in some shape or form.
Any thoughts or feedback/links to good reads would be hugely appreciated as I am sure I have only scratched the surface of this in my web search
- Ticket Pioneer
Dave Dyson, Sr. Customer Service Evangelist at Zendesk: Hi Jack! This article has a good summary of the various ticket status values and when they should be used: About ticket fields.
So I'd recommend using on hold for when you're waiting for something on your end, pending when you're waiting for something from the customer, and solved when you're confident that the interaction has reached an end.
Lance Conzett, Customer Experience Lead at Found:
The biggest reason I have for using pending in your workflow instead of solving on response is to prevent CSAT surveys from going out mid-conversation. (Also any other automation you might trigger on solve rather than pend, but CSAT was the big one for us.)
IMO, best practice is to use Pending for any time when you need more information from the customer to move the ticket forward, paired with automation to remind the customer when the ticket has been in pending for X hours. If they don’t respond, then another automation solves the ticket.
On-Hold, as Dave says, is great for when you’re waiting on a third party (either on your side or a vendor). That way, you can have different workflows for different use-cases.
Dave: Some other useful tips:
Joe Tinter, Premier Support Engineer at Zendesk:
I’d also suggest, taking a look into running this automation workflow, what we call the “Bump-Bump-Solve”: Workflow recipe: Sending automated ticket reminders to customers
Ticket Pioneer: Thank you for your input here.
Introducing A New Product Under The Same Brand
Hi guys, we're introducing a new product under the same brand. We're also using the ZenDesk Guide. I am wondering if we need to add a new ZenDesk brand or use custom fields and stick to one brand. Does anyone have experience with such a case? Any pros and cons we should consider?
- Brand discoverer
Rafael Santos, Zendesk & CS Tools Admin: A new Brand could be used to separate them, which can be useful in case you'd like to use Brand signatures in your messages, make usage of different email template designs, or filter by brand in Explore's default dashboards.
However, using a separate Brand will also impact potential AnswerBot usage, unless adding a new Help Centre for the new Brand. This could limit article suggestions and knowledge recommendations for the case of a single help centre, or make it easier to add Messaging for multi-brand Help Centres.
Also worth noting that a new brand will be associated with a new Default email address. If you're using Email as one of your contact channels, then that would also reflect a different sent from / reply-to address.
If deciding to use a single brand, my recommendation is to use a drop-down ticket custom field to differentiate them, along with a customs form for each, if that makes sense. (If using multiple forms, you could have the product field be filled automatically via Triggers)
Does this answer your questions? Relevant documentation: Multibrand resources.
Brand discoverer: Thank you so much, the information goes a long way into figuring out how to proceed on our end.
Inspiration for guide-based sites
What are the best Guide-based sites you've seen? I'm looking for inspiration.
- Page Navigator
Rafael Santos, Zendesk & CS Tools Admin: I love Tresorit's simple and continuous navigation, and Slack's deep product integration, out of many I follow. Sharing a list that has been shared with me before.
1. Help Centers with customized interactive non-text content:
Zendesk, Lesson 1: From support requests to tickets: See here. (multiple articles in one - click the pagination at the bottom)
Slack, see here. (Subscribe to the newsletter)
Trustpilot, see here.
Fundrazr, see here.
2. Help Centers with videos. Articles sometimes contain rich media. Video is added to articles in a variety of ways:
Squarespace, see here.
Udemy, see here.
Invisionapp, see here.
Strikingly, see here.
Insight.ly, see here.
Fiverr, see here.
Tradegecko, see here.
3. Help Centers with multiple languages:
Weebly, see here.
Soundcloud, see here.
Udemy, see here.
Libratone, see here.
Medium, see here.
Spreadshirt, see here.
Appsflyer, see here.
Adroll, see here.
Discrodapp, see here.
Wrike, see here.
Ding, see here.
Slack, see here.
Strikingly, see here.
4. Help Centers with heavy branding. Heavy branding is defined by advanced HTML/CSS customization.
Withings, see here
Wetransfer, see here
Creditkarma, see here
Cloudflare, see here (category images are added in the template, they are not added as part of any Category content)
Gusto, see here (Strings for upvoting/downvoting are custom)
Weebly, see here (blue note at the top is custom)
ECWID, see here (TOC at the top is custom)
Invisionapp, see here (Sidebar is custom. When you click a level above an article, you'll see it's still an article by /article/ in the URL. So it's an article that acts as a category/section. You can also see this by the fact that URLs don't have any slug after the ID in the URL. Prev/Next buttons are also custom.)
Slack, see here (A word in each article title is highlighted).
A slack article, see here (custom voting strings).
Chartboost, see here (each article is an icon on this category page. The odd thing is that they also include some non-HC links there, e.g. to Cocos20x).
Tradegecko, see here (added Print and PDF buttons).
Coursera, see here
Hoping these help.
Page Navigator: Thank you so much! That's wonderful!
Fixing Duplicate Tickets
Hi there! Has anyone used ChannelReply to integrate eBay and Zendesk? I'm having trouble with duplicate tickets being created and I can't figure out how to get rid of them.
- Problem Solver
Dave Dyson, Sr. Customer Service Evangelist at Zendesk: I found this on ChannelReply's website: Zendesk Users: Fixing Duplicate Replies and Message Delivery Failures
If that doesn't help, I'd suggest contacting ChannelReply directly: see here.
About the Editor
Erika Carpio is a Support Driven Community Guide for AirCall by day and a reader by night. She has found that her Ikigai (a Japanese word meaning reason for being) is to connect and help others. Before covid, she was a passionate tour guide/advisor making people’s long life dreams come true. Find her here on LinkedIn.