Updating First Response Times to See the Whole Picture
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Is it possible to force a ‘recalculate’ the first response times for some closed tickets? We have a few ones where the first comment was internal but we were in touch with the customer elsewhere (another ticket) bit of a process failure but I don’t want us to be liable for rebate on that. If I can correct the FRT we should be good.
- See the Whole Picture
Andrei Kamarouski, CS & Zendesk Expert: If you have very strong evidence how to define those tickets with normal internal notes you can calculate a custom FRT using custom timestamp for "correct" reply event DATE_DIFF formula.
Check this recipe: Due date performance report.
And this topic too: Calculating Time Between Dates in Organization Profile
Turn on Ticket Forms Without Activating Help Articles
Hi y’all, is there any way to make a ticket form live on Zendesk without activating all the help articles?
- Just the Tickets Please
Dave Dyson, Sr. Customer Service Evangelist at Zendesk: You can set the visibility on all your articles to "agents and admins", which would make them (along with their sections and categories) disappear as far as end-users are concerned. Your "Submit a request" link would still work. Is that what you're asking? What are you trying to achieve?
Just the Tickets Please: I think that might work! We are moving to ZD this week and we want to have the ticket form live but no articles live yet. Thank you Dave!
Dave: Glad to help! If you don't have any articles live anyway, there's no reason why you couldn't enable your help center anyway - the "Submit a request" link would still work. For an end user it would look the same as if you had all your articles set to agent/admin visibility - no categories or sections would appear. If you wanted, you could create a "Coming soon!" placeholder article, or if your Guide plan allows, edit the home page of your Help Center to add a "Coming soon" graphic which you'd remove once you rolled out your articles.
Rafael Santos, Zendesk & CS Tools Admin: Adding to what Dave's said, if on Guide Professional/Enterprise, you could also follow this article on Setting up a requests-only (tickets-only) help center and keeping that theme until you're ready to go live.
Setting the Ticket Language Based on Content of Ticket
Does anyone know of a way to have Zendesk check a ticket's language after it's created?
The use case is a client email address that will create tickets in different languages that need to be appropriately routed to the right team member. However, once their first ticket is identified as one language, all future tickets are presumed to be that language. This results in a lot of French and English tickets from this client landing in a German-language queue. I'd love to be able to check on the individual ticket basis, instead of the end-user.
- Lost in Translation
Community Member: Similar need here. We use Unbabel, which does identify/tag the ticket by language, but that only happens once an agent is viewing the ticket (because it’s the Unbabel sidebar app doing the work), so it’s not useful for automatic routing.
Rafa: We're using an AWS LambdaFunction triggered by Amazon EventBridge. It retrieves the ticket, parses it to identify the dominant language detection, and then pushes the language info into the ticket's respective custom field. It's a partial implementation of what's described here for ticket translation: Zendesk Ticket Translations.
The main function in use for the language detection is: DetectDominantLanguage.
Community Member B: Thanks, @Rafa! I was just thinking through a similar setup, but with the Google Translate API. Doesn’t seem like an especially complicated structure I guess. (Though let’s be real… I think this often and kick myself for it days later.)
Rafa: ...that's also a valid option for the detection function. However, I'd still recommend using EventBridge and AWS Lambda, as it reduces a lot of API Overhead and dependencies, given that Zendesk is already running on AWS, and per what they document here.
Out-of-the-Box Solutions for Duplicate Tickets
We often get duplicate tickets from the same customer in the span of a few minutes or hours. These stack up in our queues, they add extra time to solve when merging them, plus it’s not a great experience for the customer either. Do you have the same problem and if so, how have you solved it on Zendesk? Afaik, there’s no out-of-the-box solution for this and I haven’t been able to find a workaround.
Ideally I’m looking for a solution that detects when 1+ tickets have been created from the same email address in the last ~24 hours and solves the new incoming ticket(s) + sends out an automated email letting the user know that they have an open request that will be looked at shortly.
- Drowning in Duplicate Tickets
Community Member: The only automated solution I am aware of is this: Can I automatically merge tickets from the same sender? - but we never installed it so I can’t vouch for it
Drowning in Duplicate Tickets: Thanks for your comments! That solution is indeed quite expensive - especially since it’s a fixed price, not by volume. We don’t have that many cases to justify the price, but enough to be an obstacle to our workflow. I imagine it’s a common pain point for lots of companies, so I really don’t understand why Zendesk hasn't built an ad-hoc solution by now. I can only guess it’s so that they can upsell other products to keep low ticket volumes, e.g. Chatbot
Tadas Labudis, CEO at Prodsight: What do you think is the root cause of this? Do they raise duplicates because they get inpatient? Do they think their initial ticket didn't get logged?
Drowning in Duplicate Tickets: I think it’s caused by unmet expectations with first reply time - our team is quite small so although we tend to provide a first reply in ~24 hours on average, it might take longer in some cases. We do let them know how long it might take when they send a request though.
Andrei: Check this app - Auto Merge.
Community Member B: I built a process that uses the API to check for and merge duplicates. It’s worked pretty well for the past year. It’s built for our specific tickets/attributes and requires dabbling in Python to adjust, but here it is if you’re curious. It uses the excellent Zenpy library.
https://gitlab.com/support-driven/support-driven-snippets/-/snippets/2160175
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