Practical Zendesk Administration

Chapter 5. Channels

There are nine different ways in which a ticket can be added to Zendesk, each of which is defined as a Channel. Some of the channels, such as the web portal and email, are so common that almost every organization uses them. Other channels, such as Chat or the Feedback Tab, would probably be used more frequently if customers were aware of them. The Voice channel is the only channel that has an extra cost associated with it. The Facebook and Twitter channels are probably best suited to organizations with a certain social media awareness (although I’ll expand on this in the Twitter section). The Ticket Sharing channel is a advanced feature used to integrate several Zendesk systems, or Zendesk with other software platforms. The final channel, the Application Programming Interface (API), is a way of programmatically connecting Zendesk with other software systems, or adding new tickets into the system without direct user intervention. Technically speaking, tickets created using the mobile applications are created using the API, though I generally consider them in the same category as tickets created via the web portal.

According to a study, 58% of online retail customers prefer email as their medium for customer support, 22% prefer phone, and 20% prefer chat. These metrics might provide some useful context to what is most important to your customers, and further details of the study are available from the full infographic.

The reason that Zendesk has so many channels ...