Practical Zendesk Administration

Chapter 7. Agent Support Process

Zendesk is the kind of tool that allows you to create a new instance (without requiring any installation, since it’s SaaS), and immediately start providing support to your customers. Out of the box, there are some nifty default settings that will assist with the process.

This is fine to start with, but as your business and support processes mature, it’s a good idea to ensure that your Zendesk instance matures with them. Some of these processes are less tangible and will require user education only, but for the other tasks, you can use macros and views for business process automation. This chapter describes these tools, and some of the other techniques that your agents will use to support your customers.

Restricting Agent Access to Tickets

On the agent creation page, administrators have an option to restrict what the agent "Has access to". Most customers elect to give all agents access to "All tickets", which is the least restrictive of the options. I also encourage you to select this option. The simple reason is that it allows agents to proactively find tickets that are new in your Zendesk instance, triage them, and possibly work on them. All of the other options would require an automatic triage policy to be set up in the Triggers, or a dedicated person to assign new tickets to agents manually. Assigning a team member to function as a triage manager is a potential roadblock, particularly if the person happens to be out of the office when an important ...