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  • Writer's pictureSorin Alupoaie

Optimizing How You Handle Zendesk Tickets: A Primer



customer support person solving tickets

Image by Freepik


Optimizing your Zendesk ticket management is a great way to get even more from Zendesk tickets, making your customer service that much more efficient and streamlined.


In this post, we're going to be looking at the importance of Zendesk ticket management as well as ways that you can start optimizing your ticket management today.


Why you should optimize your Zendesk ticket management


First, let's look at why you should optimize how you handle your Zendesk tickets. After all, this feature works pretty great as is, so why invest in changing or improving it?


To convince you, we have three compelling reasons to make a change.


Optimizing your response time and improving customer satisfaction


Optimizing your Zendesk ticket workflow can help streamline your response times and improve your customer satisfaction.


While Zendesk tickets are a great way to put you in touch with your customers, that connection isn't going to go over as well if your team is slow to respond, has a hard time understanding the issues attached to each ticket, and is bogged down by duplicate tickets.


Using third-party tools and services can help you get back to each customer faster, saving them and your team time, and ensuring that everyone is as satisfied with each interaction as possible.


Embracing automation to boost your success


Another key reason to improve your Zendesk ticket management is that doing so can be the first step in embracing automation. And, as you likely know, automation is one of the best ways to take your business to the next level.


Automating elements of your Zendesk ticketing process will free up your customer support team to focus on more high-value tasks, allow you to scale up and reach more customers, and shorten the amount of time spent on each ticket.


Automation can be used to prevent overlooked tickets as well. Delayed or overlooked tickets are a crucial issue that can lead to you losing a customer for good. You can use automation to make sure that your tickets don't end up falling by the wayside, improving your customer retention and satisfaction.


Get prepped for the upcoming holiday season


Lastly, embracing third-party services as a way to improve your Zendesk ticket performance is an excellent way to get ahead of the upcoming holiday season. Because let's face it, as much as we'd all love to provide a perfect, seamless experience to all of our customers this holiday, it doesn’t always go that way!


Typically, this is the time of the year when you can expect the most incoming tickets, whether it be for returns, refunds, or the occasional mistake that crops up.


Third-party Zendesk services can help support your business during this time. By investing now, you can stay prepared and ready for the holidays, helping your team stay afloat and keeping your customers happy.


Ways to optimize your Zendesk ticket management


Now that you have an idea of why you should invest in Zendesk ticket management improvements, let's look at specific ways you can optimize your Zendesk ticket processes. Below are several recommendations that you can implement right away to start improving your Zendesk ticketing.


Set up a tier system


First up, we strongly recommend that you set up a tier system. A tier system is used to rank the priority of each ticket based on your capacity to address them. This is opposed to the more traditional "first come, first served" approach.


While "first come, first served" technically works, it can frustrate customers with more pressing issues, cause disorganization among your team, and is generally less effective when dealing with larger quantities of customers.


On their blog, Zendesk recommends setting up a tier system along these lines:

  • Tier 1: Simple problems that your support agents can handle in 10 minutes or less

  • Tier 2: Complex problems that more experienced agents can handle in 10 minutes or less

  • Tier 3: Issues from VIP customers that a dedicated segment of your support team addresses

  • Tier 4: Issues that require a specialist and are too complicated to provide a resolution timeframe for

Use analytics to measure performance


Next, you should consider using analytics to measure how your customer support ecosystem is performing.


Measuring the output of your agents can give you a good idea of how they are performing and highlight any strengths and weaknesses in your customer support pipeline. This can be a great way to spot training opportunities and to make sure that each agent is receiving tickets and workloads that match their skill level.


It’s also important to track how your help center is performing and if it’s operating optimally. If you're looking for a solid tool to help you collect these analytics, check out our Help Center Analytics software. It provides rich insights into how customers are engaging with your help center, serving as a great resource for refining and improving your customer service.


Expand your knowledge base to support self-help


Another excellent way you can start to optimize your Zendesk ticket processes is by expanding the knowledge base on your website. A knowledge base is an area of your website where customers can go to find answers to commonly asked questions.


By expanding and filling out your knowledge base, you can passively answer questions that your customers may have. And through this, you can reduce the number of incoming Zendesk tickets, freeing up your customer support channels as a result.


Automatically merge duplicate tickets


A big problem with using Zendesk ticket management is that duplicate tickets for the same issue can pop up. This can lead to your customer support channels becoming backed up, slowing down your response times and leading to tickets being missed completely.


By using automation to allow Zendesk to merge tickets, you can begin to streamline your system and prevent these issues from appearing. Zendesk has a feature that you can use to manually merge duplicate tickets, but if you're looking for an automated solution, check out the Auto-Merge tool we've developed right here at Swifteq.


Start automating your Zendesk tickets with tools from Swifteq


If you're looking for a fast and easy way to make the Zendesk merge tickets feature automatic, Swifteq has what you're looking for. We also provide a whole host of other automated Zendesk features, which you can find right here!


Start using these features today to improve your customer service, cut response times, and empower your customer support team!

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