Community tips and best practices

I wanted to share some steps I came up with for reporting ticket volume in a way that allows you to see % change year-over-year by month. This requires creating custom metrics and attributes in Zendesk Explore. Hope this is useful to some folks out there in Explore world! 1. Create a new custom metric called "Tickets Created - Current 12 Months (YoY)": Returns the total number of tickets submitted within the latest 12 month period. Here is the formula/code: IF(DATE_GREATER_OR_EQUAL([Ticket created - Date], DATE_ADD(START_OF_MONTH(TODAY()), "year", -1)) AND DATE_LESS([Ticket created - Date],START_OF_MONTH(TODAY())))THEN [Ticket ID]ENDIF   2. Create a custom metric called "Tickets Created - Previous 12 Months (YoY)": Returns the total number of tickets submitted within the previous 12 month period. Here is the formula/code:

Check out these  tips for your help center!  Follow this post and we'll update you when we add a new tip. Tips from the community  How to enable a PDF export for your help center articles - contributed by Sorin Adding a notification banner to your Help Center - contributed by Wes Add multilingual welcome note (placeholder text) in search box along with user name - contributed byTeam Diziana  Add note and warning boxes to your articles  - 

Hi everyone!  This method got me extremely close to an accurate Next Reply Time metric in Explore and without having to rely on ticket status updates. It only applies to the usual async channels, however (i.e. doesn't apply to messaging or chat as this depends on trigger 'Comment' conditions). Disclaimer on accuracy Please bear in mind that this is a 'nice-to-have'. My own tests came pretty close to reality as I confirmed things across many individual tickets: my NRT durations diverged approx. 2% on average from reality in a few cases. That said, please note that things can differ between accounts and depend on external factors (e.g. how agents adhere to conventional usage of ticket statuses and updates; Explore's own calculation limitations; etc). In other words, I highly recommend you take some time to properly analyze the data and confirm things on your end. The setup This

Hello community, I stumbled on a feature request in the business I work with requiring followers to be assigned automatically when tagged in a dropdown field on a form. This would benefit the Customer Support team by reducing work needed to relay the ticket to the appropriate managers.There is no feature for this natively or via community wiki and after speaking with Zendesk Support I spent time on my own working solution. Feel free to interpolate this or improve this.Firstly, I had a form setup with the drop-down field I want containing all managers/VIP, the tag was the username part of the email, for example John Doe, and the tag being john.doe. Create a PUT webhook, endpoint: /api/v2/tickets/{{ticket.id}}.jsonBasic auth Secondly subscribe it to a trigger, I used the following: Meet all  Ticket: Created Ticket status: New Notify webhook {"ticket": {"followers": [{"user

  Happy Wednesday folks! Our second A.I. User Group session was a success! Despite some technical difficulties, we were able to walk users through a tutorial on how to write a great prompt in the context of the Zendesk ecosystem. Our session went through a common use case that we all have for A.I. - summarizing and concisely providing the context of a ticket to another team during a handoff / escalation. As always our session was accompanied by an example app that showcases this functionality which can be found here.

Hello community friends, Hope everyone is having a great January so far! Artificial Intelligence (AI) is seemingly everywhere these days, shaping our experiences with companies in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. From a chatbot that pops out at the corner of a webpage to the personalized recommendations that magically appear just when we need them, AI is definitely shaking things up. I thought it'd be interesting to flip the lens around and talk about our own experiences encountering AI as customers. I’ll go first! Most recently, I’ve run into an issue where I wasn’t able to get a query working in Explore and was generating an error. I plugged my formula into the ch

What we wanted to achieve: When users land on our zendesk homepage the focus should lie on the search field. Sometimes you do not exactly know what you can search for. In our searchbar we wanted users to get suggestions for useful search questions. To make it extra fancy those suggestions should have a typewriter effect to appear as being typed out in real time. What you need: a little bit of time and ideally dynamic content enabled, but you could also hardcode the placeholders if you don't use multi language support.    How to do it: If you want to use dynamic content for the placeholders, you should create those  first (Admin Center -> Agent Tools -> Dynamic Content). We created three different placeholders and named them search placeholder 1/2/3 

Hello community friends, Hope everything's going smoothly for all of you. Given that AI is shapeshifting the future of customer service, we’re all on the same journey to understand it better.  I thought it would be helpful for us to share what resources have helped or intrigued us as we navigate AI. It could be a blog, online course, book, podcast, anything at all. As part of this conversation, I’ve included some resources that I myself have found helpful around AI and its application to customer service:  AI deep dive: Harnessing the power of AI for customer service Wha

Hello Community! Here's a list of AI-related resources that we've put together to help you understand the role of AI in customer service. You can use these to get more comfortable with implementing AI in your business and improving your customers' experience. Feel free to bookmark anything you find useful here. We will continuously update this list and comment on the post when the new resource is added. Be sure to hit the follow button to receive email notifications as shown in the screenshot below: Blog: Get ready for the future of AI in customer experience 9 ways to use AI in customer service

Hello Zendesk Community! For those unfamiliar, each month the A.I. User Group hosts two events. One which is an open discussion around a topic that the group has decided to discuss in depth. Users are also able to use this session to bring up any questions or problems that they are currently facing with utilizing or implementing A.I. into their customer support workstreams. Our second session is education focused. These can be anything from a speaker joining to present on a certain facet of A.I., a technical tutorial, or a deep dive into Zendesk functionality that can be enhanced with the proper us

Setting up the notification target Create a Slack incoming webhook using the channel you want to send the notifications to From Zendesk, navigate to Settings > Extensions > Targets > add target Click on HTTP Target Setup the target to integrate with the previously created incoming webhook Title: A descriptive title  URL: use previously created incoming webhook’s URL Method: POST Content Type: JSON  Basic Authentication: not necessary  Example application: setting up not

Please follow this short tutorial about how to put all sections and articles on the home page of your Help Center (according to this post). There are few ways to achieve that, but I will explain one of them, probably the most easiest. Example: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us So: Put all the content (all sections) in just one category (how to do that) Go to editor for design changes (General / Customize design / Home page) Find code row provided under, and remove it and whole code in this section (if you can

Since not all of our company’s customers have direct access to a live support channel (due to different pricing packages) I wanted to make sure that the help articles that all customers have access to are helpful for them. I needed more detailed feedback than just the “Was this article helpful?” yes/no buttons. Hotjar's polls are the little popups at the bottom of your screen that can ask any question you want, and you can also add logic to show other questions based on the responses. We are using Hotjar for our company website, so I was able to easily install it to our help center and verify that it was working. Once it's installed, you need to remove the voting options from the articles template and then create your poll. Disable the

We have found a nice way of handling user feedback on negative votes - here it goes: 1. Add a new text field called "Originated Article" - note its ID (31107517 in my example). 2. Add a new form called "Article Feedback" - note its ID (155127 in my example). 3. Edit your theme, and the Article page HTML section add the following code after the article-vote-controls div (change the form ID, and the text to your liking): <div class="negative-followup__c"><p>We're sorry to hear that!</p><a href="/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=155127">Please tell us why.</a></div> Add the following corresponding CSS: /* ---- negative followup ----------- */.negative-followup__c {display: none;border: 1px;border-color: #ccc;border-sty

Preface Today, mid-March 2020, when COVID-19 is on the rise and many companies are affected, we need to support each other even more than usual. We all are facing very special management and productivity challenges doing customer service these days. And I think that knowledge is the best weapon against those challenges.  That's why I decided to share another piece of my professional knowledge with the community. Last time I posted about my approach to set up or optimize Zendesk using Customer Journey idea. I know this post might sound a bit too theoretical - so I would like to share more practical stuff today.  I have been doing professional Zendesk consulting for the last 9 years. One of my best-selling services is Zendesk Health Diagnostics. I have diagnosed many Zendesk accounts – from small one-

Step One - Create a URL TargetBy creating a URL target as below (settings/extensions/add target/URL target) this will allow you to set a trigger to carry out a certain action upon the ticket that the trigger or automation ran on. URL: https://domainname.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets/{{ticket.id}}.json?ticket[comment][public]=false+ Method: PUT Attribute name: ticket[comment][body]Save the URL Target to something like "Auto Private Comment" and then you can use it as a target using the NOTIFICATIONS: Target trigger option.Step Two - Create the triggerNow set up your trigger or automation with your relevant trigger options. In the 'actions' section you can select the 'notifications: Noti

This tip will help you add value to the description field by submitting a request form in the guide theme. You can use the code when you want to prefill the description or can simply put the code under the condition where you can auto-populate the description field when certain conditions are met. Use the below line of code to set the value for the description field. tinymce.get("request_description").setContent("<p>Test</p>”); You can also take a look at this post where the code was originally shared. Let us know if you face any issues. Thanks

Wes Drury did all the work on this, I'm merely writing up a how-to for Swag rewards ;-) Would you like to have your article labels visible to end users as tags*? Sure you do, why else would you be here. *) It won't work as a link to a list of other articles with the same label though (as you may know from blogs), only as pretty labels with text.   How it will look Before we start If you are unfamiliar with customizing your Help Center you may want to reference this article first ^. If you have articles that already have labels on them, know that they

CHALLENGE: Emails are sent to us via a number of different email addresses. We have different (customized/relevant) auto-responses for each of these addresses. When a holiday rolls around, altering all of the triggers manually takes time. And then you have to edit them again after the holiday. Drag. SOLUTION: Utilize the ability to schedule holidays. Then add holiday conditions to triggers. HOW? (1) Set up all holidays. In brief: Admin > Settings > Schedule > Holidays > Add holiday More detailed instructions in Zendesk article: Setting your schedule with business hours and holidays (2) Edit your existing triggers to show that they should be used other t

Sharing a workaround that a colleague and I created for our team.  Our team really liked the old dashboard and the ability to pre-read and watch chats without joining. With the limitations in the new dashboard as a result of the new Agent Workspace, and growing concern from our team we created a custom view for active chats that replaced the functionality of the old dashboard for our team. This view also is more accessible than the old dashboard!  Here is a screenshot of the settings.  

Hello all, This tip is for hero section slider, users can make the hero section as a slider instead of the static image. Prerequisites: CSS, HTML, JavaScript Time: Max 5 Min Theme: Copenhagen (Default Theme)   You only need to follow the given simple steps to make the hero section as a slider:   1). Copy the given CDNs to your document_head.hbs file. <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/OwlCarousel2/2.3.4/assets/owl.carousel.min.css" integrity="sha512-tS3S5qG0BlhnQROyJXvNjeEM4UpMXHrQfTGmbQ1gKmelCxlSEBUaxhRBj/EFTzpbP4RVSrpEikbmdJobCvhE3g==" crossorigin="anonymous" referrerpolicy="no-referrer" /><script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.5.1/jquery.min.js"></script><script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/OwlCarousel2/2.3.4/owl.carousel.min.js" integrity="s

We've recently made some modifications to our C-Sat automation.   This is how the new email looks... Want to know how?    If you haven't already - activate 'Customer satisfaction surveys' (info here) Download the smileys below and upload these as assets to your helpcenter (or host them elsewhere)    Navigate to Settings > Automations - and locate the 'Request customer

Brands are normally thought of as a way to allow companies to offer customers ways to reach specific support teams; However, Brands can also be used to support your employees.See Setting up multiple brands for details on configuring Brands. For example, if you are looking to have employees submit tickets to specific internal teams, but you don't want them going through the process of manually generating tickets from the Agent view, you can setup a new Brand (with Help Center enabled). From there, you setup any necessary Fields, Forms, and Triggers (i.e. ticket routing rules), and ensure you have the "Agents can manage requests from Help Center" option enabled. Example Use Case You have your IT t

Using Guide's video embed feature, it's easy to embed YouTube videos into Guide articles. Unfortunately, if you try to embed a video with a timestamp using YouTube's "Copy URL at current time" feature, Guide will embed the video but won't respect the start time. To force a specific start / end time, you just need to edit your article a little more. Start by embedding your video using the default feature. Calculate your desired start time (and end time, if needed) in seconds, and hold onto those numbers. For example, you might have a start time of 45 seconds into the video, and an end time of 120 seconds.  Then, go to the code editor:You'll see a snippet that looks like the below block of code: <iframe src="//

For companies that aren't yet big enough to use a third party provider to manage projects, the Project Management APP from Zendesk labs will come in handy. This APP allows you to create a Parent ticket and attach multiple child tickets to it, without having to use the default Problem-Incident scenario. This also helps with analytics, allowing you to track tasks instead of problems. Installation Go to Project Management. Click Get it and complete the process How to use it Creating the Parent ticket Create a new ticket. This ticket will be the project's parent ticket. Disregard the ticket field you created (for now) Once the ticket is created, on the right-hand side under APPS you wi