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Roles and Responsibilities 1. We do have 3 groups of engineers with corresponding groups in Zendesk: Candidate - newbies, who joined the team just recently and only able to create DRAFT and reuse existing knowledge. Approver - an experienced engineer who validates DRAFT from the technical point of view and across content standard. Publisher - the most experienced engineer who may publish articles externally. 2. We do have two categories in HC: Knowledge Triage - internal section Public - section available to customers. With User Segments in guide, we allow only Publishers to modify articles in that group Creation & publish workflow To create: We use two templates to create articles: For technical articles: Symptom Cause Resolution For how-to articles: Question Answer

Zendesk level: Beginner Knowledge: HTML Time Required: 10 minutes Updated:  07/23/14 - Updated to latest Font Awesome CDN Updated:  04/21/15 - Updated to latest Font Awesome CDN Icons play a vital role in web design. Even though they can be quite small and might seem redundant, they play many different roles. Icons can be a great way to bring essential content to the point. They are a great attention grabber and they help your website visitors to find and scan content. This tutorial will show you how you can easily embed icons into your Help Center.  You can add icons to your header, footer, home page, categories page, accordions, articles, buttons, etc..    FontAwsome has a good selection of icons and its super easy to use, so I will use them in all of my examples below. Let’s get started!

Hello,please, let me share a tip for all Zendesks users. I'm co-founder of Integromat.com, and we are using Zendesk, but we missed any form of visible desktop notifications about new tickets (or updated tickets), so we have created a solution, since Integromat is a tool for workflow automation :)We have created Google Chrome Extension, which can be used for displaying notifications from Zendesk (or any other service) at desktop (in browser). It's very variable. You can use it for displaying just simple notification:Or can be more complex, anyone can adjust it as needed.

We had the amazing opportunity to get to play around with enhanced service level agreement (SLA) functionality in Zendesk, and it resulted in some pretty significant changes to the way we work. I thought I’d share some of what we learned along the way. How SLAs helped us If you have particularly complex SLA needs, as we do, then you’ll probably find yourself managing those through a combination of views and some creative business process. To give you an idea of what we’re dealing with, we support nearly 200 games, in 15 languages, for a global audience, using several channels, and prioritizing based on diverse player needs. Doing that using views is messy. With the enhanced SLA functionality, here’s what we did: We simplified our View structure, keeping it down to language only We implemented SLA policies using channel, game, player need, and status (see s

Zendesk level:  BeginnerKnowledge:  HTMLTime Required:  10 minutes Updated:  07/24/14 - Latest version of CDN 4.6 Updated:  11/20/15 - Latest version of CDN 5.2.1 Updated: 05/16/18 - Latest version of CDN 6.9.0   Note the following before you begin: To embed videos in your articles, you must first enable unsafe HTML in pages. The links below are examples of videos. You'll need to replace these links with your own content. Use the method described in this tip if you are not using a public hosted video service, such as Wistia or YouTube. This tutorial will show you how you can embed your company’s help videos into the Help Center.  We will accomplish this in two easy steps and without uploading any files into Help Center.  In res

Background We do Customer Service for our online and physical store customers in 4 countries - Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. We want to take advantage of self-service options using Help Center and Web Widget. Our focus is on quality, ease of use and a short route to publication. Multilingual content creation can be a painfully slow process, so we hope to optimize a workflow that can drive our self-serve strategy for years to come. Teams Agents dealing with end users directly in their local language on multiple channels (among them chat, email and Facebook) will be the primary contributors of new content. Drawing on their immediate relation to end users and their experience they will actively be scanning for potential deflection opportunities. Quality assurance team verifying content is relevant, formatted correctly, contributing locali

Hey everyone, a couple of weeks ago I was wondering how I could back up all my knowledge base content and after some research I was a bit disappointed as my only options were upgrade to a plan that I couldn't afford at the moment write your own backup script that's using Zendesk APIs use a Windows app - haven't touched a Windows machine in years yay So I decided to write an app that makes exporting knowledge base data a breeze for everyone. You can find the latest version in the Zendesk Apps Marketplace How to install & use TL;DR Head to the Zendesk Apps Marketplace & click install Add an API access token in the app config ( how to create

I'm thinking of setting up Dashboards (like Geckoboard, Leftronic or BIME) this year, and would like to hear (and see) what experience you may have in this area. Some ideas and questions I'm pondering: What metrics are you displaying and why? How / what historical (if any) context are they shown against? (current First Reply Time vs. Avr. FRT (last week, last year?) How did you decide on Dashboard supplier? BIME was recently acquired by Zendesk, are there compelling reasons for choosing one over the other?  Do you display any other business data, besides Zendesk on your dashboards?  Feel free to showcase you own Da

Zendesk level: Beginner Knowledge: Copy and Paste Time Required: 5 minutes   Zendesk will automatically display 6 articles under each section in your Help Center.  For some six is too many and would like to show less especailly if they have alot of sections under each category.  To make things a little neater we can add some code to only show 3 articles at a time.   **Credit goes to Socorro Fernandez The CSS Code does not seem to work for me on the Copenhagen Theme but I instead accessed the category_page.hbs template and added the following code to the bottom of the page: <style>.article-list li:nth-child(n+4) { display: none;}</style> This will hide all but the first 3 articles in the article list of the category page. I chose to put this directly on

One thing that we really like about HC is adding pinned topics (now known as "Promoted articles") to our front page. In some themes, the tag doesn't come inserted automatically. I worked with Zendesker Arnaud to figure this out!   Add the Handlebar to your HTML Under Homepage, add the following <section class="clearfix">{{promoted_articles}}<br /></section>   Modify the CSS /** Promoted articles*/ .promoted-articles{background-color:#f4f4f4;padding:20px;-webkit-border-radius: 3px;border-radius: 3px;clear:both;} .promoted-articles h3{margin:0 0 10px 0;font-weight:bold;font-size:20px;} .bottomspace{min-height:500px;} .main-column .form footer{margin-top:20px;} This will add a section just for the promoted articles below the search bar and whatever introductory

  We have internal customers that send a lot of tickets to us.  They also receive a lot of Zendesk notifications by default (ticket received, ticket updated, ticket solved, satisfaction survey).  This works for some customers, but others will log into Zendesk to check on their tickets or they only want us to reach back out if there is a problem with the request.  We added the option to opt out of notifications on a per ticket basis. Create a custom Notification Opt Out checkbox ticket field and add it to any applicable ticket forms Update your notification triggers to only email if the Notification Opt Out checkbox is unchecked We continue to send emails for updates where the status is Pending and for Sat

I am looking for some ideas & best practices in managing live issues. If you can offer advice on how to avoid any of the issues outlines it I would be forever grateful.  Foreward We have multiple live service products, new issues are always being introduced and resolved.  We have a problem ticket for all major issues that are being tracked by our quality/development teams, these can sometimes have 1000+ attached incidents. We are constantly maintaining 50+ problem tickets (10-20 per product), we have built an app to help with this, see below. We typically won't create a problem ticket for low volume issues unless it is high impact, simply because the more we have, the more our agents seem to make mistakes when attaching incidents. The issues We need a way to track issues that are known but don't meet the criteria of requiring a

I wanted to share how our team is doing Knowledge Sharing today.  We have a lot going on in our knowledge process, so I'm not going to list out specific steps on how to build this, but I'll be giving a high level overview of most of our process.  Some of the steps may make a lot of sense for you and your teams, others might not. However, I hope that this helps some of you improve your knowledge experience.  Background We've had variations of this since before it was even a concept being looked at within Zendesk.  Our team worked closely with our account rep to introduce them to Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) methodologies and we heard that many teams at Zendesk completed this training themselves and started their own knowledge journey, over the following years there have been many versions of this app. We are just getting to a place were we can use the features in Zendesk, but the tips should still apply to your teams with the newest rele

So, by now, a lot of Zendeskers out there have made great use of the wonderfully simple, yet elegant Customer Satisfaction Ratings Professional and Enterprise plans. But there’s something more there that you can do with this tracking system. I feel this idea could be of great use to the community at large. First, let me present you – the “Agent” -- with a problem, a quandary, if you will, and will present the thought and ideas, and the solution. When a customer loves the quickness and promptness of your answer, and gives you a “Yes, I’m satisfied” answer – that is an awesome feeling! As a support agent, you can’t beat the feeling of an ‘internet thumbs-up’, a proverbial 'pat on the back'. It’s even better when the customer notes “Give Good Guy Greg a raise, he’s the greatest!”, isn’t it? Unfortunately, today... it’s not a good day for Pessimistic Paul, who’s

In addition to the formatting, many bugs and reported customer issues were being forgotten about while they should have been escalated.  To resolve this issue, I created a standardized format. The process I created and enforce with our agents includes a few different steps and is documented . 1: Agent uses the "Escalate Bug" macros: ACTIONS:     Comment Mode / Private     Group / L2     Comment  ZD ID # {{ticket.id}}  REPORTING AGENT: {{current_user.name}} CONTACT: {{ticket.requester.name}}/{{ticket.requester.email}} COMPANY: {{ticket.organization.name}} LOGIN URL:   ISSUE SUMMARY: A very concise sentence or two to explain the issue.  Be careful not to include ste

I implemented tabs using jQuery-UI tabs plugin, which makes it quite simple to embed in Zendesk Help Center home-page.  First, download jquery-ui from their website, with your favorite design, and add jquery-ui.css as an asset to your theme. In the Document Head section add the following: <script src="//code.jquery.com/ui/1.11.4/jquery-ui.js"></script><link rel="stylesheet" href="{{asset 'jquery-ui.css'}}"><script>  $(function() {    $( "#product_updates_tabs" ).tabs();  });</script>   In the Home section, add the following: {{#each categories}}  {{#is name "Product Updates"}}     <h2>{{name}}</h2>    <div id="product_updates_tabs">      <ul>        {{

For our requirements we want to proofread articles before they go live to customers. I came up with a process that seems to work for us to achieve this though it would be a nice feature to have builtin. For now here is how I worked around this. Create a Knowledge template with the design I would like all articles to follow. In our case we want articles to have a description and a resolution so the template contains bootstrap panel sections for these with placeholder text. When publishing the template, set the defaults for comments, section and the status of Draft which is the important step here so that new articles should default to draft status. In this step we also store the template in an agent only section. From here, the agents can use knowledge to create an article and as a manager I have a view in the article drafts as to where articles are and where they stand and can publish them when they are ready to go. Hope

The goal of this trick to add a little little bit of functionality to the workflow of light agents. By notifying regular agent within Zendesk that a light agent has read/responded to the ticket. We're going to leverage triggers for this, and expand the definition of pending/on-hold a little bit. Set-up the trigger Create a new trigger with the following conditions conditions- Ticket: update via is e-mail- Ticket: comment is private- Ticket: comment text contains the following string !status open- Ticket: status is openor- Ticket: status is on-holdactions- Ticket: status is open Save the trigger. How to use it Whenever an agent wants a response from a light agent they should add them in CC or @mention them. For this case our advis

If you're using the new Multibrand, I'm sure you're disappointed with the fact that each brand don't have their own email template and you need to make do with only one. Good news is: there's a workaround for that! With Liquid Markup, you can insert your logo or important links that are related to a single brand. All you have to do is edit your Triggers and Automations that notify users and add in them a "case" statement according to each brand. Let's say I have 5 brands, and I want to show a certain logo for 2 of them. Here's what I would add to the end of each trigger and automation:   % case ticket.brand.name %}  {% when 'Brand 1' %}  <a href="http://brand1.com" target="_blank" border="0"><img src="http://

To achieve higher contrast for agent ticket tabs tempororily (this only lasts until you refresh the page or change it) Using Chrome - and not using multiple agent tabs. Final Result - Dark Tabs!   Right click on a ticket tab (actually anywhere on the agent page will do) Select 'Inspect'    In the inspector window... Click the + icon Copy the style selector from the CSS (shown a little further on) and paste into the selector section (in blue in the pic) Click after the first curly bracket 

We were able to customize our Help Center with just a bit of CSS/Google-foo. I was able to add our trademark image as a faded background to our support articles.     In Help Center's CSS, I looked for the background, found it and referenced our custom image.  To edit the CSS for your Help Center, see Customizing the CSS or JavaScript.  The net result was the following: body {background-image:url('//assets.zendesk.com/hc/theme_assets/65710/1931/watchman-zendesk-tower-gray.png');background-repeat: no-repeat;background-attachment:fixed;background-position: bottom right;} You will need to upload the image to your Help Center. To do so, see  Uploading and using your own assets.   Th

Introduction Zendesk's Satisfaction Rating (Professional and Enterprise) allows customers to rate and comment on tickets. By default, 24 hours after solving a ticket, an email goes to the customer offering the rating. For customers with low ticket volumes, this email is unlikely to be a burden. Where customers create many tickets the satisfaction email may be detrimental to your service. This article will assume that the default approach is appropriate for most customers. But there are specific organisations that should never receive an email. These customers can continue to rate tickets through the Help Centre. The default automation An automation sends t

Backstory If, like myself, you have at one point or another run into the problem that you accidentally deleted some Categories, Sections or Articles from your Help Center then, up until recently, Zendesk was able to help out by restoring the data. Unfortunately Zendesk recently made the decision to implement a new policy which can be viewed here. In short, they will no longer restore any data that was deleted as a result of a mistake or incorrect use.  Now I'm sure you might be thinking "Well what am I going to do now if I accidentally delete some content?" and that is a very good question. I was in the same boat until I remembered, Google caches nearly everything!  So I've gone ahead and included some steps below which allowed me to get nearly 100% of my content back. Please keep

This nice enhancement is based on the Humble Squid theme. See live example at: https://moderatortal.zendesk.com/hc/en-us   This enhancement is based on the VideoBG plugin by Syd Lawrence:http://syddev.com/jquery.videoBG/ To make it work, you will need: Video files in multiple formats (webm, mp3, ogv).Poster image - which should be the 1st frame of the video.The plugin file (jquery.videoBG.js) from the site above. Steps: 1. Add the video files, poster image, and .js file as assets to your theme. 2. Add the following script to the Document head page  <script src="{{asset 'jquery.videoBG.js'}}"/> 3. Add the following sc

Introduction Perhaps you are faced with the problem of the CSV file request frequency limit. To work around this, we use small javascript (bookmarklet) that receives the data via Zendesk API and saves it to a CSV file. You can get the script HERE to set it up for yourself. It`s open source and FREE. Enjoy! How it works This video shows how it works. Here's the source code Following is the script code. Feel free to modify it for your own needs! javascript:var win=window.open("","","width=600,height=500,scrollbars=yes");var vn=+window.location.href.replace(/(.*filters\/)/,""); var w=win.document; w.write("<p style='font-f