Getting Started Guide

The Getting Started Guide is for new Zendesk users who want to make the most out of their
free trial and get to the know the system quickly. To jump to a specific part of the Getting
Started Guide, use the following sub-headings and links.

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Lesson 1 Lesson 4
Jumping in and solving your Organizing your support tickets with
first ticket Views/Queues
• Submitting your first ticket • What’s Open and What’s Pending?
• Seeing and replying to support tickets • List vs. Table Layout
• What Your Customer Sees • Editing a View
• How Your Customer Replies • Removing Unused Views
• Solving A Ticket
• Reviewing a Ticket’s History
Lesson 5
Working with your whole team
Lesson 2
• The Three Types of Users in Zendesk
Customizing the Agent Homepage • Adding and Working with More Support Agents
• Header and menu bar • Creating Accountability within Your Support Team by
• Adding your logo and colors Assigning Tickets
• Changing the Colors • Building a Web Form
• The menu bar • Adding a New Field to the Support Form
• Hiding the Introductory Text • Creating a Trigger to Automatically Assign Tickets
• Adding a Knowledge Base to Your Web Portal Home Page Unassigned Tickets
• Creating new forums
• Create a Forum Category
• Pinned Forum Topics (and how to unpin them)

Lesson 3
Customizing the customer experience
• Assuming a Customer Perspective
• Configuring the Customer Web Portal Home Page
• Removing Unused Forums
• Adding The Introductory Text Back In
• Using Your Organization’s Email Address and URL
• Configuring the Customer Web Portal Home Page
• Receiving Support Emails at Your Organization’s
Email Address
• Sending Support Emails from Your Organization’s
Email Address
• Using Your Own Domain Name

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Lesson 1: Jumping in and solving your first ticket
In this first lesson, you’ll create and resolve your first customer service incident using Zendesk. The way we
do this is by submitting a request by email and then responding to that request within Zendesk. Putting
yourself in your customers’ shoes, you’ll see how Zendesk captures and keeps track of support incidents; as
well as use some of the tools Zendesk offers you and your support team to work more quickly and efficiently
while addressing those incidents.

Submitting your first ticket

The central piece of Zendesk is the ticket. Whenever a
support request is received in Zendesk, a ticket is created. The
TIP
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
ticket then becomes a record of each one-to-one customer
conversation you have. Tickets can be created through
If you are an admin, it’s important that you send
multiple channels: email, your website, social media, online
chat, phone, and more. Wherever these conversations are any test emails from a different email account than
started, however, they all become tickets. the one you use with your administrator account.
Since your Zendesk recognizes your email as the
Once the support ticket has been submitted, your goal is to owner of the account, it treats you differently than
resolve it as quickly and efficiently as possibly, whether it’s it does one of your customers. In general, it’s good
a simple question about how your product works, or a major
to have a separate email address that you use to
customer problem. In each case, the support conversation
test your Zendesk. This gives you the opportunity to
goes through a series of stages: the ticket might require your
attention or it might be waiting on some information from the experience Zendesk the way your customers will.
customer; eventually, it is resolved.

In this lesson, we are going to submit a support request using

email. Zendesk comes set up to work with email. When you
signed up for your Zendesk account, you were given a Zendesk support email address: [email protected] where
“youraccount” is the site name you signed up with. You can see your account name in the URL displayed in the address bar.
Sidebar: You can change this email address, which we’ll get to in the next lesson.

We’re going to send an email to this address.

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 Open up your email and send an email as if it were from a
customer to your zendesk support address (i.e. support@
youraccount.zendesk.com). Our account is called
MondoCam - an international camera company we used
for demo purposes. So in our case, we are sending the
email to [email protected].

You can write whatever you want, but it can be helpful to

write something you might actually see from a customer.

That’s it! Your first support ticket submitted.

Seeing and replying to support tickets

Back in our Zendesk account, let’s see where that email ended up. Once a customer sends you a ticket, it will be automatically
converted to a ticket and show up in your Views. To see those, hover over the View tab in the top navigation.

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Views are like custom inboxes for your support tickets. We’ll discuss them more in Lesson 5. The default view is called My Unsolved
Tickets, which shows you any ticket that you haven’t deemed solved yet. The ticket you just sent in will show up here. If you
haven’t already, click on My Unsolved Tickets.

There it is! Nice. Click the title of the ticket to open it. The ticket is where you respond to the customer; but the ticket will also keep
a log of all the subsequent communication between your team and the customer. Let’s go ahead and respond to this ticket now.

We want to ask the customer for more information. To do that, add a comment below the initial one asking for more information.
Simply type your response in the text box.

Next we’ll change the drop-down fields on the ticket labeled Status, Type and Priority. Zendesk can add and keep track of a support
conversation’s details by setting these drop-down fields, or as they are called in Zendesk, ticket fields. You can modify these ticket
fields as well as add your own. We go over that in Lesson 6.

The status field says “open.” A Zendesk ticket can have five statuses, each of which marks a different stage along the path from a
customer submitting a request to your agents solving it.
• New - a ticket that has just come in and hasn’t been opened yet.
• Open - a ticket that has been opened and requires attention. Open tickets are the ones that are currently on your plate.
• Pending - a ticket that is waiting on another party, usually the customer. Use this for when you are waiting on a customer reply.
• Solved - means the ticket has been deemed resolved. It can still be re-opened however.
• Closed - once a ticket has been solved for a number of days, it is officially (and automatically) closed. Closed tickets are
archived and cannot be reopened.

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We are asking the customer to send us more information, so change the status of the ticket to pending. By changing the status, we
help ourselves organize our tickets into ones that require attention immediately, and those that we can’t work on at the moment.

Let’s now look at the Type drop-down field. Like status, there a number of ticket types. The type describes what kind of issue you
are dealing with. There are four ticket types, and depending on which you choose, you get a different set of features.
• Question - the most basic type; used when a customer has a question about your business or service.
• Problem - for when a customer has a problem with your business or service
• Incident - is a specific instance of a problem. For instance, if the problem is that our billing system is down, each ticket
that comes in after we identify the problem is an incident of the problem. This lets us group our tickets together around a
common issue.
• Task - for tickets which turn into a to-do item for your agents. They can have a due date.

Because the customer is asking a question about our product, we will change the Type field to Question. We might change that
later as we gather more information. Lastly, because we aren’t sure exactly what is going on yet, let’s set priority to normal. You
could also choose Low, High, and Urgent. Priority is another ticket categorization tool. When we look at ticket organization in
Lesson 5, we will see how you can use priority to focus on your highest priority tickets.

Ok, your ticket should look something

like this:

We are now ready to reply to the customer.

To do so, click the submit button under
your comment. This will update the ticket
with all the changes we just made and
send out our reply to the customer.

Zendesk returns you to your Unsolved

Ticket View with a message that you’ve
updated your ticket.

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What Your Customer Sees
When you hit submit, Zendesk sends out your comment to the customer. Let’s see what this looks like. We’ll check the email
account we used to send in the test support request.

You will see two replies:

1. Your Request has been Received
2. An update with the comment you just added.

These replies were automatically sent out by your Zendesk through something called a trigger. Triggers are automatic actions that
occur when tickets are created or updated. They act like this: “If A happens then do B”. So for instance:
A. When a customer submits a ticket
B. Zendesk automatically replies and acknowledges that the request has been received.

That’s where that first email came from.

But a trigger also sent out our second email:

A. When you make a comment on a ticket
B. Zendesk automatically sends that comment back to
the customer.

The subject line of the second email should read something

like “[MondoCam] Re: Problems using the XR50-HyperShot”.
Click into that email.

It has both your comment and the original request for support.
There is also a link back to the ticket. All of this is controlled
by the trigger that sent it out. Triggers are a powerful tool in
Zendesk, and we’ll go through them at length in Lesson 5.

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How Your Customer Replies
How does your customer respond? As the email says, “You can add a comment by replying to this email.” Let’s try it.

Hit reply and type out a response from the customer perspective. In our example, we asked for the customer to attach an image.
Go ahead and try this as well, attach an image to your email and click send.

Go back to your Zendesk and return to the My Unsolved Ticket view (click the view tab to get there). There’s your ticket, with the
customer reply showing. Notice too that ticket status has changed from Pending to Open.

Since the customer replied, you are no longer waiting on them. This reopens the ticket and puts it back on your plate.

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 Solving A Ticket
Let’s resolve this issue now. Click in
to the ticket. There is the customer
response along with the image we
attached - cool! You can click quick
view to see your image right from
within the ticket.

Now we have enough information to

solve this ticket. We will respond with
the answer to their question; and
we can change the status to Solved
in the drop-down menu. Your ticket
should look something like this:

Notice that we can also attach files

to tickets. Just click the attach file
link in the lower right of the comment
box. Once we are satisfied that we
have successfully trouble-shot the
customer’s issue and answered their
question, we can hit submit.

Easy as that! We just solved our first

ticket. Your Zendesk even tracks
your weekly progress by telling you
how many tickets you’ve solved (see
screenshot below) .

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Reviewing A Ticket’s History
We just went through a pretty typical support interaction in Zendesk. A customer contacted us with a question, we troubleshot
the issue, and ultimately answered their question. But Zendesk not only helps us to resolve the issues, it keeps a history of all the
activity. Let’s review the ticket history.

To return to our ticket, click the Recent tab in the top menu bar. This gives you quick access to any tickets you handled recently.

Now in the ticket, click the All

Events and Notifications link.
It is in the top right of the
Comments section.

This shows us every change

that occurred on our ticket. You
can see the changes we made
manually like changing the
Type to Question; as well as
the automatic actions taken by
Zendesk - such as the Trigger
that sent out the Notification
emails when we added new
comments, as well as when the
customer replied and the ticket
went from Pending to Open.

Notice too that a notification

was sent out when we solved
the ticket.

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Summary
In this lesson, we jumped right into the support process with Zendesk. We saw how Zendesk receives support requests through
email and turns them into tickets. And then we went through the basic steps you take to resolve that request within Zendesk.

Now that we have the basics down, we can start to take advantage of some of Zendesk’s other features and tools. In addition
to email, for instance, Zendesk can receive support requests from multiple channels, including web site forms, live online chat,
and Twitter.

We’ll also be diving into Triggers more to see how they can automate and accelerate a lot of your support tasks and discuss how
you can organize your customers and agents into groups.

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Lesson 2: Customizing The Agent Homepage
In this lesson, we’re going to go over and customize what you see when you first log in to Zendesk.
If you just created your account, you will initially see the Getting Started Screen (see screenshot below).

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However, on your subsequent logins, you will be directed to your Web Portal Home Page. (You can also always get there by clicking
the Home button in the menu bar bar.) For new accounts, that screen looks like this:

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We’ll show you ways to change the information on this page as well as customize the look of it. Your agents and you will be
spending a lot of time working in this web portal, so it makes sense to get to know the interface, as well as how to get your content
in there, and integrate the look of it with your company’s look.

There are five main areas to your support homepage:

• Header and menu bar
• Introductory Text
• Highlighted Forum Articles
• The Forum directory
• The sidebar

Header and menu bar

Your account name is in the upper left of the header along with a Zendesk logo. Links to your personal profile and to Zendesk’s help
are in the upper right. The menu bar of your web portal goes across the bottom of the header.

Adding your logo and colors

Zendesk offers some simple web tools to change the colors and add your own logo. Anyone can use them, you don’t need to be a
programmer or designer. NOTE: there are some advanced customization options as well, which we will look at in the next lesson.

While the Zendesk logo is nice, let’s swap it out with our own logo.

All the basic personalization tools are in Settings > Account > Branding. Go there and scroll to the bottom until you see
Header logo.

Adding a logo is as simple as uploading it here, but it’s important to note that Zendesk will resize the logo to 50px by 50px, so it’s
best to make sure you have a version of your logo optimized for that size.

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When you have a version of your logo that looks good at that size, click the Choose File button and browse to it from your computer.
It is fine if the image is larger than 50px by 50px - but Zendesk will scale it to fit within that space.

When you choose a new logo, you can also indicate a URL to which you want the logo to link. It makes sense to add your
own website.

Click Save Change on the bottom of the page and you have a new logo.

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Changing the Colors
Now, unless you happen to have the exact same color scheme
TIP
as Zendesk, your logo probably looks a little funny up there. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Let’s change the colors to fit our brand and work with the
logo better.
Hex numbers are a computer standard code for
describing colors.
You should still be in the Personalize Your Zendesk page.
Scroll to the section labeled Help desk colors. Click on
the green bar next to page Page header. Up pops a color
picker tool.

We can either choose the color using the color picker (the
round dot on the color block) or by entering in the hex number
for the color.

We are going to enter the hex number for our brand color - which is a deep blue - #002262. You can use either the color picker or
also enter a hex number. Do the same for the page background with the alternate color. The page background is the frame around
the main content of the page (pictured below).

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Click Save Change at the bottom and your new colors are now visible.

If at any point you want to start over, you can return to the default green and dark grey colors by clicking the Revert to default
colors link in the help desk colors link.

The menu bar Bar

Now that we have changed our colors and logo, let’s take a look at the menu bar. This is how you will navigate your support site.
• Home - brings you back to the support homepage
• Forums - your knowledge base and community support
• Manage - a menu where you manage the pieces of your help desk including users, work flows, and pre-built responses.
• Settings - a menu with administrative and ownership control, including branding tools and tools that integrate your Zendesk
with other tools. (Note that you’ll only see the Account menu if you’re an administrator. Individual support agents will not
have access to these settings.)
• Twitter icon - Zendesk allows you to monitor and respond to support requests that come through Twitter. This tab gives you
direct access to that feature.
• Views - The customizable collection buckets for all your support requests.
• + New- Takes you directly to a new support ticket.
• Search Bar - searches your entire support history, including knowledge base and tickets.

The Manage and Account tabs have a number of related sub menus.

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Hiding the Introductory Text
Let’s look at the other sections of your web portal home page and make a few changes to get you started.

The introductory text is the section right below the menu bar.
It is completely editable and a good place to put a welcome
message or other information about your support -- hours,
contact information, etc. The introductory text comes more
into play when we start to configure the web portal for our
customers’ use, so let’s hide it for now.

To hide it, go to Settings >> Channels and then click the green
edit link next to Web Portal. This page has a number of
settings for your web portal content - what is shown and how it
is displayed. To hide the introductory text, uncheck the “show”
box on the first item and click the save button at the bottom of
the page.

The remaining settings all address your Zendesk forums. You

can use forums to build out a knowledge base and FAQ section,
as well as to offer community support, creating a space for your
customers to ask public questions and engage with
other customers.

As you see, you can choose to show your forums on your home
page. Let’s return there to see what they look like. Click on the
Home tab in the menu bar.

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Adding a Knowledge Base to Your Web Portal Home Page
The forums occupy the bulk of your home page. Forums are collections of articles and/or community questions and feedback.
Each entry in a forum is called a topic. One great way to utilize that is to add a knowledge base and start building up some
documentation on your product or service. This can be helpful for your support agents as they are troubleshooting a customer’s
questions. It centralizes your support knowledge in one place and integrates it with your ticketing system.

To start building a knowledge base we are going to explore the forums, add some new content relevant to our business, and display
that on our web portal home page.

When you first sign up for your Zendesk account, you are set up with a few example forums – Announcements, Community Help, Tips
& Tricks, Feature Requests, and Agents Only. If these sample forums work for you, you can definitely start adding content to them.

For our knowledge base example, let’s customize the forums so that they are organized around our product line. We want to group
articles around each product we manufacture to make it very easy to browse. To do that we are going to create separate forums for
each product line and then group them into a forum category called Knowledge Base. Lastly, we’ll configure how it displays on the
home page.

Creating new forums

To create a new forum around a product line, we will go to the Forums page on our Zendesk. Click the Forum tab in the menu
bar. It looks very similar to what we had on our home page. But while the forums can be displayed on the home page, all forum
organization and configuration happens here. Notice the green actions link on the right side of the page, which were not available
on the home page.

Add a new forum by clicking the actions link and choosing add forum.

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Add a title of a product line. We’ll call our Digital Compact
Cameras, one of MondoCam’s product lines. Add a description
of the product line in the description field - this will be
displayed along with the forum and can provide some general
information about the product. Leave everything else as is.
These options become useful later when building out an area
for customer community support. For now we are focusing on
knowledge base articles and the defaults work well for that.
For more on community support and forum options, check out
the community support video tutorial.

Click the Add Forum button at the end of the forum. This
takes us into our new forum. The title we just added is across
the top, along with some breadcrumb style navigation (you
can click “Forums” to go back up one level); a search bar
allows us to search within that forum (not that interesting yet
as we have no content); when we add forum topics, they will
be listed in the main column; and the description we wrote is
in the right column.

Let’s add a knowledge base article about this particular product line (“digital compact cameras” in our MondoCam example).
Click the Add Article button on the right side.

On the next page, you create your knowledge base article by adding a title and the article body. For our example, we are going to
add a question a customer might ask about our product line. This will help our agents troubleshoot customer questions.

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You can either write something from scratch, or if you have an existing knowledge base, simply copy and paste an article into the
text box (you can paste in text as well as images). Notice the drop-down titled “Which forum does this topic belong to?” It has our
new forum selected, but you could change it to another forum.

Lastly, we can set a few options for how this topic is displayed. We don’t want people to leave comments on our knowledge base
articles -- we’d rather have them submit a support ticket if they have questions – so let’s check the disable comments box. Leave
the other items unchecked for now. Your form should look something like this:

Looks good. Click update in the bottom right of the form. This brings us to the forum topic as people will see it when they browse
to it. If you need to ever make a change to your documentation – when a product is updated for instance – you can edit it at any
point by clicking the green edit link in the upper right of the article.

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Ok, remember that we were adding a knowledge base article to display on our web portal home page. Let’s go back there and see
what it looks like. Click the home tab in the menu bar.

Looks ok - there’s our forum along with the sample forums Zendesk starts you off with; and the article we just added is listed.

But it could look even more organized. And some of those sample forums don’t apply to our business. To clean up how this looks,
and make it much easier to browse for our agents, we can create a forum Category.

In addition to grouping related topics together in forums, you can group related forums into categories. Let’s create a category
called Knowledge Base and move our product forum into it.

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Create a Forum Category
Creating a forum category is very similar to creating a forum itself. First, as we did before, we need to go the Forums tab in the
menu bar. On the forum management page, click the Add Category button in the upper right of the main column. On the new
category page add a title and a description. The title will be displayed on the home page as a section heading (see picture below).

We’ll title ours “Knowledge Base” and add a simple description: “Official Articles, Manuals, and Tips about all of MondoCam’s
products”. When you click Update, you’ll see your category on your Forum Management page. Let’s see how it looks on the home
page. Click the Home tab.

It’s gone! What gives? It turns out that Zendesk will not display a forum category if it doesn’t have any forums in it. We need to
move our product forum into the Knowledge Base category and then it will show up on our home page.

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To move the forum category you created earlier, click the title of the forum; and then click the green edit link on the forum page.
You’ll now notice a drop-down titled “Which category does this forum belong to?” open that up and choose “Knowledge Base”
(or whatever you named the category you created).

Click update forum in the bottom.

Now when you go to the home page your category shows up with your forum within it.

How are we doing? Our web portal home page is definitely taking shape. It sports our logo and colors, and we are starting to build
up a knowledge base for our agents to access. From here, you can continue to organize and add articles to your knowledge base.

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Pinned Forum Topics (and how to unpin them)
There’s one last item on the home page we haven’t looked at yet. The message titled “For Your Eyes Only”

It reads:

This topic was posted to the restricted Agents Only forum in your help desk and pinned to the home page.
The topic is visible to help desk agents only, not your customers.

This points to an aspect of the web portal home page and of forums that we haven’t considered yet: what can your customers see?
We are going to look at that in the next section.

For now, let’s focus on the other piece introduced by this post: the idea of pinning topics to the homepage. It turns out that this
“For Your Eyes Only” post is a normal forum topic. You may remember from earlier in the lesson a set of options for how a forum
topic is to be displayed (see below).

One of those options was to pin a topic to the home page. When you enable this option, it shows up on your home page just
like this “For Your Eyes Only” post. This gives you the ability to showcase particular content that could be useful for your
support agents.

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And when that content is no longer useful – perhaps you want to highlight a product update, but only for a week – you can unpin it.
Now that we have read the “For Your Eyes Only” post, it isn’t really something we need to see every time we log in.

To unpin it, all we have to do is click the unpin link under the title.

It disappears, but note that it hasn’t been deleted. You can

still see it listed in the “Agents Only” forum in the Forum
Directory on the home page. TIP
___________________________________________________________________________________________________

To re-pin something, go into the topic and click the

green edit link the upper right of the main column.
Select the checkbox at the bottom titled “Pin to
Home Page” and update the post.

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Summary
In this lesson, we customized the agent home page to look more in line with your company’s brand. And we started building a
knowledge base that your agents can use when troubleshooting customer questions. We looked at how the Zendesk forums are
organized, with topics, forums, and categories; and saw how to move items between forums and categories. Lastly, we saw that
we could highlight particular forum topics by pinning them to our web portal home page.

In the next lesson, we’ll return to setting up Zendesk for your customers point of view. We’ll set up your web portal for their use so
you can communicate important news and announcements to them; so they can help themselves to your public knowledge base;
and so they submit tickets and keep track of their support history. We’ll also make the support experience more seamless for them
by removing the word Zendesk from your support email and your web portal URL.

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Lesson 3: Customizing the Customer Experience
So far, we’ve been working on the web portal home page you see when you log in to Zendesk.
What do your customers or colleagues see when they visit the site?

You’ve probably seen it already if you have logged out and then come back to your Zendesk. It looks similar to the home page you
see when you log in, but optimized for your customer. The navigation is different and anything that is marked for logged in agents
and admins is hidden.

The important concept here is that your web portal home page serves both your support team and your customers. Keep that in
mind as you are pinning topics to your homepage, writing your introductory text and building out your forums. It is a best practice
to run through your own support experience from the customer perspective to ensure it offers the kind of support you want
to offer.

In this lesson, we are going to review our web portal home page as our customers see it and adjust the content to provide
the optimal experience. We will also customize the URL of our Zendesk support site so it can match your business URL. It is
important that the support experience you provide your customers feels integrated with the rest of your customer experience.
The URL is part of that. Additionally, we will also remove the “.zendesk” from the support email address for both incoming and
outgoing messages so that your customers can send email directly to [email protected] rather than requiring support@
mondocam.zendesk.com.

Assuming a Customer Perspective

In order to see what your customers see on the home page, you can simply log out - but this gets tedious over time. You don’t
want to keep logging out and logging back in just to see what your customer sees while you’re working on your support page. A
better, quicker way to work on your web portal is to assume the identity of a customer while still logged in to your Zendesk.

In Zendesk, you can assume the identity of any user of your support system. This means experiencing your help desk from their
perspective. This can be helpful to guarantee that the system looks and behaves as you want it to for each person.

STEP 1: Click on the Manage tab in the top navigation and choose People. If you just created your account you don’t have many
users yet, but everyone that has interacted with your help desk so far is in here. (We’ll go over the People section in more detail in
Lesson 5).

If you are the person who created the account, you should see yourself in the list as “Owner”. There is also the test user with the
email address from which we sent in a ticket in Lesson 1. (You might also have Kelly H in there, who is a Zendesk employee who
has sent you a ticket to help you get started.)

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STEP 2: To assume a user, you can either hover over their
name in the user list and click the “assume” link that appears;
or you can click the “assume an anonymous user” link the TIP
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
right column. An anonymous user is one who comes to your
web portal and does not log in.
Once a customer sends in a support ticket, they have
Let’s review the website from an anonymous user. Click the the option to create a password for themselves and
link in the right column. log in. This will give them access to their support
history – every ticket they sent in – as well as allow
them to participate in your forums.

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This drops you back on to your home page - it looks similar to what we were looking at earlier in the lesson, but notice the small
differences:
• The menu bar is different.
• You do not see the Agents Only Forum

The menu bar has some new items.

Your customers can visit your forums,
but instead of having the Manage
and Settings tab, they have tabs for
submitting new support tickets and
for checking support tickets they have
submitted in the past.

As for the rest of the page, it has the

forum directory we were working on in
the last lesson, including our Knowledge
Base with our new product line forum.
It does not, however, have the “Agents
Only” forum. As we read in the “For Your
Eyes” only topic in the last lesson, you can
create forums and restrict access to them, allowing only your support agents to see the topics within them.

The customer web portal home page does show the other sample forums that Zendesk starts us off with. While Zendesk sets you up
with a number of items and tools to help you get started, it’s best practice to remove items you aren’t using once you get the hang of
things. This will make your Zendesk much easier to use for your agents; they will not have to wade through items irrelevant to them.

Now that we’ve started building out and organizing our knowledge base, let’s clear out content we aren’t using. Look through the
forums that Zendesk starts you with and decide if you want to use any of them. It’s not a big deal if you remove them and decide
to add them back in later. You saw how simple it was to add a new forum earlier. You can always add forums later.

For our example, let’s keep “Announcements”. We sometimes have announcements about new products or news updates that we
want to share.

To remove the unused forums, we need to switch back to our administrator profile. To do so, click the “revert identity” link in the
upper right. This will bring you back to the People page.

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Configuring the Customer Web Portal Home Page

Removing Unused Forums

Back in the admin view, let’s remove the forums we aren’t going to use. To do so, click on the Forum tab. Once there, click on one
of the forums you are going to remove – “Community Help” for instance. Now click the green edit link in the upper right of the main
column. At the bottom of the page, there is a delete link.

Click that and confirm your choice when the alert pops up.

Done! Easy. Now repeat those steps to remove other forums you don’t plan on using. For this example, we are going to keep the
“Announcements” forum and the “Agents Only” forum. We want to keep some documentation private to our internal staff. We
don’t like the name “Agents Only” however. Let’s call it “Internal Documentation”. To make that change click the title of the forum
and click the edit link as you did in the previous steps. Rather than delete the forum, however, just change the title.

Before you click the Update button, notice the the radio button at the bottom of the form that sets the permissions for who can
view topics in this forum.

“Agents only”. That’s how you restrict your forums and make them invisible to your customers. Leave that as is and click the
update button.

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Adding The Introductory Text Back In
Let’s make one more change to the customer web portal home page - add back the Introductory Text we removed in the previous
lesson. Now that we’ve seen what the customer sees when they visit our web portal, it makes sense to have some text that
welcomes and orients them to the site.

To show that text, go to Settings >> Channels and then click the edit link next to the Web Portal section. Click the “Show” box in
the “Introductory text on portal home page” section (the first item). Click the Save button at the bottom of the page; and then
check to make sure it is there by clicking the Home tab in the menu bar.

There it is! Feel free to edit this however you like, keeping in mind that the introductory text is visible to your customers. To make
edits, click the green “edit” link in the upper right. You can of course keep the default text that Zendesk starts you off with, a
generic welcome message.

Once you have the text as you want it, check to see how everything looks by following the steps earlier in the lesson and assuming
an anonymous user.

Looking good, but there are two pieces that might confuse our customers - the Zendesk support email address in the introductory
text and the Zendesk in the URL. As we are making the web portal fit more and more with our company, let’s also extend that to
email address our customers use to send in support requests, and the URL they visit.

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Using Your Organization’s Email Address and URL
Using your own email domain with your Zendesk is easy to do and well worth it. Customers respond better when they see that
their question or problem is being handled directly by the company. While you could use the default support address that Zendesk
provides you upon sign up, it can sometimes be confusing to a customer when they see another company in the address. “Am I
writing to the right company?” they may wonder.

So let’s set it up so that your customers write to and receive emails from simply: [email protected]. (In our case, that will
be [email protected].)

Part of this happens on your end with your email server (whether it’s Google Apps, an MS Exchange server, or some other system
your organization uses for managing your email account). Because of that, we will give general instructions easy to follow for
whoever administrates the organization’s email.

Receiving Support Emails at Your Organization’s Email Address

As we showed earlier, it’s quite simple to get mail into your Zendesk. Just send an email to the Zendesk support email you received
upon signing up. Using your own support email address is almost as easy.

If you don’t have an email address that you use for support already, the first step is to create one. This is something usually
handled by whoever administers the email for your organization. It can be whatever you want: [email protected]; help@
yourcompany.com; info@... you get the idea.

Once you have created the address, or if you already have an email address you use for support (say: [email protected]),
simply set it up to forward any mail it receives to your default Zendesk address ([email protected]). That’s
it! The customer will email your address which will send it on to your Zendesk address behind the scenes. They’ve never see the
Zendesk name in the email.

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Email forwarding is generally a simple process based on a rule
engine in your mail server. You say: when a mail comes into
address a, send it to b.
IMPORTANT
___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sending Support Emails from Your If you currently have a support email that you
Organization’s Email Address receive support emails to, do not forward that
Now that you can receive emails using your own email address to your Zendesk until you are ready to start
address, let’s make sure that your customers also receive all using Zendesk for your real support. Those emails
your support responses from that same address (as opposed will start coming into your Zendesk as soon as you
to receiving email from the [email protected].
set up the forward. Better to stick with the default
com address). This is not entirely necessary - the whole
Zendesk email address for testing and set up.
communication back and forth will continue to work even if
you don’t set this up - but it might be confusing for customers
who email one address and then receive a response from a
separate address.

To set this up, go to the Account tab and choose the Mails and Domains page. Find the section labeled Default reply email
address. Unless you’ve already changed it, you should see that default Zendesk support email address you got when you
signed up.

Replace that with your own email address (we recommend using the same one you set up to forward mails into your Zendesk, e.g
[email protected] in our example). Click Save changes at the bottom of the page.

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Now, that will work in most cases, but to ensure your mail from Zendesk is delivered correctly, you should also set up what’s called
an SPF record with your domain registrar (e.g Godaddy, Network Solutions, Hover, etc.). Essentially what’s happening here is that
Zendesk is sending out mail which it is then saying is from your email address. This is fine, and the SPF record basically tells the
computer that receive emails delivered this way that it’s all right for Zendesk to send mail under your email address. If you don’t do
this, there is a chance your emails may be flagged as spam.

We explain how to set up this SPF record in our support forums: https://support.zendesk.com/entries/8051. It is a bit technical --
if you have someone who manages your web site, they would be the ones to talk to about this -- but the place you registered your
domain name should have some good documentation on how to do it as well.

Using Your Own Domain Name

Ok! We’ve changed colors and logos, and set it up so that all email communication comes from your own domain name. Lastly,
we’ll remove the “.zendesk” from your support site URL so you can use your own domain name; so, for instance, instead of typing
mondocam.zendesk.com your support site would be at support.mondocam.com.

This is also a bit technical and will require more work at your domain registrar. Essentially, what we need to do is go to the place
where your domain name is registered, create a special address, and say that whenever a person goes to that address, show them
your Zendesk.

You will be creating a subdomain of your website, meaning something like: support.yourwebsite.com or help.yourwebsite.com,
where ‘support’ and ‘help’ are the subdomains in that example (though, your subdomain can be whatever you want).

Step 1: create a CNAME record within your DNS settings. That’s a lot of acronyms we know, but your domain registrar or the
person who manages your website should be able to set it up. We’ve written up an example with Godaddy in our support forums.
The important part is that you point your subdomain (sometimes called a hostname or an alias) at your default Zendesk account
address (which is the address in the URL when you first create your account).

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Step 2: Once this is created, you can go back to your Zendesk
and to the Mails and Domains page under the Account tab.
Find the section labeled Host Mapping and enter the entire TIP
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
URL you created with your CNAME record. In the example
above it would be support.mondocameras.com
It is very important that you create the CNAME
Click Save Changes and now your new support site is on your record first because if that is not in place when you
domain name. Congratulations! put your new URL in the Host Mapping box, you
will be unable to reach your support site home page.
If this does happen to you, you can always go to
youraccount.zendesk.com/access/normal
Summary
which will bring you to your home page no matter
In this lesson we went over how to make your Zendesk a
part of your organizations overall look, feel, and identity what happens.
by changing the logo and colors to match your branding; as
well as using your name and hiding the Zendesk one so your
customers don’t see the Zendesk name while interacting with
your support.

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Lesson 4: Organizing your support tickets
with Views/Queues
Once support requests start coming into your system, you need to organize them into groups that make
working with them easier. If you had one support request a day, organization is not that important; but once
you start getting tens or hundreds a day, you need to be able to view them in groupings which are meaningful
to your business and your support team. Otherwise, you risk becoming overwhelmed with a lot of tickets and
unable to decide which ones require your attention. Just think if you never filed anything away in your life and
you just put everything in one big pile. You’d lose control of what was in it pretty quick.

In this lesson, we’re going to look at Zendesk Views. Views are customizable queues for your support requests or tickets. To see
your current views, click on the Views menu in the upper right of the menu bar.

Views organize your tickets into groupings which should help you stay on top of them. Perhaps you want to know which tickets
need your attention; or to be reminded of tickets which haven’t been addressed in a while; or see all the high priority tickets in your
system. Views let you see your tickets in these and many more ways.

While Zendesk provides you with some default views, it’s important that you set up your own views which will help your support
team focus on the tickets they need to address when they need to address them.

We’ll be changing one of Zendesk’s default views to highlight which of our unsolved tickets are open (require our attention) and
which are pending (waiting for more information from the customer). You’ll recall from lesson one that Open and Pending are
different ticket statuses. This will help us focus in on which support issues we should be working on at the moment.

We’ll also deactivate some of the default views we aren’t using at the moment.

What’s Open and What’s Pending?

Before we actually change any of the views, let’s check our main view – My Unsolved Tickets. Click the View tab in the upper right
of the top menu.

If you haven’t already, you should see a ticket in there from Kelly H. titled “Welcome to Zendesk, You’ve Got a Ticket!” Kelly is a
real-life Zendesk support agent. Click into the ticket and read what it says.

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She submitted this by sending an email to your default
Zendesk support address ([email protected].
com). Because it will actually be helpful to what we are doing
TIP
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
in this lesson, we are going to follow her directions: reply to
the ticket and set it to pending.
If you want to check what happened when you
Recalling what we did in the first lesson: hit submit, remember that you can always see
• Reply to Kelly as she suggests: How am I doing? the ticket log by clicking the All Events and
• Change the status to pending Notifications link.
• Update the ticket

Now we are back in our view. Depending on how much testing

you’ve been doing on your own, you might only see the one
pending ticket. Let’s add another one for testing purposes – since we are setting up our view to show us which tickets are pending
and which are open, it would be better if we had an open ticket in there. It’s a good practice to create test tickets as you work with
your Zendesk. Every time you add something new or want to change something, you can use your test tickets to make sure it works
as you expect. Better to test on yourself than on your customers.

To create a new ticket click the New button in the top right of the menu bar. This brings you to a new ticket form. While many
tickets come in to your Zendesk via email, you might use the New Ticket button to create a ticket in response to a phone call, for
example. The new ticket form looks like the tickets we’ve been working with, except nothing has been filled in yet.

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Let’s say your boss has called you with an urgent request
from a VIP customer. To keep track of that request, you
create a new support ticket. Fill it out with the customer’s NOTE
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
information and the request.

Because we have not communicated with this customer Zendesk requires an email for all customer tickets.
through Zendesk before, we need to add them to the system This is why a customer account is automatically
first. Click the “add new user” link under the “Requester” created when they email a question in; but why you
text field. need to add their email manually when filling out a
new ticket.
Put in the user’s name and phone number if you have it.

Click create and then fill out the rest of the ticket with an urgent request. So even though you are the one filling out the ticket, you
can ascribe it to the user. They will receive any further communication just like a normal ticket; and you will be able to reference
this issue later when looking at their user account.

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Change the Type to “Problem” and the Priority to “High”. Your form should look something like this:

Note that the customer data you just added is on display in the right column.

Click the submit button to create the ticket.

List vs. Table Layout

Now we have at least two tickets in our
Unsolved Ticket view: the one from Kelly
and the one we just created. They are
currently displayed in List layout, which
shows the subject of both tickets as well
as the most recent comment. There is
also a small label indicating whether
the ticket is open – and thus requires
attention – or whether it is pending –
meaning that you are waiting on
further information.

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List layout is good for seeing the most recent activity on tickets, but we want to focus more on which of our unsolved tickets
are pending and which are open. To do that, it is best to view the tickets in Table layout. It’s best practice to create a list that
separates all the tickets that currently require your attention from the tickets that don’t. This will make your support agents and
you much more focused and effective, especially if you are dealing with a large volume of tickets.

To modify the layout, click the Table link in the upper right of the main column.

Nice! The Table View separates the tickets into two distinct areas, those that are open and those that are pending. So now when
we look at our unsolved tickets, we can quickly see which ones require our attention.

Note that by selecting Table view, we’re not establishing a permanent change in how we view these tickets. Next time you go back
to the Home Tab and then come back to view your tickets, they will be back in the List layout as it was when we started. So we’ll
edit our “Unsolved Tickets” view so that it always shows our tickets in table layout, and grouping our open and pending tickets.

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Editing a View
To change how a view looks (as well as which tickets it shows you), click the Edit link in the top right bar (in the same place as the
Table link you clicked earlier). Go to your Views >> My Unsolved Tickets if you aren’t there already and click that green edit link.

It looks similar to the Triggers screen we looked at in lesson one. Basically, the top section defines what kind of tickets you want to
show up in the view (i.e. this could be tickets assigned to you, high priority tickets, tickets that haven’t been responded to in over a
month, etc.); while the bottom section sets how the page is organized.

Under Formatting options, you’ll see that you can switch the view from “List” to “Table”. Choose “Table”; this will make Table the
default layout of your My Unsolved Tickets View.

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This opens up another set of options. While there are a lot of choices, it’s basically a list of ticket data which you can select to
include in this view. On the right are items of data you will see for each ticket; and on the left are all the other options you can
include. To move items between lists, you just drag and drop the items you want.

For right now, we just need some really basic data, most of
which is already there. We want to see:
• who sent in the ticket - called the Requester in the table
• what the subject line is - called Subject
• when it came in - Request date

We don’t really need score at this moment, so drag and drop

it from the right column into the left. (Score shows you how
important a ticket is in relationship to other tickets; helpful,
but right now let’s focus on the basics.) Leave everything else
the same for now.

So we now have the types of data we want to see about our tickets. What about grouping them by their status like we set out to
do (open or pending)?

You configure this in the Group By section underneath the columns. The drop down should be set to “Status” already, but if it’s
not, open up the drop-down and choose it. You’ll see that there are many options for grouping your tickets in a particular view. This
gives you a second level of organization within your views. For instance, you may want to see all your high priority tickets in one
View, but then group them by which agent they are assigned to; or perhaps, what date they came in. In our case, we want to see
which of our unsolved tickets are open and which are pending.

The next section – Order By – reads “Score”. We removed score from our columns up above, so change that to “Request Date”. That
will mean that within your groupings – open or pending – they will be in order of the date they came in, similar to how your email
program works probably.

Click the update view. Now any time you look at your Unsolved Tickets, you’ll see them in the table layout, grouped by their status.

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Removing Unused Views
Let’s continue setting this up so your agents and you can better
focus on what’s important in your help desk right now. Even
though you want to view your tickets into meaningful chunks
or views (i.e. which tickets are open right now), you don’t want
more views than necessary. It’s like going through the closet
and saying: “Do I really wear this?” If not, get rid of it.

To that end, we’ll reduce the number of views you see when
you click Views tab in the menu bar (see right).

Zendesk’s default views are based on customer service best

practices. But when you’re just starting out or if you don’t
have very many tickets, some of these default views may not
be useful yet. We haven’t gone over groups, for instance – so
let’s disable some of these views.

You can disable views in Zendesk without deleting them. This

will allow you add them back to your list later when you feel
they might be helpful. For now, let’s disable “New tickets in
your groups” and “Unsolved tickets in your group”.

Click on the Manage tab in the top menu bar and choose Views
from the sub menu. You’ll see that it lists out the same views
you see in the Views top menu drop-down. You also see that
there are already some Inactive views. Roll your mouse over the “New Tickets in your groups” row. A menu reveals itself on the
right with the option to “deactivate”. Click “deactivate”; the page reloads and now “New Tickets in your groups” is in the Inactive
views. Do the same with “Unsolved tickets in your groups”.

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Looking at our views is a little easier now (see right)

The remaining views in the list address scenarios we have

seen and which are useful when you are just starting out with
Zendesk:
• looking at all the unsolved tickets
• looking at tickets which have been recently updated or
recently solved
• looking at all the tickets are pending (waiting on
information from the customer)

There’s one view which contains a piece of Zendesk we haven’t

addressed yet: unassigned tickets? All tickets in Zendesk
must eventually be assigned to a support agent. Assignment
means that the support agent will receive notifications when
the ticket is updated; and it establishes a clear responsibility.
As you are currently the only agent in your Zendesk, all tickets
are automatically assigned to you. We’ll look further at
Ticket Assignment in the next lesson when we begin adding
additional agents to your Zendesk.

Summary
In this lesson, we looked at how to organize the tickets we have in our help desk by using Zendesk Views. When you log into your
Zendesk, you should open up your views and choose the one that best fits what you need to do at that moment -- typically, either
dealing with unsolved tickets; or checking in with the backlog of tickets that are waiting on more customer information.

We evaluated the difference between list format and table format, and chose table format for our main “My Unsolved Ticket” view.
This allowed us to easily distinguish between unsolved tickets that are open awaiting our action and which were pending on a
customer response.

Lastly, because we use views to help us focus on which support requests need our attention, we turned off certain default views
that we don’t need yet.

Extra Exercise
Check your “My Unsolved Tickets” view and see whether Kelly H. has responded to her ticket. If she has, it should now be in the
Open section of your view. This means she has replied. Because the ticket is now back in your court, Zendesk automatically moves
it from pending to open. Review your ticket from Kelly H. and solve it. It’s not good practice to leave tickets open longer than you
have to.

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Lesson 5: Working with Your Whole Team
In the previous lesson, we went over how to organize your support tickets into Views so your team and you
can focus on which tickets matter most at that moment. In this lesson, we’re going to start setting up your
team. We will add an additional support agent to your help desk and show you how to organize your agents
into groups.

Working with others on a support team presents many challenges (as anyone who’s tried to share one group email box will tell you).
It can be difficult to know who has responded to what; or which issues should be handled by which person. The amount of time lost
on trying to get your whole support team on the same page is a productivity killer.

Also, if your team is more than a few people, you probably have agents who specialize in a particular aspect of your business. When
issues related to that aspect come in, you need a way to get it to that person; and they need a way to manage their personal queue.

To address these challenges, we’re going to look at how to assign tickets to people on your support team. Each ticket within
Zendesk is assigned to particular agent - adding a layer of accountability to your support work. We’ll also see how you can use
triggers to assign tickets to particular agents automatically based on the content of the ticket (i.e. all billing issues go to the agent
who is the billing system expert). This will give us a chance to investigate the Zendesk web form, another way for your customers
to get tickets into your Zendesk.

By the end of this lesson, you should be ready to start building up your team and assigning tickets to them; as well as creating the
rules (or triggers) to automate how you assign tickets.

The Three Types of Users

in Zendesk
To add an additional agent to your team, go the
People page under the Manage menu. Before
we add a new agent, let’s quickly look at the
People page and the three different kinds of
users in Zendesk.

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The above is a standard set of users for new trial users. The
owner of the account is listed at the bottom (presumably you)
- you can see the small owner label underneath their image. ADVANCED TIP
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
The owner is by default an admin of your Zendesk. You can
create additional admins. The role of the admin is to manage
You can change end-user access to your help
how the help desk works and be in control of many of the
global help desk settings. desk – for instance, require that new users create
an account before they may submit a ticket – in
If you’ve been following through the previous lessons you’ll Settings >> End-Users tab.
also see the two people from whom you received tickets – the
customer test account you created in Lesson 1 and Kelly H.,
the Zendesk employee whose ticket we discussed in Lesson 4.

These two accounts are called end-user accounts; this is the

type of user your customer will be. End-users can create tickets and contribute to your community forums, but they cannot do or
see any of the behind the scenes management. Note that while you can create new end-user accounts manually, in most cases
they are created automatically simply by the person sending in a ticket. An end-user does not have to sign up, in other words, to
work with your help desk - they can just send in a ticket and Zendesk will remember them.

Lastly, (thought not represented above) are your agents. Agents are those who answer tickets and moderate forums - they run your
support day-to-day. (Note that admins can by default do all the things that agents can do.) Most support teams are made up of
multiple people. Let’s grow your team by adding our first additional support agent.

Adding and Working with More

Support Agents TIP
To add another agent, click “Add user” in the upper right of ___________________________________________________________________________________________________

the main column. Fill out the form on the subsequent page,
either with one of your colleague’s information; or, if you When setting up Zendesk’s we often advise that
are working alone, or just want to test Zendesk out further the owner create a test end-user and a test agent
before bringing others in, you may use another of your email
account. It helps greatly with set up as you can
addresses to create a test agent account.
quickly test out how each type of user experiences
the site. When doing so use names like Johnny End-
User and Mary Agent, so you can quickly recognize
them in your emails.

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To create the new agent:
• Fill out name
• Fill out Email
• Optionally, upload a Photo
• Add a note in the note field that reads
“This is <your name>’s test
agent account”

You can leave Detailed Information, Twitter

account, and Organization alone for now.

When you get to roles, select Agent (End-

user will be selected by default). A set of
options opens up - these options allow you
to finely control this particular person access
and role within your help desk.

Because we are just getting started, it makes the most sense to bring on another agent with pretty broad access - someone
who can help us get our Zendesk set up.. We can always restrict it later. To do so, leave all the settings as is, except switch “Can
moderate topics in forums” from No to Yes.

Click the Create button and your new agent is created. Notice the Agent label below their image.

The person you signed up will now receive a welcome

email with a link that verifies their account and asks
them to choose a password. If you are using one of your ADVANCED TIP
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
own email addresses to test this, go ahead and check
your email and go through the verification process.
Need to import a lot of users all at once? Zendesk
also offers a few ways to bulk import your users.
This support article explains how.

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Creating Accountability within Your Support Team by Assigning Tickets
One common problem in support teams with multiple people is establishing who is in charge of which support requests. If it is
everyone’s responsibility to answer a particular ticket, then it is effectively no one’s responsibility. In Zendesk, each ticket must
eventually have someone assigned to it (or, as we say it in Zendesk: have an assignee). In the previous lessons all tickets were by
default assigned to you, since you were the only agent in the system.

But now that you have another colleague working with you, the assignee must be set. Why does each ticket require an assignee?
Because it clearly defines responsibility within your support workflow. Once a ticket is clearly assigned to a particular person, they
are much more likely to address it, simply because no one else will. Assignment can always be passed off to another agent (if, for
instance, another agent has a particular expertise that is better suited to the ticket), but at any given time it is clearly someone’s.

Let’s create a new ticket and assign it to the agent we just added to our help desk. Let’s assume we just received a call from one of
our customers who is experiencing a billing issue; and that our new agent is the billing expert in our organization.

While on the phone with the customer, we open up a new ticket within Zendesk by clicking the New button in the upper right of the
menu bar. They are a new customer and have not contacted our support before, so as in Lesson 4, click the “add a new user” link
under the Requester text box.

Click the Create button; this will bring you back to your ticket with the customer details filled in. Next, we’ll fill out the ticket with
the customer’s issue - say, they were double-charged on their credit card. The subject can read, “Double-charge on credit card”; in
the description, you can make a note about what your call was about: “I just got off the phone with this customer who is seeing a
double-charge on their credit card.”

Now, we want to assign it to the

new agent we just added who is
our support person in charge of
billing issues. Notice that there
is a new drop-down field on the
ticket now: Assignee. Open it up
and choose the new agent you
just added. (You’ll see that you
are also an option in the drop-
down as you are also an agent.)
Leave the status of the ticket
to “New” (until the new agent
opens it, it is still a new issue);
change the type to “Incident;
and make the priority “High”. It
should look something like the
screenshot below:

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Click the Submit button. A new ticket is created. What happens now?

First, Zendesk automatically notifies any agent who is assigned a ticket. It’s fine to assign a ticket to someone, but it’s no use
if they don’t know it was assigned to them. To confirm that they were notified, go back into the ticket by either clicking the link
in the notification that tells you the ticket was created or by using the Recent Tickets menu in the top menu bar. Scroll down the
the Events section of the ticket and click the “All events and notifications” link on the right side. We’ve looked at this in previous
lessons - it logs every action taken on a ticket.

Here we see that the ticket was indeed

assigned to our newly added agent; and
that a notification was emailed to them
(using a trigger).

The email your agent receives looks like

this (if you are using your own email to
go through this lesson, you’ll receive
this email):

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The agent can then either follow the link or respond directly from email to work on this support request further.

If you look at the Views menu in the upper right, you should now see a difference between “My Unsolved Tickets” and “All Unsolved
Tickets”. “ My Unsolved Tickets” collects all the unsolved tickets assigned to you; “All Unsolved Tickets” collects all the unsolved
tickets period. Click into “All Unsolved Tickets” - if you remember the previous lesson, you’ll see that this view groups the tickets
by assignee (see below).

Automatically Assigning Tickets to Agents

Now that’s we’ve assigned a ticket to another agent (and gone over the reasons for why each support request should have an
assignee), let’s make the process more efficient by automating it. Remembering lesson 1, we are going to be building a trigger that
automatically assigns billing related tickets to our new support agent. While there will always be a need for you to manually assign
tickets to other agents, it’s a best practice to automate what you can within your help desk. This will reduce the amount of human
error in your support -- forgetting to assign the ticket when you update it say -- and also allow your support to scale as more and
more requests come in. It’s one thing to read a couple billing related questions and assign them to our billing expert; it’s another
thing to do that with hundreds of tickets.

The process we use here can be used to address most scenarios when you want to automate some piece of your support.
A.We’ll define a task we do often
B. we’ll build a trigger (and any other component in Zendesk we need) to address that task
C. we’ll test what we’ve built.

We’ve already defined what we want to automate: the process of assigning billing related support requests to our new agent (who
is the billing expert on our team). Now let’s look at the pieces we need to accomplish that.

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Building a Web Form
First, we need to know which questions are billing questions or not. There are many ways to do this in Zendesk, but one of the
most effective is to configure the support form on your Zendesk support site.

To see the default support form, we need to put ourselves in our customers shoes. In Zendesk, you can assume the identity of any
user of your support system. This means experiencing your help desk from their perspective. This can be helpful to guarantee that
the system looks and behaves as you want it to for each person.

STEP 1: Click on the Manage menu in the top navigation and choose People. Remember the distinction between end-user, admins
and agents from earlier in the lesson. We want to assume the role of of an end-user. To do so click the assume link next to one of
the end-user accounts (Kelly H., for instance; or any user without owner or agent underneath their image).

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STEP 2: This drops you back on to your homepage - it looks similar to the homepage we’ve been looking at all along, but notice that
the navigation bar is different. This is your Zendesk configured for someone who is looking for support. As such, an end-user can
browse whatever knowledge base article or community forums you’ve set up, or, as we want to do here, Submit a Request; you’ll
see a button labeled submit a request in the top menu bar. Click on that button.

This is the default support form - your customers can come to this page, fill out this form, and just like sending in an email, it will
create a ticket for them in your Zendesk. This ticket will look exactly the same for your agents and you.

Ok, but how are we going to know which support requests that come in through this form are billing related? The answer is: in it’s
current form, it’d be pretty tough. Luckily, Zendesk lets you edit and add things to this form. We are going to add a drop down
field for our customers to fill out that asks them what type of question they are asking. With that information, we’ll be able to
accurately assign it to our support agent.

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Adding a New Field to the Support Form
To add a new field, we need to return to our admin status. To do so, click the “Revert Identity” link in the upper right of the page.
Anytime you assume the identity of another user in your Zendesk, you need to click this link to get back your admin perspective.
Doing so will drop you on the People page again.

Now let’s add that new field.

STEP 1. Click the Manage menu and choose Ticket Fields from the options. This page lists all the various fields on your web form.
You may notice that this list has many more fields than the one we were just looking at as an end-user. In fact, this lists all the
fields we saw earlier in the lesson when we created a new ticket as an admin. What’s going on?

Zendesk uses the same ticket form for both your agents and your end-users, it simply shows them different pieces of that form.
The subject field, for instance (the first item on the list) is available to both agent and end-user - both types of users can enter in a
subject for a ticket. The Status field, however, can only be seen and changed by an agent.

Your support form is an important tool in capturing support requests because you can add many different types of information that
a simple email simply cannot. While email is often very easy for customers and very important for the modern support team; the
web form can really speed up and provide your support team with more information upfront.

STEP 2. Click the “Add custom field” in the upper right of the main column. On the next page select drop down list.

STEP 3. Here’s where we configure our new field. Give the field a title (this is for internal use, so name it something you’ll
understand later like “Support Category”) and then add a more descriptive question in the Field Title Displayed to End-users. This
is what your customers will see when they access your web form, so it should be something like “What are you writing us about?”

Leave Required for Agents unchecked, but definitely check Visible to end-users. This is what will put it on the customer support
form. (Note that if you left that unchecked the field would still appear on your support form, but only for your agents.)

This opens up a second set of options. Check Editable by end-users - this will make it so that they can actually open up and choose
an option in the drop down (not actually edit its content). You would leave that box unchecked if you wanted to show them the
current value of the field, but not let them change it, such as if you wanted to show them which agent was assigned to their ticket
(which would be the assignee field, but you didn’t want them to be able to change the assignee.

Next, add a short description which will help explain to users what you would like them to do in this instance, something like
“Please specify what type of question or problem you’re having.”

Lastly, check the Required for end-users box. This makes our drop-down field required for end-users; they must fill it out before
they are allowed to submit their request.

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Your drop down should currently look something like this.

STEP 4. Now we will add the actual options we want our customers to choose from. In the section labeled Field Options add three
or four options in the text field labeled Title. Make one of them “Billing Issue”. To add additional fields, click the green plus button
to the right of the text fields.

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Notice that each time you enter an option, a corresponding tag is created. Zendesk creates these automatically for you (though
you can edit them if you wish). When a customer chooses one of these options, Zendesk will tag that particular ticket with the
corresponding tag. We’ll use these tags to create our trigger. That tag is how the trigger will now what kind of question it is,
specifically if it’s a billing question, and be able to assign it to our billing expert.

Click the Add Field button.

Creating a Trigger to Automatically Assign Tickets

When you create the custom field, there is a notice at the top of the page that notifies us that we “use the field option tags to filter
report, view, trigger and automation conditions and actions.” We are going to create a trigger. Click that link.

Triggers, you’ll remember, are business rules you define that run immediately after tickets are created or updated. For example,
a trigger can be used to notify the customer when a ticket has been opened. Another can be created to then notify the customer
when the ticket is solved. Zendesk starts you off with a number of triggers. For a description of those triggers, check out
Streamlining workflow with ticket updates and triggers in the Zendesk support forums.

STEP 1. We are adding a trigger to automatically assign billing related tickets to our new agent in charge of billing. Click add trigger
in the upper right.

Triggers contain conditions and actions. You combine these to create ‘if’ and ‘then’ statements (if the ticket contains a certain set
of conditions then the actions make the desired updates to the ticket and optionally notify the requester or the support staff). You
build condition and action statements using ticket properties, field operators, and the ticket property values.

STEP 2. Filling out the form.

Title the trigger “Auto-assign to Billing”. Open the dropdown under the “Meet all of the following conditions” header, and choose
tags. This creates a second set of form fields. Leave the second dropdown as “Contains at least one of the following”. In the open
text field write “billing_issue”. Remember from the previous section that when a customer chooses “Billing Issue” on our ticket
form it will tag their ticket with “billing_issue”. We are leveraging that tag here in this trigger.

Next, click the green plus button to add another condition. Choose “Ticket is...” from the drop down. Open the resulting drop down
and look at the options: Created and Updated. This is an important distinction. A ticket can only be created once, but it can be
updated any number of times. In our case, we want this trigger to run when the ticket is created, so choose that in the drop down.

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That covers the conditions. Next, open the drop down under the “Perform these actions” heading. What do we want to have
happen? We want to assign the billing tickets; so choose Assignee, and then choose the agent you created earlier in the lesson.
It should looks something like this:

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Is there anything else we want to do? Well, we probably want
to notify our new agent that a ticket has been assigned to
them. We could click the green plus button and add another HOW TRIGGERS WORK
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
action. Let’s see what that looks like.

This is important because we only want the trigger

Click the green plus button. Choose Email user from the drop
down. In the next drop down we want to choose our new to fire once. If we didn’t specify a particular
agent. We could of course choose their name from the list, moment, then this trigger would fire every time a
but a better technique is to pick “(assignee)”. Triggers can use ticket tagged “billing_issue” was updated. Every
placeholders like this -- send the email to the person assigned time you update a ticket (i.e. hit the submit button
to this ticket. We just assigned the ticket to our new agent, so within the ticket as seen below), Zendesk runs
that applies in this case.
through your triggers looking to see if that ticket
fits any of the trigger conditions. We don’t want the
Now, before we create the default email to send to when a
billing ticket comes in, we should come clean and say, we ticket to be assigned to our billing agent every time
actually don’t have to go through the trouble. It turns out the ticket is updated; we just want it to be assigned
that there is an easier and much more effective way to notify once. So we choose created.
people when a ticket is assigned to them: fire another trigger
that already notifies agents when a ticket is assigned to them.

We saw before that emails are sent out when a ticket is

assigned to an agent (see fig. xx above). This was done by one of those default triggers Zendesk starts you off with. It’s called
“Notify assignee of assignment”. It turns out that one Zendesk trigger can trigger another; in our case, we have one trigger that
assigns billing tickets to a particular agent, and we have another trigger that sends out emails to agents when a ticket is assigned
to them. They can work together. To see how, we need to go back to our list of triggers. Let’s save the trigger we’re working on and
check it out. Click the red minus button next to our “Email User” action and then click the “Add Trigger” button at the bottom.

STEP 3. Ordering Triggers

As we said, triggers can interact with one another, but they need to be in the correct order to do so. When a ticket is created or
updated, Zendesk runs through all the triggers in order. This means that we want our Auto-assign trigger to be above the “Notify
assignee of assignment” trigger. This will ensure that when a customer submits a billing issue ticket, it will first be assigned to our
new agent; and then an email will be sent out to that agent. It doesn’t work the other way around: you can’t send an email out to
the person assigned to the ticket before the ticket is assigned to anybody.

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Our new trigger is down at the bottom. To move it, click the “Reorder” button at the bottom of the list. Then drag the “Auto-
assign” bar to the top.

Now, we have all the pieces in place to automatically assign a ticket to someone. Let’s test it out.

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Testing Our Trigger
To test the trigger we are going to assume an end-user again. Following the steps from before, assume an end-user.

Click Submit a Request in the top menu bar. Notice first that our new ticket field is there (sweet!). Fill out the ticket with a sample
billing issue (you can copy what we have below); and make sure you choose “Billing Issue” from the Reason for Writing field.

Click submit and then revert identity (click the link in the upper right).

To see the ticket that was just submitted, go to Views >> All Unsolved Tickets. The ticket you created should be in there. Click into
it, and see that it is already assigned to our new agent. And, our new ticket field is also in there, already set to “Billing Issue”

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Next, let’s check further by clicking “All Events and Notifications”. Here we can see that not only our “Auto-assign” trigger worked;
but also that one trigger fired the next:

If you used one of your own email addresses for the second agent we added, you will get that notification in your inbox.

Unassigned Tickets
One more small note to wrap up this lesson. Now that you’ve got more than one agent, you’ll notice that there is an “Unassigned
Tickets” view in your View menu at the top. Unless you create an automatic assignment for all your incoming tickets, they will be
unassigned by default. This view is a good place to check often - you want to make sure that unassigned tickets get assigned quickly.

Conclusion
This was a pretty packed lesson. We went over the three different types of Zendesk users and added a second agent.

We also introduced the concept of assigning tickets to your agents and went over two methods of assigning:
1. manually changing the ticket fields
2. automatically assigning using a trigger

In order to create the automatic assignment, we created a new ticket field for the Zendesk built-in support form.

And we checked how this support form worked (and looked) by assuming an end-user.

Now you are ready to add more people to your team as well as build up your support web form and your work flow!

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Appendix: Where to go and what to do next
Turning your Zendesk “on”
It is easy to start using your Zendesk for real-life support. If you have a support email address already in use, simply start
forwarding all the incoming mail to your default Zendesk support email address (for more on this, refer to Lesson 3). From the
moment you start forwarding that mail, all your support communication will start flowing into Zendesk.

If you don’t yet have a support email address you want to use, you can publicize your default Zendesk support email address.
Include and link to it on your own website. If at any time you want to start using a custom support email address, all you need to
do is set up the forwarding. With that in place, the transition will be seamless.

You can also start offering support through your Zendesk by linking to your support web portal home page from your own website.
If you don’t have one already, add a link to “Support” or “Help” and make that link go to your Zendesk web portal.

Learn more about Zendesk

Zendesk has a number of resources to which you can turn GETTING HELP
when you need help or just want to learn more. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________

• The Zendesk User Guide has definitive documentation

Of course, Zendesk support agents are on hand to
on all the Zendesk features. answer questions and offer advice should you need
• Zendesk holds regular webinars – live demonstrations and it. Depending on your plan, you can reach us through:
Q&As about how to use Zendesk and many of its features.
• Our support web site: www.support.zendesk.com
• The Zendesk Support Forums are an active area of
(Starter, Regular, Plus)
discussion about best practices and new features. • Emaill: [email protected] (Regular, Plus)
• Phone (Plus)
Below are some specific resources that might be of interest to • +1 (415) 418 7506
you after this guide: • +44 20 3355 7960
• +61 3 9008 6775
• Streamlining your workflow • Skype: zendesk
- Managing the Help Desk Workflow (User Guide)
- Beginning Zendesk (webinar) Note that while you are in your trial period, you
• Gaining business insight with support reporting & analytics have all the features and support of the Plus plan.
- GoodData for Zendesk (webinar)
- Intermediate Zendesk (webinar) And we make announcements and listen to
feedback on our social channels as well:
• Building and extending your help desk
- Customizing and extending your help desk • Twitter: @zendesk
(support forum) • Facebook: www.facebook.com/zendesk
- Zendesk Integrations Overview

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