M+E Daily

Zendesk: How to Empower Your Teams

In the latest entry in Zendesk’s “Coffee Break” webinar series, “Gaining Operational Agility to Scale,” on March 28, the company discussed how organisations can empower their teams and achieve operational efficiencies through scaling.

“First, we’re going to talk about empowering your teams,” Josh Brzeszkiewicz, SMB customer success manager at Zendesk, said at the start of the webinar. “We’ll talk through empowering agile teams with context and knowledge, using unified agent status to holistically manage capacity and using live dashboards to gain visibility and insight.”

He told viewers: “As we move into 2023, we see several customer experience trends that impact support teams. Increasingly, customers want to reach out to brands via live channels like messaging, if they even want to talk to someone at all.”

Agents, meanwhile, are routinely reporting that they “don’t have all the tools they need to help customers well.”

He noted that Agent Workspace is Zendesk’s “primary interface for support teams built right into the Zendex  Suite, giving teams everything they need to deliver great service at scale.” It’s an “all-in-one platform [that] empowers agents to manage all customer conversations in one location across any channel.”

He told viewers that Agent Workspace “also enables agents to solve issues faster by putting a full context and powerful tools right at the agent’s fingertips,”  adding: “It also helps you gain productivity by helping agents prioritise and focus on what matters most. An important aspect of the Agent Workspace is the context panel. Once agents receive their work, having additional information on who the customer is and how they engage with your business in the past can not only help your agent solve customer requests quickly, but also provide that deeper personalisation customers are looking for.”

Meanwhile, the context panel in the Agent Workspace “comes out of the box highlighting important information about your customer outside the basic ticket content” and It’s also “flexible enough to let teams plug in external data sources to help provide a more holistic view of the individuals your teams are serving.”

Moving on to discuss scaling in more detail, Alfonso Doucette, SMB customer success manager at Zendesk, said: “Part of scaling is ensuring that your teams are able to communicate efficiently with one another. And Side Conversations is one tool available on Zendesk Suite.”

He explained that Side Conversations “gives you a way to keep all of the conversations in one place and, once enabled, your agents can use Side Conversations to reach out to those same teammates or third parties right through the ticket.”

Bots, meanwhile, “bring … content to life by delivering information proactively based off of your customer’s language,” he went on to say. “Our bots are applications used to simulate conversations and deliver automated services to customers, and Zendesk offers basically two flavours of bots that could be integrated at different touch points in the customer journey.”