It’s an exciting time; your business is growing organically, or perhaps you’ve just raised your first serious round of funding. As your business scales, so too will your Zendesk operations. But what works when servicing 100 or 500 customers a week is often not what’s required to successfully serve 10,000 or 100,000 customers per week.

In this article, we take a look at the common challenges facing Zendesk admins and CS leads as their Zendesk operations grow, as well as the solutions to keep you on track.

Increased Ticket Volumes

As your business grows, inevitably so will your ticket volumes. Whilst on the surface this is a sign that your business is healthy and thriving, every CX specialist knows that a huge part of their role is ensuring that ticket volumes do not scale linearly with sales.

Many start-ups begin life in the growth stage, in which growth is prioritized over profitability. This helps prove concepts and land essential investors. It’s those same investors, however, who will soon be asking to see a focus on profitability as they start to turn their attention on getting a return on their investment.

So, whilst sales must grow, the cost of servicing each sale needs to decrease. That includes the cost of your customer service team.

With this in mind, we need to find ways to ensure that your customers can still get the support they need, without your agents spending as much time on each of their queries.

The solution to this dilemma is to help customers self-serve as much as possible, and to ensure that those customers that do need your agents’ help take up as little of their time as possible.

This will rely on establishing a well-populated and maintained help center (known as Guide in Zendesk), creating and training a robust Answer Bot, setting up AI-based ticket triage and ensuring that your agents have every possible macro they could need to quickly and compliantly solve customer queries.

Decrease in Quality of Support

Just looking at the above solutions to increased ticket volumes, it’s not hard to imagine a proportion of your customers growing frustrated at either finding it harder to reach an agent or, equally frustrating, finding that response times are increasing. Just as likely is that, as your agents are targeted with solving more queries per hour (in order to reduce cost of servicing orders), the quality of their responses drops.

Whilst macros are a great step forward from manually crafting each and every response, left unchecked they have the ability to wind up your customers no end.

Here we find ourselves entering the old quality Vs. quantity debate. As you scale your Zendesk operations, your budget dictates that you must reduce cost per contact. On the other hand, your NPS targets and/or returning customer rate demands that you leave your customers happier than they’ve ever been.

Quantity has a quality of its own, however, so simply reducing the quantity of tickets isn’t a viable solution.

This is where proper usage of Zendesk’s plethora of quality monitoring and target tools comes in. As a first step, setting up proper SLAs, based on a combination of your customers’ expectations and what your team can realistically achieve, will allow you to ensure that customers are being responded to within acceptable time frames.

On their own, however, SLAs only incentivize speed, not quality. This is why we also need to set up, as a minimum, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) surveys. These are automatically-generated ticket follow-ups that ask the requester to rate the service they receive.

In the case that the customer responds negatively, a simple follow-up question is presented to understand the cause of this reason.

Tickets marked negatively can then be fed back to the agents (and their team lead) to rectify or learn from.

Whilst learning from individual SLA breaches or CSAT surveys can be useful on a day-to-day basis, to really understand how well your Zendesk operation is scaling, you’ll need to rely heavily on well thought-through and customized reporting.

Stay on top of your data

Arguably the most under-utilized of all Zendesk features is Explore, its reporting function. In the modern age, everyone knows how valuable data is, yet many new clients of mine have little to no reporting set up to give them insights on their operations, often meaning they’re missing out on some really low-hanging fruit that could save their teams hundreds of hours of work or tens of thousands of Dollars.

A good Explore report is the difference between knowing and not knowing that just two of your hundreds of macros are the cause of 80% of your negative customer experiences. These types of insights can be gained from a simple report that plots each macro down the Y column of a table or graph, with each macro’s corresponding average CSAT score next to it.

Whilst Zendesk has a whole host of default Zendesk reports, it’s missing quite a few that most companies certainly need (such as the above). This is where creating custom reports comes in. Although it can be tricky to learn, Explore lets you build a nearly infinite combination of reports to analyze every single part of your operation. That said, if time isn’t on your side, hiring a Zendesk expert to advise and build your reports is often a solution that pays for itself in weeks, not months.

Some of the most impactful Zendesk Explore reports I recommend teams consider include:

• CSAT score per macro (table)
  
  
• CSAT score per agent (table or line graph over time)
  
  
• SLA adherence per ticket category (bar graph)
  
  
• Average number of replies per resolved ticket (KPI)
  
  
• One touch tickets % per agent (table) - this informs you which agents are managing to resolve tickets the quickets or slowest, allowing you to either learn from your best agents or identify training gaps from those struggling
  
  
• Tickets created by day and hour (column charts) - this one is essential to learn how and when to schedule your agents

In conclusion, if you properly automate workflows to deflect queries away from your agents’ precious time, along with creating effective quality monitoring processes and reporting to monitor all of your teams’ efforts, you’ll be in the  strongest possible position to effectively scale your Zendesk operations and support your business to thrive.