In Part 1, we looked at some of the more obvious challenges of scaling support operations, from increased ticket volumes to decreases in the quality your team is able to offer. In Part 2, we’ll look at the hidden challenges and their solutions. These are the opportunities to improve your Zendesk environment that most administrators skip over but, executed correctly, will create a best-in-class environment, and at scale!

Integrations

The Challenge

Zendesk often needs to integrate with third-party tools, such as CRMs, ERPs, e-commerce tools, social media platforms and marketing tools.

Integration of any of one these tools is often an imperfect art. Many tools are utilized in order to fulfill a shortcoming in Zendesk’s native abilities. The result is that inexperienced Zendesk admins are likely to accept suboptimal integration solutions that themselves have knock-on impacts and requirements on your Zendesk environment. These can vary from triggers that need to fire in a certain order, to manual data dumps that need to be performed weekly, to a messy tagging protocol that would otherwise never be acceptable.

Whilst these quirks to your Zendesk environment might not be a problem at a small scale, it’s worth seeing them for what they really are: technical debt.

Technical debt is the implied future cost of expedience at the expense of having to rework a system in the future. Just like financial debt, it can accumulate “interest” in that the longer you leave it (and thus the more you build around the issue rather than addressing it), the harder it becomes to shed the debt in the future.

Poorly integrated third-party tools should be considered as technical debt as, whilst they may work well at a small scale, once your Zendesk environment expands, whether that’s by adding other integrations, brands, languages or something else, you will quickly run into problems.

A bit like a dud ingredient in a soup recipe; a single ingredient that’s not quite carrying its weight might not seem like a big deal, but when there are multiple dud ingredients in your soup, you’re not going to enjoy that soup!

The Solution

The solution then is to take your time to ensure that you understand the cost of each extension you integrate into Zendesk. Perhaps even more importantly, take the time to consider the cost of using free tools versus paid tools. Many free integrations require messy workarounds that will pile up the technical debt in no time.

One good method to ensure affordability of integrations whilst your Zendesk environment is small, yet also ensure simplicity of usage once your Zendesk grows, is to look for tools that have a free and paid version.

It’s quite likely that an integration like this will provide a sub-optimal free version that is more than enough initially and also provide a paid solution that meets your needs with fewer workarounds once your business can afford it. This way, you can easily upgrade from the free version to the paid version when the time is right, without having to rework an entire new integration.

Compliance

The Challenge

If your business has plans to go international, it’s worth paying close attention to the legal requirements of each country within which you’ll operate, in terms of data security and protection. Two examples of this are GDPR in the EU and UK, and CCPA in California.

GDPR, for example, has strict rules about how data stored outside of the European Economic Area can be stored.

The Solution

Many European clients of mine thus prefer to make use of Zendesk’s Data Center Location add-on. Included in all Zendesk Suite plans (although not activated by default), this add-on allows you to choose the location in which Zendesk stores your valuable customer data.

For companies operating across multiple jurisdictions, it pays to sit down with your legal department and understand the data processing requirements of each state - and do it before your legal team comes to you and tells you there’s an urgent issue!

Tone of Voice

The Challenge

Tone of voice matters to customers as it’s the language that your brand speaks. If one agent is using a formal, matter of fact tone, but another is using a cheery and informal approach, your customers are going to be left feeling unsure about what your brand really represents.

As companies grow, it becomes harder and harder to rely on your team of two or three customer service champions who simply “get” your brand without having to be trained excessively on tone of voice in Zendesk communications.

Whilst it’s easy for these colleagues to learn your brand inside out whilst your start-up still feels like a closely-knit family, once you get to the scale-up stage and have 10+ members in your CS team, you’re going to need a more sure fire way of ensuring consistency across your department.

The Solution

You’re going to need two tools to crack this; a tone of voice guidelines document, drawn up in collaboration with your marketing department, and systematic use of Zendesk macros.

Your tone of voice guidelines doc will likely apply to your whole company, not just your department, so your business may already have one lying around in a shared drive somewhere.

Once you’ve sourced the guidelines you need, it’s time to build up your macros. By ensuring that your support operations team have a macro for just about every eventuality they deal with regularly, you not only get the obvious time-saving benefits, you also have a free opportunity to ensure that 99% of your comms being sent from Zendesk are using a consistent tone of voice.

My suggestion is to ensure that when writing or updating your macros for operational accuracy, also ensure that they are all written according to your tone of voice guidelines. This way you’ll ensure a consistent customer experience, no matter which of your large team of agents is helping on a given day!

A Bonus Tone of Voice and Compliance tip

The Challenge

This tip combines the previous two topics into one handy tip. When rewriting your macros according to your organization’s tone of voice guidelines, you have an extra opportunity to ensure legal compliance in the language you use.

For example, you may have certain macros explaining a customer’s rights, or maybe you work for a business that needs to carefully distinguish between employees and self-employed workers.

Expecting your customer service team to be able to use the correct terminology 100% of the time is unrealistic without providing them the tools they need.

The Solution

The next time you review your macros as your organization scales, take the time to ensure that they not only smash it on the tone of voice front, but also that they’re setting your business up to be as legally watertight as possible. Don’t leave it to your newly trained team members to guess whether they should use the phrase “partial liability” or “whole liability”!

Summary

To conclude, rather than viewing scaling your Zendesk operations as a difficult problem to overcome, there is plenty of scope to view the task as a clean-up exercise to really get your ducks in a row in a way that you simply didn’t have time to when you first set up your Zendesk environment.

From consistently delivering on your brand’s tone of voice, to ensuring you never upset your legal team, with the right solution, scaling your Zendesk operations is a chance to excel as a Zendesk administrator and create your best Zendesk environment to date.