Launch guide for Zendesk – CX Experts

Welcome to Zendesk Support! This article provides the framework you need to get your account up and running. It describes the key items you need to set up and gives you guidelines on where to find more information.

This article contains these sections:

Defining your organizational structure

After you've done some basic planning, the next step is to create an organizational and role structure for your staff members.

There are two main roles for your team members: agent and admin. Agents solve tickets and admins, who can also solve tickets, have additional access to the admin features and are able to set up workflows, for example. Also, there are additional roles for different channels and, on Enterprise plans, also create custom roles for more granular control of permissions.

Groups are used for organizing your staff members. Organizations are meaningful collections of your end-users, but they can also include staff members. For more information, see About organizations and groups.

It’s a good idea to set up your organization structure at the beginning because it will be needed when you define your workflow in upcoming steps. You’ll add your team members, along with end users, later in the setup process. If you want to add a few users now for testing purposes, you can do so, but know that any admins or agents you add now will be notified and have access to Zendesk.

Defining your customer support experience

Your customers’ experience of the support you provide to them is a collection of contact points that includes your support email addresses, your help center, your social media presence and other channels you set up, and where you’ve embedded your Zendesk (on any website and also in mobile apps).

In Zendesk, a collection of customer contact points is referred to as a brand. Depending on your plan, you can have from 5 to 300 different brands. For example, you may provide support for both B2C and B2B customers and want the experience to be different for each.

Another part of the support experience is how your customers submit their support requests when they’re not directly communicating with you live (via live chat and voice, for example). You can customize the type of data that your customers need to provide to you when submitting a support request and you can customize the email notifications they receive from you with your company brand.

Configuring settings and access

Before you add users to your Zendesk account, team members or customers, you should also define access security and authentication for both.

All staff members must sign in to any part of Zendesk and you can define your password security level and also what type of authentication will be used. Zendesk user authentication is enabled by default, but you can also choose third-party authentication using Microsoft or Google, or single-sign on using a number of different services.

With customers (referred to as end users in Zendesk), if you require them to sign in, you have the same password and authentication options. In addition, you also have the option of allowing them to sign in using their X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook accounts. For an overview of your options for end user access, see Understanding options for end-user access and sign-in.

Because users may have different security requirements, Zendesk gives you the flexibility to allow multiple authentication methods for each type of user. See Giving users different ways to sign into Zendesk.

Integrating external apps and services

If you also rely on external apps and services to help you manage parts of your business and your customers, you can integrate those into your Zendesk account.

For example, if you also use Salesforce, JIRA, or Slack, you can manage user data and ticket flows across those applications. You can also add apps from the Zendesk Marketplace to integrate with popular services such as SurveyMonkey.

It’s also possible to notify external targets when a ticket is created or updated. External targets can include cloud-based applications and services as well as email.

Defining ticket routing and workflows

With enough of the building blocks in place, you can now set up your workflows and how incoming and updated tickets will be handled. This is where you’ll start using business rules to define automated workflows, set up ticket routing of tickets agents, and create views of your tickets based on various criteria (by channels, by groups, and so on).

For automated routed, you can set up omnichannel routing to assign tickets generated from email, web form, API, messaging conversations, and calls to the agents most available to work on them, based on status and capacity.

Or, if your Zendesk plan includes skills-based routing, you can creates skills and use them in the business rules you create with triggers and automations, for example. If you plan to use skills, you'll create them now and assign them to agents later.

If you’re not already familiar with the routing and workflow tools in Zendesk, here’s a quick summary:

Triggers are event-based business rules you define that run immediately after tickets are created or updated. For example, a trigger can automatically assign a high priority to tickets received from VIP customers.
Automations are time-based business rules that perform an action in your account based on time elapsed. For example, if a ticket hasn’t been answered in a timely manner, an automation can escalate the priority level and notify a manager.
Views dynamically organize tickets based on specific criteria that you define. For example, you can create a view for unassigned tickets received over 24 hrs ago. You can create views that are shared with all agents and agents can create their own personal views of their tickets.
Macros are a predefined set of actions that agents apply to a ticket with one click. You create macros for support requests that can be answered with a single, standard response.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are contracts between you and your customers – a promise to respond to and resolve tickets in a certain amount of time. SLAs enable agents working with tickets to see the time remaining before each ticket is overdue, which makes it easy for them to prioritize.

For an overview of your ticket routing options, see Routing options for incoming tickets.

Adding people

With your organizational structure in place, you can now add agents to your Zendesk account, assign them roles and skills, if needed, add them to the groups and organizations you created, and set their access to specific channels.

You can also add end users to your account if you already have a database of users that you’re already providing support to (for example, you were using some other system to manage users or provide support before you started using Zendesk).

The other method for adding end users to your account is as they come to you for support. For example, via all the channels you provide, your end users contact you for support and a new user account is automatically created. If the end user already has an account in your Zendesk, a new support request will be paired with their existing account. For more information about end-user accounts, see Understanding how end user accounts are handled across Zendesk Suite.

The steps you took in Configuring user access security and authentication to define password security and user authentication are in place and apply to the users you add to your Zendesk account.