Getting Started with Zendesk Suite

While all five plans contain the core Zendesk products, the higher plans contain the additional features and capabilities needed to scale and manage the complexity of providing support in increasingly larger organizations and businesses.

For more information about the Suite plans, see About the Zendesk Suite plan types.

Zendesk Suite includes the following products:

	Zendesk Support. This is the ticketing system and agent workspace – the hub of your support experience. Support provides ticket and user management, workflow, and other administrative aspects of the core of your customer service solution. The agent workspace is where all tickets and all interactions with customers from all communication channels are managed.
	Zendesk Guide. With Guide you create a help center that contains your knowledge base articles and the support portal you provide to your customers. Guide also provides you with an authoring environment to create and manage your knowledge base articles. There are also features to enable team member collaboration in the development of your knowledge base content.
	Zendesk Gather. This is the community forum that can be added to your help center. It enables your customers to post topics (such as a question) and interact with other members of your community.
	Zendesk Chat. Zendesk Chat enables customers to initiate live chat with an agent. Chat sessions become tickets that agents can update after the chat session. You can add Zendesk Chat to any website, your help center, and mobile apps. Live chat is one of the ways in which you can interact with customers via messaging (see Zendesk messaging and live chat below for more information).
	Zendesk Talk. This is the voice (telephony) channel. Like live chat and messaging, voice interactions with customers happen in the agent workspace in Support. Talk also provides tools for monitoring all ongoing call activity, status for the agents currently working this channel, and reports to show you, for example, your customers’ average wait time and average call length. The voice channel also enables you to interact with your customers via text using SMS messages.
	Zendesk Explore. Explore provides all the reporting and analytics tools you need to monitor and evaluate your tickets and agent status and performance. It contains reporting dashboards for the important activity in Support, Chat, Talk, and Guide. You can also use the query tools to build your own custom reports and dashboards.
	Sunshine. This is Zendesk’s open and flexible CRM platform. You can use it to develop custom apps that connect to external customer data and to extend your messaging capabilities by adding additional messaging channels and AI services using Sunshine Conversations.

In addition to these products, Zendesk Suite contains additional features and functionality that automate and streamline your customer service, offer your customers and agents rich conversational experiences, and help to address the needs of increased organizational and business complexity and volume.

As an admin user for your Zendesk Suite account, you have access to either all or just some of the products in Zendesk Suite. What access you have depends on how your Zendesk user profile has been configured. For the sake of this section, let’s assume you're an admin user with complete access to everything in your Zendesk Suite (user access and roles are explained below in Accessing admin settings in Zendesk Suite.

To get started using Zendesk Suite, you sign in to Zendesk and you’ll see getting started tasks for admins.

The individual product and suite settings and configuration options that admins have access to are located in several places. In the individual products such as Chat, and Explore, you can find the admin settings by locating the Admin icon () in the left-side toolbar for each product dashboard. For Support, admin settings are located in Admin Center.

In Guide, you access the admin settings and tools from the top navigation bar (via the Guide admin link). This is because the default view of Guide is the help center, which is what your end users also see. The top navigation bar is only displayed to admins and agents.

In the individual Zendesk Suite products, the admin settings are used to configure those specific products. For example, the settings in Guide allow you control the help center’s content moderation features, whether or not end users need to sign in to access your help center, enable Google Analytics to help you better understand web traffic to your help center, and other options.

For admin settings that affect more than one product in Zendesk Suite, you use the Admin Center. You access this through the product tray (), which is included in all Zendesk Suite products and is located in the top navigation bar.

You use the product tray to switch between the different parts of Zendesk Suite. At the bottom of the tray you can find the link to the Admin Center.

In the Admin Center, in addition to Support settings, you’ll find the settings that are relevant to your account: your billing information, access security, integrations, channels, and so on. We’ll discuss several aspects of working with the Admin Center later in this article. You can find more detailed information about all of these settings in Using Zendesk Admin Center.

When you add admin and agent users to your Zendesk Suite account, you select the products they have access to and also their role permissions.

All users are added to your account in Admin Center via the Team members page or the Add tab in the Agent Workspace.

When you add a user, you choose their type as either a staff member (team member) or end user. You then assign your team members to the different parts of Zendesk Suite by editing their user profile.

In a team member’s profile you click the Manage in Admin Center link, as shown above. See Opening the team member profile for step by step instructions.

On the team member’s profile page in the Admin Center, you choose which Zendesk Suite products the team member has access to and also their role (what actions they are allowed to take in each of the selected products).

As you can see above, all team members have access to Support; however what they are allowed to do in Support (and in the other products) is based on their assigned role. See Setting roles and access in Zendesk Admin Center.

Each product contains an admin role, which allows the person assigned to this role to access the product’s admin settings to do things such as configuring the product, setting up workflows, and so on. You can assign the admin role to as many people as you need to.

Agents provide customer support, interact with end users (via email, chat, messaging, voice, and other channels) and solve their support issues. Admins are also agents.

What an admin or agent can do in a product varies. Also, there are additional roles for each product. The role options are displayed when you click the Role drop-down list. For a detailed explanation of the roles for each product, see About team member roles in Zendesk Admin Center.

The other type of users that are added to your Zendesk account are end users (the people you provide support to, your customers). They can be added by importing them into your account, added manually by agents, or automatically as they contact you for support using the communication channels you set up.

Your customers can contact you via any of the communication channels you set up and all those interactions from those different channels are captured in their individual user profiles if the end user’s channel-specific contact points (telephone number, messaging handle, etc) have been added to their user profile.

Therefore, it’s possible to be in contact with a single customer using multiple channels and have more than one user profile for that customer. For example, a customer first contacted you for support via email message (and their user profile was created using that email address) and then later they called your support telephone number and the agent they spoke to did not inquire if they had already contacted them for support or asked for their email address. Likewise, that same customer could also contact you using one of their other email addresses, which creates a new user profile.

To manage these cases, you can easily merge duplicate end user accounts so that every support transaction is tracked in a single user profile. See Merging a user's duplicate account.

Although an email address is not always required for an end user account to be created, it’s best, if possible, to acquire each end user’s email address because an email message is often the best way to follow up on a support conversation that occured on a different channel such as live chat and voice.

Having multiple accounts for a single end user is not a technical issue; you can successfully support your customers on any of the channels you set up, even though separate channel-specific user profiles might be created. However, if maintaining a single user profile is important to you, you should always ask ‘new’ contacts if they have previously reached out for support and ask for their contact details to see if you can match them to an existing user profile.

You can also organize end users if needed. For example, you can segment your end users into organizations and then view, route, and report on tickets specific to those organizations.

For more information about end user accounts, see Adding end users.

Your team members must be signed in and and be authenticated to access any part of the Zendesk Suite, for obvious security reasons. You can choose between the native Zendesk user authentication, third-party authentication using Microsoft or Google, or single-sign on using a number of different services. Zendesk authentication is enabled by default.

Team members sign in once per session and then access the products that they have access to via the product tray.

Team member authentication is managed on the Team member authentication page of the Admin Center. There you choose between Zendesk or external authentication, set up single sign-on and two factor authentication, configure IP restrictions, and so on.

You also use the Admin Center to manage end user authentication. You have the option of requiring end users to sign in and be authenticated to use your help center to submit support requests via the support request form.

In addition to the support request form in your help center, you can embed your Zendesk support into your websites and mobile apps and you have the option of requiring end users to sign in for a live chat on your website so that you can authenticate who they are.

For more information about security settings, see Managing security settings in Admin Center.

We’ve mentioned support channels briefly a number of times in this article. You know that live chat and messaging and voice, for example, are channels by which your customers can use to contact you for support. These are just several of the many channels that you can add.

All incoming support requests from each channel you set up automatically become tickets, which you can then view, manage, and resolve in the Agent Workspace.

Admins are able to add channels using the Channels section of the Admin Center.

Here’s a quick summary of the channels you have available to add. Follow the links for more information about and instructions for adding these channels.

The channel that was used to submit a support request is visible on the ticket, below the ticket title, as in this example.

You’ll also use this channel source information when viewing reports in Explore (see Understanding ticket channels in Explore) and if you want to set up routing for tickets that are received from specific channels (more about this below in Routing incoming support requests).

The live channels (voice and live chat) are directly routed to the pool of agents who have been assigned to provide support to those channels. If no agents are available, or during off hours, requests from those live channels can be followed up on (the voicemail channel accepts voicemail messages and live chat prompts customers to leave a message that creates an email-based ticket).

Incoming support requests from all of the channels you set up can be automatically routed to specific agents or agent groups and organized into views.

Incoming voice calls can be assigned to a specific group (or more than one group) so that only agents in those groups are able to see and respond to those calls. Tickets created through the email channel, sent to a specific support address, can be automatically assigned (for example, email sent to sales@mycompany.com is assigned to a sales support group). Also, in Chat you can route incoming chats to agents using skills-based routing (for example, only agents who are fluent in a specific language are able to respond to chats in that language). These are just several examples of the many options you have for routing tickets.

You set up and manage ticket routing in Admin Center.

To automatically route your tickets, you create business rules (triggers and automations) that evaluate ticket data and then take action. For example, incoming support requests from a specific channel are assigned to a specific group, as in the example above. You can also modify the other ticket data, such as setting the ticket’s priority based on who sent you the support request.

You can also handle ticket routing manually. As an example, if you want to triage all incoming tickets before assigning them to agents, you can assign someone the role of triage agent who evaluates the incoming tickets in a view that’s been created for that task and then manually assigns the tickets to the appropriate agent or group.

For a detailed explanation of ticket routing and links to articles that provide set up instructions, we highly recommend that you read the following article: Routing options for incoming tickets.

An important aspect of managing your flow of incoming support requests is to set the customer’s expectation about when their request will be responded to when you’re not available.

If you’re not providing 24/7 support to your customers, you’ll need to have a workflow in place for following up with customers, regardless of when they contact you. You do this in Zendesk Suite by creating a business hour schedule that can then be used to automatically inform your customers about your availability and when you’ll be able to respond.

You set this up in Admin Center.

You set the days and hours that you are available and when a request comes in outside those hours the customer is notified. For example, an email message support request during non-business hours generates an email message reply that you use to indicate when the customer can expect to be contacted and also direct them to your self-service articles in your help center.

This is done with a trigger that evaluates if the message has been received during non-business hours and then generates a notification to inform the customer if it has been. You can also create automations (time-based responses based on a number of business hour conditions).

How business hours are used differs across the many channels you can add. The email message example above is straightforward (receive an email message, reply with an email message). You can respond to a tweet with a tweet. A chat request can be automatically responded to with a prompt for the customer to send you an offline message instead. These are common examples.

For more information about setting up business hours, see Setting your schedule with business hours and holidays.

As mentioned earlier in this article, you can also use the Answer Bot to automatically reply to a number of different types of support requests. See Understanding everywhere you can use Answer Bot.

Related to customer expectations and response time are service level agreements (SLAs). An SLA is an agreed upon measure of the average response and resolution times that your support team delivers to your customers. Providing support based on service levels ensures that you're delivering measured and predictable service. It also provides greater visibility when problems arise.

You define SLA service targets so that you and your agents can monitor your service level performance and meet your service level goals. Zendesk highlights tickets that fail to meet service level targets so that you can promptly identify and address problems.

Support SLA policies don’t apply to live channels such as Chat or Talk because the service targets are different. For example, let’s say that your company goal is to answer chats within 60 seconds and you want to know how well you‘re doing. You need to use Explore to create a report, instead of using a SLA policy.

For more information, see Defining and using SLA policies.

Your primary reporting tool in Zendesk Suite is Zendesk Explore, which provides key metrics, reports, and dashboards for Support, Guide, Chat, and Talk. You can also create custom queries and dashboards.

For a detailed introduction to Explore, see Getting started with Zendesk Explore.

In addition to the reporting provided by Explore, you can find several other reports in Support. On the Reporting page () in Support you’ll find three dashboards that give you insight into the activity in your help center (knowledge base, community, and search). See Analyzing knowledge base activity and Analyzing help center search results.

The voice and chat channels also provide live activity dashboards. These show you information such as number of total calls in the queue, average wait time, number of agents who are online, number of active chats, and so on.

For more information about using the live activity dashboards, see Analyzing call activity with the Talk dashboard and Using the Chat dashboard with the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

To receive customer satisfaction feedback, you can enable customer satisfaction rating on resolved tickets and for live chats.

For live chat sessions, the end user prompt to rate the service they received is included in the chat window.

For all resolved tickets, a customer satisfaction survey can be sent to the end user when their email is included in their user profile.

This means of course that if you don’t know the end user’s email address (because you interacted with them on Twitter and don’t have their email address, for example) you will not be able to send them the satisfaction survey email message.

To request satisfaction ratings for the support you provide via the voice channel, you must also have the end user’s email address added to their user profile. The email will be sent after the call ends and the ticket is resolved.

You enable customer satisfaction for resolved tickets. For set-up instructions, see Using CSAT.

For information about enabling customer satisfaction rating for live chats, see Measuring visitor satisfaction with chat rating.

In the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus versions of Zendesk Suite, you can extend customer satisfaction rating by enabling Satisfaction Prediction Scores. Satisfaction Prediction Scores are generated using your account’s customer support data, and can identify what characteristics are likely to result in your customer being satisfied. See Working with Satisfaction Prediction Scores.

Zendesk also offers NPS (Net Promoter Score℠) surveys, which is available as a separate add-on. For more information, see About Net Promoter Scores℠.

Beyond all of the many products, features, and functionality provided by Zendesk Suite, you can also extend your support solution by adding pre-built apps and integrations and also by building your own apps and integrations using the Zendesk developer platform.

Finally, many apps and integrations that have been built on the Zendesk developer platform are available in the Apps Marketplace that help to improve agent efficiency, streamline your support workflows, and connect to the many other web applications and services you use everyday.

Now that you have an overview of Zendesk Suite, you can begin planning how you’ll roll out your Zendesk support solution to your team members and then your customers.

Because Zendesk Support is the hub of Zendesk Suite and all of the Zendesk products are designed to work with Support, you’ll want to set it up first.

Get started by adding your team members, organize them into groups, assign admin user roles, create any custom user profile fields that you need, set up organizations, create your support email addresses, and add custom ticket fields and ticket forms.

You should then set up the support channels that you want to provide to your customers. Set up messaging, live chat, the voice channel, and so on. Determine which agents will staff your channels. Determine how you’ll handle support requests during non-business hours and set up a business schedule.

With your channels in place you can then set up your automated workflows using views and triggers and automations.

While setting up new channels is a relatively easy task, an important consideration is when to make channels available and for whom. Limiting availability at first can help you to gauge demand and assess training and staffing needs to ensure a responsive customer experience.

To start, it’s a good idea to set up a self-service channel using Guide to create your help center. Create knowledge base articles for common support issues so that your customers can resolve many of their issues on their own. Having a knowledge base also sets you up for providing better service through other channels such as email and chat and messaging because the Answer Bot uses those articles to automate responses to support requests.

You can then begin deploying live channels like live chat and voice using a phased approach. For example, you might start using voice to make outbound phone calls on particularly complex tickets or by implementing proactive live chat on your website so that you have better control of the flow of chats and the need to have live agents available to respond to them. This gives you time to assess important metrics such as your average length of calls and chats and how much time agents need after calls and chats to wrap things up. These metrics will provide you with the data you need to determine staffing levels and also training needs.

To help you understand and manage the steps involved in launching your Zendesk support solution, your next step should be to refer to the Launch guide for Zendesk Suite. There you’ll find the step-by-step instructions, best practice advice, and videos to help you successfully rollout support to your customers.

For more information about Zendesk plan, Zendesk functions, Zendesk pricing, Zendesk implementation and CX transformation, contact us at:

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