Help Centers, especially with the launch of Google and Search allowed companies for the first time to offer self-service to their customers and have some ticket deflection available to lower ticket volumes.
By the 2010s we saw the next evolution with the rise of social networks, customer interactions via messages and early chatbots with hardcoded flows.
And now with the rise of AI and its LLMs and generative capabilities, we’re entering a new era where conversational AI Agents and Copilots are there to offer personal support to customers, and context-aware assistance to agents.
Customer Experience Journey
When we used to talk about a good approach to customer experience or employee support we had Zendesk Suite. A powerful combination of a unified inbox with context in Agent Workspace, an omnichannel approach across social, email and voice, deflection and self-service via the Help Center and a powerful reporting suite in Explore.
All of our customers start with this Zendesk Suite, and it’s still the best software to build your customer experience journey on.
But while Zendesk Suite offers ways to efficiently handle high amounts of tickets, and the included Help Center search offers a way to deflect tickets, we do see customers that reach the limits of their teams’ capabilities, even with the best guidance, setup and continuous support.
The issues we notice with customers can be combined into three buckets.
- The amount of tickets created is too high and agents can’t handle the influx of tickets anymore, leading to longer resolution times and lower customer satisfaction in the end.
- The complexity and work time per ticket are too high because agents need to know lots of processes and need to interact with multiple tools per ticket. Here too longer resolution times will lead to bad customer satisfaction, and the cognitive load of that many processes and knowledge makes training new hires tough, and the repetitive nature of these tickets can lead to burn-out
- We also have customers who become stagnant. Their Help Center doesn’t address new issues, agents keep rewriting the same answers since they’re not available as prewritten replies and the same interactions with external departments happen in the same inefficient way. This happens often due to a lack of (proactive) insights into customer interactions. Hidden issues and inefficiencies are not discovered and never addressed.
Even though these three issues might paint a negative shadow over a customer experience team, the solution is available for each of these issues.
Milestone 1: Implement AI Agents
By leveraging AI Agents and their personal, context-aware and generative nature are ideal to leverage existing knowledge and integrations to offer better self-service to your customers. Customers get the answers they need quicker, leading to higher customer satisfaction. And the fact that fewer tickets are created, reduces the workload on your team.
Milestone 2: Leverage Agent Copilot
Your agents already work in a team. They have colleagues they can count on, they each have unique skills and where one might not know the answer, another colleague is there to help. By leveraging an Agent Copilot you can extend your customer experience team with another team member that proactively suggests replies to your agents, integrates with external tools to automate actions and guides your agents through your procedures.
This reduces the amount of repetitive work, removes the need for context switching to other tools and platforms and makes it easier to onboard new agents.
Less manual work leads to more efficiency and will result in a better experience for both your agents and customers alike.
Milestone 3: Get insights with Zendesk QA
The third tier of improving your customer experience journey and Zendesk efficiency lies in getting insights from the wealth of knowledge hidden in your tickets.
No team lead has time to read every conversation, and manual tagging and categorising tickets by agents will lead to a bias in reporting and will hide important insights. You can only measure the categories you define, so your other category will always hide important topics.
Thanks to the combination of Zendesk QA, knowledge gap detection and use case suggestions for your AI Agents you can fix this.
Zendesk will actively read every conversation and offer you suggestions for articles you should add to your Help Center. It will turn often written replies into macro suggestions so every agent can use that reply.
It will read conversations and look for churn risks, bad interactions, and unprofessional behaviour and offer you personalized coaching reports per agent so you can guide them in their career.
Milestone 4: Break Silos
The fourth solution steps out of the world of Customer Care and asks you to look at your bigger company. Your customer experience team doesn’t work in a silo. They interact with sales. Marketing campaigns that lead to an influx of questions. Escalations to Finance and IT. Communications to external parties like suppliers and partners.
Each of these interactions is an opportunity for improvement. Instead of asking finance for a copy of an invoice, build an integration for agents or customers to download a copy of the invoice themselves.
Instead of agents responding to questions about a marketing campaign, work together with your marketing team to add answers to those potential questions proactively to your Help Center and AI Agent. Index your website and webshop so your bot can also provide answers about your products and services.
Customer Experience Journey doesn’t stop with sales or start with support. It’s a journey that spans the entire relationship a customer has with your company from the moment they discover your brand until it’s time to renew their contract. So integration and collaboration are the keywords for this final step.
How can Premium Plus help improve your customer experience journey?
You’re not alone in this Customer Experience Journey. Premium Plus is there to assist you throughout the growth and evolution of your customer care team.
If you’re new to Zendesk or want to start with CX we have our Essential packages which offer you the best practices in customer experience to get started with Zendesk including setup, training and guidance.
For customers who already have Zendesk in place, we offer free and paid Health Checks to get you an accurate overview of the state of your instance and a list of potential improvements from a setup, technical as well as operational standpoint.
And for those who want to get started with AI Agents or Agent Copilot, we offer custom packages that guide you throughout the entire process.
