How to help agents by removing a blind spot?
Unveiling the Hidden Context in Zendesk
In the dynamic world of customer support, Zendesk stands out as an essential tool for many organizations. It offers agents an intuitive platform to manage workloads efficiently. Typically, agents can see the tickets assigned to their group(s), enabling them to monitor volumes and identify potential issues. A sudden spike in ticket volumes can indicate that something might be wrong. But it is not always that straight forward. Often, the agent must delve deeper into the tickets to uncover broader problems.
The Advantage of Omnichannel Routing
Zendesk's introduction of Omnichannel Routing has brought a significant shift in how work is allocated to agents. With this feature, agents receive manageable chunks of work based on their capacity and skills. This ensures that each agent's workload remains manageable, preventing burnout and maintaining a steady flow of tasks.
However, this system has a drawback: it can blind agents to the overall environment. For instance, there might be dozens of tickets related to a server outage, but if all these tickets are dispersed among agents, no one receives an alert that a significant problem might exist.
Advanced AI and the Power of Intents
As part of Zendesk’s Advanced AI add-on we have Intelligent Triage with its intents detection. These intents can counteract this blind spot. Each ticket now receives an intent, a language defined, and a user's sentiment. Intents are crucial for understanding what each ticket is about. With Intelligence viewer agents can see not only the intent but also how many other tickets in Zendesk share the same intent.
For example, if an agent is dealing with a ticket labeled "server offline" and sees that there are another 30 new and open tickets with the same intent, they gain a direct understanding of a widespread problem. This empowers agents to take swift action and address the issue more effectively.
Furthermore, agents can examine tickets with the same intent that have been marked as solved or closed, enabling them to find potential solutions. This feature is invaluable, as it allows agents to gather more information and address issues more comprehensively.
The Hidden Treasure called Intelligent Triage
It is important to note that the information provided by Advanced AI—such as intent, language, and user sentiment—was initially very visible but has been mostly hidden in the recent Agent Workspace redesign.. This data provides a wealth of untapped context. By making this data more accessible through the Intelligence Viewer, agents can gain a better understanding of the issues at hand, even if the Omnichannel Routing system has dispersed these tickets.
But there is more. Under the intent you will see the amount of tickets currently available in zendesk with the same intent.They are listed per status (new, open, pending, on hold (and solved and closed combined).
You can click on these numbers to check the matching tickets.
And why would you use that?
Example: as an agent you might notice the number of tickets for intent “Performance issue” increasing rapidly. This could mean a general issue with a server. You can directly check if the other tickets are about the same topic.
Or you can check for resolutions by checking closed tickets with the same intent;
In conclusion, while Zendesk's Omnichannel Routing offers an innovative solution for managing workloads, it is not without its drawbacks. The challenge of maintaining visibility into broader issues remains. However, by leveraging advanced AI features and using the Intelligence viewer App, support teams can strike a balance between efficiency and awareness as it ensures that critical metadata is easily accessible.
“I have been an agent for a long time. My God, i would have loved such a feature. Seeing directly all interconnected tickets as they share the same intent. Wouldn’t your agents love it?”
