How can I add the account manager as a follower?
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How can I make a generic trigger that adds the account manager as a follower on all tickets for an org? At the moment we have a few specific named users, but would like to generalise this to [account manager]? Add the account manager that is set at the organisation level to all tickets for that organisation. Eg:If organisation is not internal org name then add [Account Manager]
- Zendesk Manager
Community Member A: If I understand correctly, here's how I'd do that:
Add an Org custom field to input the account manager's email address
Create an HTTP target to set the follower (based on the value set in the previous Org field)
I.e. by inputting different account managers per Org, you can then use a single trigger to always add the correct account manager as a follower. The "If organisation is not ... then add [Account Manager]" conditions sounds like a separate trigger.
Zendesk Manager: Thanks! Am amazed it’s not core fuctionality.
Community Member A: I agree, there's room for improvement regarding this kind of configuration. But at least we could find a workaround.
Manage redirecting URLs from Intercom to the mirrored articles in Zendesk Guide
Anyone who has migrated from Intercom help center to ZD Guide, do you just manage redirecting URLs from Intercom to the mirrored articles in Guide at the DNS provider level? Am I missing anything? I want to point our website.com/support page to the zendesk guide landing page and then redirect the URLs of all published Intercom articles before we shut Intercom down.
- Zendesk Migrator
Hosam Hassan, Certified Zendesk Expert & SupportOps Consultant: Hey, the URL for each Zendesk article is unique to Zendesk. They’ll look something like this:https://help.cointracker.com/hc/en-us/sections/4413915509015-About-My-MembershipIf you’ve set up a URL for each Intercom article with your domain provider, you can point those URLs to the unique Zendesk article. Otherwise, you’ll have to find every area where you’ve linked the Intercom article and replace it the the new Zendesk article. Someone with more Intercom experience might be able to give us more info though.
Zendesk Migrator: We did this several years ago, and we just redirected the domain. It might be possible at the server level to set up redirects for each article, but it would take some dev work most likely.
Community Member A: We set up page redirects at the server level because we were also moving to a support subdomain. If you generate a csv with 2 columns for old and new article URLS and hand that to a dev, then they should be able to quickly build a load of 301 redirects for you.
Zendesk Migrator: Thanks everyone! That is very helpful, I was struggling how to actually start actioning this but this is what i needed, thank you!
Tools for overhauling and maintaining macros
Hi friends! My team is about to start overhauling our macros, some of which have been around for many years. Does anyone have any experience with a project like this? Are there any tools that you found useful either during the overhaul project or for maintenance (essentially document control) afterwards? Right now our expectation is that we'll need to export everything, upload to Notion, make edits, and then transfer those edits back to Zendesk. I'd also love to be able to search within the body of the macro and/or the description, if anyone knows of apps that have that capability.
- Macros Manager
Hosam Hassan, Certified Zendesk Expert & SupportOps Consultant: Hi - here are a few things I’ve done before.
Use Zendesk’s method to extract your macros. https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4409506817178-How-to-export-Zendesk-macros-into-a-spreadsheet
Use a third-party app like https://pythia.cc/products/report to pull reports.
Deactivate any macros that have 0 usage in the last 30 days and only reactivate them if you need them.
Categorize your macros after you’ve cleaned them up. https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408884166554-Organizing-and-managing-your-macros
Otherwise, the process is usually manual.
Dave Dyson, Sr. Customer Service Evangelist at Zendesk: some additional possibly-useful tips:
Community Member A: I've used monday.com to manage macro update projects, to keep track of the ones you have updated and macros still do. Really useful when there are different people working on the project as you can assign tasks and set due dates etc.
Use Zendesk for processing internal company requests
Hi everyone! One of our internal company ops teams would like to start using our support instance of Zendesk to work with internal requests (i.e. coming from company employees). I’m trying to figure out the pros/cons of simply creating a separate group for them or creating an entire new brand. Does anyone use a single Zendesk account for both external and internal requests? I’d love to hear about your approach to this, I’m sure I don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. My thoughts so far: this team’s ZD usage won’t be very high, so my gut feeling is that a group would be sufficient, but I want to understand the scope of changes I’ll need to make to ensure their data doesn’t mess with ours. It looks like with the group approach, I’ll need to:
Go through all of our Explore reports and exclude the new group from them
Update our triggers and automations to also exclude that group
And with that, I won’t be able to limit ticket forms by group, so everyone will see some forms that are not relevant to their function. However, I’ve never worked with separate brands before so I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to set everything up for a new brand. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this! Thank you in advance.
- Zendesk Administrator
Community Member A: Hi, I think you covered the most important bits already. When our clients use ZD for internal and external comms, groups is the first thing that we set up.
You also want to consider different views for the types of queries
What about security/privacy? You might want to limit what tickets agents can see; eg. when a colleague submits something that others in the company are not supposed to see.
It’s relatively easy to explain to employees why there are other forms or not related forms so additional forms (and multiple brands) are not necessary. But if you see that it leads to confusion - or the complexity for internal queries increase and you need extra ticket fields - reconsider brands. It’s easy to set up and can help greatly when separating tickets - especially for reporting.
Zendesk Administrator: Thankfully the security aspect isn’t too tricky; these will be very general operational requests that won’t breach anything if a Support agent sees them. I will, however, limit this new group to see only their tickets. When you say that a brand is easier for reporting – do you mean because it’ll be easier to filter by brand vs. by individual groups? From my understanding I’d still need to go and update the existing reports to exclude this new brand from the data.
Community Member A: Yes, it makes it easier to use the default dashboards with the brand filters. However, if you have custom reports & dashboards I think it doesn’t matter much if you use groups or brands.
Community Member B: Are you also using Jira? We have internal requests going in there rather than zendesk.
Community Member C: Another POV - we use a Zendesk sharing agreement for our Ops team. So each dept has their own Zendesk instance and tickets are shared between the 2.
Zendesk Administrator: Thank you for your replies, everyone! Our development team does use Jira, but it’s a very closed environment and a more change-resistant than us with our Zendesk instance. These internal requests will mainly be coming from the Sales teams, so having Support help host the environment is also a strategic move on our end. We see it as an opportunity to boost the Support team’s position and hopefully get ourselves some more ops resources down the road.
