6 Ways to Use Zendesk with Slack for Better Customer Service

Zendesk is an ideal way to keep customer service communications organized and is rapidly being adapted by SMBs. We’re not surprised – the dashboard is user-friendly and the ticket system helps everyone on the customer service team stay informed – we even use Zendesk here at Workato. But what about keeping the rest of the team in the loop?

how to workbot slack

Many companies use Slack or Hipchat for internal communications, but getting a notification for every ticket can be exhausting. Smart notifications and the ability to access information from Zendesk without leaving your chat console can revolutionize both your office communications and the customer service team’s capabilities. Here are some of the coolest use cases and features you can utilize thanks to Workbot for Slack – a chat bot that not only talks to you, but can pull information and perform actions across all of your applications.


If you want to put these use cases to work for your own business, add Workbot for Slack above (it’s free!) and then set up the integration recipes in Workato that power the tasks you want Workbot to perform (also free based on transactions and apps). For example, if you want Workbot to send you a notification in Slack for urgent tickets in Zendesk, you would add Workbot to Slack and then use this recipe


 

1. Assign Customer Service Tickets to the Correct Party Within Slack

Let’s say a support person gets a question that is too technical or more difficult than they can answer. Within Zendesk, they can categorize a support issue as “technical” or “marketing” or whatever tag you have allocated for the correct party. Using a Workato recipe, this will trigger a notification in Slack to a specific channel for the correct party, ie. if it is tagged “technical, it will go to a channel for engineers or if it is tagged “marketing” it will go into the marketing channel. The coolest part is that the engineers can make comments in Slack that go directly into Zendesk as a comment for the support rep with this recipe.


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The ability to assign questions to the engineering team manually with a tag is important as engineers are usually one of the busiest departments and don’t want to know about every support ticket. They only want to see the technical ones and they don’t have time to log into Zendesk to answer them. By making it easy for the engineers to quickly and painlessly answer questions, they are more prone to engage, which helps the support person do their job well and keeps customers happy.

To get this integration you need 2 Workato recipes: Zendesk ticket to Slack and Push response from experts. Don’t forget you may need to customize these recipes to create the exact scenario you want.

Related: Why IT automations are critical to your organization

2. Receive Customer Service Ticket Notifications Based on Threshold

You can filter your Zendesk notifications by a threshold you set – for instance, “show all customers with more than five invoices past due.” In the image, the threshold is 3 tickets, so Workbot alerts you that there has been 4 or more tickets in the last 15 minutes and shows you each ticket. For detailed set up instructions click here >


Zendesk ticket threshold


This scenario is especially useful for managers who want an easy way to see the status of his support team and only be notified when a threshold is exceeded. Often support people are distributed across the globe making a simple check in more of an ordeal.

Workbot can provide data graphics right in Slack if you notice a spike in ticket number or any other indicator of change. Changes in ticket activity can tip off managers that there is a problem and Workbot can help them root causes by answering some key questions such as, ‘Where’s the spike coming from? Workbook can display if the spike comes from only phones or perhaps one product, one area or one geographic region is experiencing the issue. This information can be invaluable when managing a support team and having it at your finger tips in Slack will increase response time.

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Related: 5 ServiceNow app integrations that help IT thrive

3. Receive Zendesk Ticket Notifications Based on Value

Perhaps you only want to see Zendesk tickets that come from customers in the United States or you would only like to be notified of Zendesk tickets marked “priority.” When configuring the recipe in Workato, you can choose the data values such as ticket priority and customer location that you would like Workbot to show you. Below only tickets marked priority:high appear.


Zendesk only show priority _= high


Another great way to use value notifications is identifying your VIP or high value customers in your CRM and setting a notification to only receive Zendesk notifications when a VIP customer has a new ticket. This will allow the customer service team to provide truly outstanding service to your important customers and help managers keep a close eye on any problems a high value customer might have.

4. Customer Service Ticket Summary View

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If you only want to see an overview of Zendesk’s activity, you can ask Workbot to send you summaries of your business data daily or on whatever timeline you choose. Smart filtering means you only see what’s important to you and makes Slack the ultimate work hub!

5. When a Ticket is Marked High Priority, View the Information on that Customer in your CRM in Slack

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When you receive a notification from Zendesk using a value filter, Workbot can show you more information on that customers right inside of Slack. Workbot will ask, “Let me know if you want to know more about [company name]” and if you reply ‘yes,’ Workbot will pull the info on file from Salesforce or your CRM system so you can have a 360 degree view of your customer. If you use Salesforce as your CRM you can use this recipe. You can also copy this recipe and replace Salesforce with the CRM of your choice.

6. Escalate Support Tickets Directly From Slack.

Something that truly sets Workbot for Slack apart from other chatbots is that you can take actions within your apps from Slack. For instance, if a support issue is particularly serious or urgent, you can easily escalate the ticket to another team—such as engineering—directly from Slack.

Imagine that you need to create a ticket for a very serious website problem that a customer has encountered. When you create the Zendesk ticket in Slack, Workbot will also ask whether you want to escalate the issue to the Engineering team and prompt you with “yes” or “no” buttons. Once you select the “yes” option, it will automatically create a corresponding issue in the correct app (in this case, JIRA). Workbot will also push the relevant information (like the corresponding issue’s ID number) into Slack for you. The bot can also push the new JIRA issue into a dedicated Escalated Tickets channel in Slack, so the Engineering team is aware of it right away and can get to work.

Related: 2 examples of automating incident management

Workbot’s functions will help a busy customer service team increase efficiency and save time – no logging in and out of all of your apps to do one task, just complete it with a command to Workbot in Slack! Workbot can interact with several different applications including JIRA, Salesforce, MixPanel and more. So what are you waiting for? Connect Zendesk and Slack with no code using Workbot for Slack by Workato.

See all of the apps you can integrate with Zendesk on Workato >

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How to Install:

If you want to put these use cases to work for your own business, add Workbot for Slack above (it’s free!) and then set up the integration recipes in Workato that power the tasks you want Workbot to perform (also free based on transactions and apps). For example, if you want Workbot to send you a notification in Slack for urgent tickets in Zendesk, you would add Workbot to Slack and then use this recipe


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About the author
Kristine Colosimo
Kristine oversees Workato's content and works with awesome apps like DocuSign, Zendesk, SurveyMonkey etc. on great automation content.