Chapter 4. Setting Up Multiple Ticket Channels

Helping a customer the best way possible also means meeting your customer wherever they might be. The Internet provides many different meeting points and Zendesk surely kept up with the times by providing us with the necessary channels of communication.

However, it is important to know what channels make sense for you and your business. It is also important to keep in mind that the more channels you open, the more agents will be required to cater to the support needs.

In this chapter, we will take an in depth look at each channel provided by Zendesk. We will talk about their purpose, look at the implementation, and apply the newly gained insights to our ExampleComp scenario.

At the end of this chapter, you will know what channels to pick for your individual situation and how to set them up accordingly.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• What are channels?

• The available channels in Zendesk.

• Setting up e-mail, widget, social media, and Help Center...

What are channels?

Channels enable customers to engage with your agents. They allow customers to create tickets as well as establish an ongoing string of communication. Let's start by listing all the channels provided by Zendesk:

• Email

• Help Center

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Chat (Zopim)

• Voice

• Web Widget

• Mobile SDK

• API

While some channels are self-explanatory in their nature, understanding them properly goes a long way when it comes to the actual implementation. So let's look at them in detail.

Email channel

The email channel allows your customers to contact your support directly by writing to one or more designated e-mail addresses. As soon as an e-mail is received, it will be turned into a ticket within the Zendesk environment. Zendesk allows for an unlimited amount of e-mail addresses within your Zendesk domain.

An internal e-mail address created within your Zendesk domain would look something like this:

[e-mail]

In our example, this would translate to the following:

support@examplecomp...

Setting up Zendesk channels

Now that we have a better understanding of Zendesk's channels, let's commence and go through the actual setups.

What channels did we plan to set up? Let's refer to our road map again:

• Email

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Widget

• Help Center / Support Form

Email channel setup

Let's start with the most common of channels: the Email channel.

Adding internal e-mail addresses

We will start by adding an internal e-mail address:

1. Click on the Admin icon (gear symbol) located in Zendesk's sidebar.

2. Click on Email located under CHANNELS within the admin menu.

3. Click on Add address in the right upper corner and then click on Create new Zendesk address:

Next, we are asked to provide the first part of the e-mail address. As this will be our main support address, let's go with support:

Once we click on Create now, the new internal e-mail address is ready for us. E-mails sent to [e-mail] automatically become tickets:

Our newly created internal e-mail address is now listed on the...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the different channels provided by Zendesk. You learned about their individual purpose and how to set them up properly according to our roadmap.

I do encourage you to review the other channels as well. Rest assured, we covered enough channels necessary to understand how to set up other channels such as Voice and Chat as well. While we do not need them in our scenario, they might be interesting enough for your own project later on.

In our next chapter, you will learn about business rules and how to set up our ticket escalation processes. While focusing on our example scenario again, we will also make sure to cover every aspect of business rules. Why? Because they are awesome! Also, you will likely have to deal with them a lot.