Adding Phone Support to your Zendesk
When adding phone integration to your system, it’s important to first consider what your goals are. Do you want to maximize efficiency? Increase customer satisfaction? Streamline routing?
Requirements
Since Zendesk Talk is a VoIP solution, making calls over a broadband internet connection instead of a phone line, you’ll need a strong and stable internet connection. We recommend wired headsets for reliability, as well as making sure your agents are using up-to-date versions of Firefox or Chrome web browsers.
Phone Numbers
If you don’t yet have a support phone number, a local number may be perfect if your customer base is primarily situated in a specific location or three, and they’re cheaper. However, toll-free numbers are ideal for companies with a national or global presence. It may also be helpful to have multiple phone numbers for different types of customers or service.
If your organization has a phone number already, then there are two options available for use with Zendesk: porting and forwarding. Porting allows a phone number to be moved from an existing provider over to Zendesk Talk but takes about four weeks in the US. The time can be longer in other countries. If your organization doesn’t want to port a number or the country in which you’re located isn’t one of those that allows for porting, you can contact your existing provider about forwarding calls to your current phone number to your Zendesk Talk number instead. If you choose this option, make sure your current provider can pass inbound caller ID information to your Zendesk Talk number as well!
Greetings, Routing, and More
Now you’ll get to customize the support that your customers receive: what kind of greeting they’ll hear, what kind of routing they’ll experience, and how long they’ll need to wait.
To start, you’ll need to create an IVR (interactive voice response) phone tree. These can be polarizing but used effectively, a good IVR can help to limit call volume by providing easy answers to simple and common questions, as well as routing questions to the right people. Keeping your IVR to 5 options or less is recommended. Zendesk has many options to help here; you can create agent groups based on department (sales, customer service, billing, shipping), language is spoken, and so forth. You can also use tags in Zendesk based on voice recognition of keywords in a recorded message to help direct requests to the right people.
Recording good greetings is also critical to the customer. You’ll be able to create the main greeting, which is the first thing a customer hears, as well as an available agent greeting and a voicemail greeting. Keep these welcoming, to the point, and on-brand for the best results! In your voicemail greeting, be sure to inform customers what information will help you to help them. You’ll be able to add options like hold music as well if you wish.
What’s Next?
From here, there are lots of options for how to grow and improve your support. We can discuss how to train your agents, how to analyze your support metrics, and more. Zendesk Talk has built-in analytics through the use of its Insights function, providing real-time dashboards and historical results.
Wrap-Up
Hopefully this shows you the power of adding Zendesk Talk to your organization, and you have some ideas for what you’d like to accomplish! 729 Solutions is here to assist in making your goals achievable.
