At Zendesk, finding customer service reps with certain fundamental skills is actually more important than having an extensive background in technology. We can teach them about the intricacies of Zendesk relatively quickly but the ability to be patient and empathetic must already be in place.

One of the first things we look for is whether or not they are passionate about helping others. A good indicator for this trait is if they’re passionate about other things in their lives such as a hobby or their family. During the interview, get them talking about their interests and ask yourself: “are they great at talking about the things they are passionate about?”

Honesty and transparency are huge for Zendesk. Our culture is such that we don’t want to hide anything from our customers. Our pricing is very transparent and our tone is friendly and engaged. We want our support team to reflect those values, so we look for people that naturally come across as genuine and open. During the interview, ask yourself: “do they go for easy, softball answers or can they get deeper without over-sharing?”

Below are 10 interview questions that can help you understand if the person you’re talking to has the skill-set and temperament to be an effective customer service rep:

1. Who have you spoken with so far in the interview process and what did you talk about? [This demonstrates if can they retain knowledge of names and other details]
2. Tell me about your last or current position — what did you love and what didn’t you like?
3. Tell me about problems with the products or services you previously supported?
4. What things on your resume are you really an expert on? [Ask to provide a really tough issue they resolved that involved those items.]
5. How do you respond when you don’t know the answer to a question?
6. The customer is saying you’re taking too long to solve the issue, what do you do?
7. The customer is pointing out a big known problem with your product, what do you do? [This indicates if they can show empathy and/or have the ability to apologize.]
8. Give an example of a customer that you turned around from a position of unhappiness to sheer joy.
9. Define really great support. What experiences have you had personally that are great examples?
10. Have you tried our product/service and what do you know about it?

Keeping all of the above in mind, when you’re looking for a rep that can provide memorable customer support, you should ask yourself if the candidate was memorable during the interview itself. If they were, and in all the right ways, you might have found yourself a great customer service rep.

The post 10 interview questions for hiring great customer service reps appeared first on Zendesk.

Otherwise, you can read the English version below:

Zendesk is your web-based help desk tool for the complete tracking of all support activities and the directing of numerous business processes. //SEIBERT/MEDIA uses Zendesk for (among many things) sales and marketing, internal IT support, and in the areas of services and recruiting. In our experience this system has the power to unleash a leap forward in your company’s efficiency as well as to satisfy your customers – and the employees who communicate with them.

88 Reasons for Using Zendesk

Allow us to summarize the reasons in favor of using Zendesk in your company. Here are 88 arguments no longer than a Tweet:

1. With Zendesk significant parts of your external and internal support can be automatized.
2. Zendesk centralizes all of your customer communications.
3. Customers hate waiting for support. Zendesk can significantly reduce processing times for requests.
4. Customers hate unreliable support. Zendesk can help you ensure that all requests are actually processed.
5. Customers want to know whether requests have gone through. Zendesk sends them direct confirmation and tips upon request.
6. With Zendesk both customers and support employees can always see the current processing status of a request.
7. Consistent support means happy customers. Zendesk offers an excellent basis for this.
8. Zendesk takes pressure off your support team and makes your employees happier.
9. The support workflow in Zendesk can be heavily customized to your own business processes.
10. Zendesk can be completely customized according to your existing Service Level Agreements.
11. With views, Zendesk offers easily configurable filters for the viewing of tickets according to various criteria.
12. Thanks to customizable ticket views, processes with high priority flags can be quickly identified.
13. It’s easy to find things in Zendesk: a full-text search option will comb through all content in your system.
14. Zendesk tickets allow attachments: this actually allows you to have all relevant information for a support request in one location.
15. Zendesk offers functions for user segmentation, so you could, for instance, treat premium users differently.
16. Zendesk tickets can be easily divided – even across various Zendesk accounts.
17. Agent collision detection: Zendesk warns you automatically when there’s already another support team member working on a ticket.
18. Thanks to custom fields, Zendesk tickets contain all of the information that is important for your own support process.
19. Macros are shortcuts in Zendesk: recurring tickets processes can be taken care of by the system.
20. In Zendesk the use of certain views and macros can be limited to individual employees or groups.
21. Automations in Zendesk allow automatic, time-based reactions in support.
22. Do you need further information to process a customer’s ticket? Zendesk will remind you automatically after a certain amount of time.
23. Has a customer request waited longer than a predetermined length of time for processing? Zendesk will remind the support team.
24. Triggers in Zendesk allow automatic event-based reactions in support.
25. If a request includes certain keywords, a trigger in Zendesk can automatically start a preset reaction.
26. Using triggers, incoming Zendesk tickets can be allocated directly to preset groups or employees.
27. Zendesk can be combined seamlessly with numerous internal systems and external services.
28. Zendesk means that you can receive requests through various modalities and manage them centrally and automatically.
29. Zendesk automatically links all of your customer communications to the corresponding ticket.
30. Zendesk offers a knowledge base function in order to disseminate information about typical problems both internally and externally.
31. With Zendesk you can build a fully-searchable knowledge base to help customers help themselves.
32. Zendesk allows the building of a real community with public and private forums.
33. Thanks to the integration of Google Analytics, it’s possible to have complete analyses of the activities in Zendesk forums.
34. Zendesk in support allows the importing of customers’ own ideas and the evaluation of their suggestions.
35. Articles based on Zendesk tickets can be quickly published into the support knowledge base and vice versa.
36. Zendesk promotes the expansion of community through optional sharing functions for the sharing of articles and ideas by customers.
37. Zendesk simplifies the building of a seamless FAQ collection for customers.
38. Topic Suggestions in Zendesk make customers aware of available support content and lower the overall request volume.
39. Multi-channel support: Zendesk integrates customers using e-mail, chat, social media, phone, and mobile devices.
40. With Zendesk your customers can get support using their preferred channel of communication.
41. Zendesk harmonizes perfectly with Facebook and allows support using the pinboard.
42. Twitter integration: Using @-mentions of your company, Zendesk will generate automatic “Twickets.”
43. With Zendesk support employees can react to tweets and pinboard entries without leaving their help desk.
44. Customer support via social media is the future: Zendesk is already there.
45. Zendesk offers mobile apps for Apple products, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone.
46. With an integration with Twilio, Zendesk can automatically generate a support ticket based on a customer’s text message.
47. Zendesk can be connected directly to blogs and websites using Dropbox.
48. With Zendesk companies can offer support over a completely customizable web-portal.
49. Zendesk offers a native chat function. All chat conversations with customers end up in a support ticket.
50. You’d have to think for a while to come up with possibilities for end-user communication that aren’t already integrated into Zendesk.
51. Zendesk can be used for more than just customer support. One popular use case is sales and marketing.
52. Numerous business processes can be optimized using Zendesk: recruiting, services, etc.
53. Anywhere where e-mails can be automatized is an opportunity for Zendesk to inject more efficiency into your company.
54. Zendesk offers functions that will help you run simple and automatized customer feedback surveys.
55. Zendesk is a quick setup: support channels like voice can be configured in less than five minutes.
56. The pre-installed best-practices configuration allows an accelerated start in Zendesk.
57. Customers get quick help when they need it: Zendesk University and the Zendesk partners offer professional training.
58. Zendesk is SaaS and won’t lead to increased costs for hardware, maintenance, or IT.
59. Zendesk isn’t static and is constantly being improved. There are always new integrations, etc.
60. Zendesk is always up-to-date without any worries about having your IT upload new updates.
61. Ticket Views in Zendesk can be exported at any time in CSV format.
62. For backups, all Zendesk data can be exported in XML format.
63. Zendesk is straightforward, clean, cogent, and an easy adjustment for your support team.
64. Poor usability costs you productivity, efficiency, motivation, & money. Luckily, Zendesk has excellent usability.
65. Corporate design customization: In Zendesk you can change the logo, text, font, and colors with just a few clicks.
66. The subdomain where you can find Zendesk is freely selectable, for instance, help.companyname.com.
67. Zendesk can be integrated into your own network using single sign-on (LDAP and Active Directory).
68. Zendesk works seamlessly with over 90 external systems: Mailchimp, Netsuite, Joomla, WordPress, etc.
69. Existing CRM tools like Salesforce or Highrise can be directly connected to Zendesk.
70. The integration of Zendesk with JIRA closes a gap between customer support and software development.
71. For Google Chrome users, there are awesome features like Zendesk’s activity stream in the browser.
72. Zendesk’s e-mail API allows support employees to update tickets directly from their inbox.
73. Zendesk offers many widgets with which information from external tools can be directly integrated into the help desk.
74. Zendesk uses a JavaScript/widget API to allow the creation of your own widgets.
75. Thanks to Zendesk’s open API, you can create your own integration possibilities using third-party tools.
76. Zendesk offers helpful analytics. One glance is enough to get key information about your support’s performance.
77. What’s the average processing time for support requests? Zendesk reports will show you this immediately.
78. Zendesk licenses are transparent and depend on the number of actual support employees.
79. For small teams and companies, Zendesk is free for up to a $20 donation (the money goes to a children’s hospital).
80. As “cloud software,” Zendesk is scalable: even thousands of agents and tens of thousands of tickets per day would be no problem.
81. Zendesk is secure: all your support communication is encrypted using SSL.
82. Zendesk satisfies the highest level of security demand in regards to physical, infrastructure, and application security.
83. The argument of authority: More than 20,000 companies from around the globe are already using Zendesk.
84. Zendesk supports more than 40 languages around the world for individual support.
85. Zendesk is in the truest sense of the word “excellent” and bears the Best-in-Cloud-2011-Award from COMPUTERWOCHE.
86. Zendesk doesn’t stand for “can do a lot but none of it well”: Zendesk stands for Help Desk, but the right kind of one.
87. Zendesk means transparency, efficiency, consistency, and automaticity in support.
88. It would be difficult to find a simpler and easier-to-use support system than Zendesk – for both companies and their customers.

So, have you become curious about Zendesk? Try it out for free and give your support wings. Zendesk’s partners can advise you on where to use it, how to configure it, and how to use it most effectively or efficiently!

The post 88 arguments for Zendesk appeared first on Zendesk.

The event is so cool, we’ve decided to sponsor another one in Canberra, Australia.

Canberra CloudCamp

Date: September 7, 2011

Location: NICTA, Tower A, 7 London Circuit, City ACT 2601, Australia

Register for the event here.

The event start at 1 p.m. and will wrap up with a fabulous cocktail hour hosted by your pals here at Zendesk.

Got questions? Email your congenial host Ben Kepes at ben@diversity.net.nz

Photo courtesy of akakumo.

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Benchmarking is an opportunity to measure how your performance compares to that of your peers and competitors. It’s also a way to see whether your organization is reaching its goals and how its current performance compares to past performance. It’s a really great way to see just how well you’re doing and who has the competitive edge. From there, you can create a plan that will help you keep your leading edge on the competition, or if you’re lagging, help see what you can do to push ahead.

Many of you have told us you’re interested in benchmarking your support metrics against other, similar organizations. As a result of that feedback, we’re preparing to integrate benchmarking features into Zendesk, and we want our customers to be a part of it from the very beginning.

As a first step, we have collected a top view of data across our entire customer base, which produced great data, but as you’d expect, isn’t as relevant as if we, say, displayed it per industry. That’s why we’d like to collect a few profile characteristics about your organization so we can produce data sets that are more meaningful, relevant, and geared toward your organization.

To get started, account owners should go to Account and select the Benchmarking menu in your Zendesk. All you have to do is tell us a few simple details about your organization, we’ll have a look at the information you’ve provided, and begin preparing an appropriate peer group for you to benchmark against.

4 Basic Tips to Benchmarking Customer Service

Benchmarking anything, including your customer support teams, requires that you collect data on it. You might already be collecting data on your support process, or you might just be starting to think about it; either way, it’s easy to drown in all the data available to us. Anyone who has opened Google Analytics knows you need a way to slice through what’s out there.

Numbers can make more sense when they are connected to a story, and that’s where the art of data visualization–revealing relationships between numbers, people, and actions–comes into play.

Tip 1: Compress Data Knowledge Into Numbers

We want to inspire you to begin a benchmarking program for your organization’s customer support team, by providing you with insight into two of your customer support must-watch benchmarks:

Ticket Throughput: The raw number of new tickets being generated in a period.
Agent Efficiency: The time it takes an agent to close a ticket.

We performed an anonymized analysis of our 5,000+ customer’s aggregated data and found that the highest density of tickets are created in the 4 hours before noon (see featured graphic at the beginning of article). In addition, 37% of all tickets are resolved within 4 hours while 43% of tickets take longer than 24 hours to solve. These data points reveal that timing and scheduling your support team’s “on duty” hours can have a profound cost-savings effect on average agent productivity.

Tip 2: Apply Your Numbers to Ideas and Concepts

Both ticket throughput and agent efficiency show: morning hours matter most!

Looking at the incoming latent demand for customer support, two distinct measures that matter in ticket creation are day of the week and time of day. Daily distribution is fairly consistent across the work week. Roughly half of the relative demand occurs on the weekend.

As shown above, demand across the day skews heavily towards the first few hours of the morning from 9 to 11 a.m.

Larger Ticket Volumes Inspire a 400% Increase in Per-Agent Productivity

We noticed stark differences in support agent throughput across Zendesk’s different plans (Starter, Regular, Plus+). Our interpretation of this trend is that organizations with high volumes of data to process tend to choose Plus+ for its advanced features that enable managing high volumes of data. These same organizations also tend to have agents dedicated on a more full-time basis to manage customer support, therefore leading to efficiency gains.

In fact, a well-resourced support team with a dedicated support staff can expect, on average, a 400% increase in agent productivity when compared with an organization that utilizes part-time or single-operator support agents as shown below.

The post Do You Benchmark Your Customer Service? You Should. Here’s Why. appeared first on Zendesk.

The community wall was inspired by Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastary (Man Fat Tsz), Sha Tin, Hong Kong and based on artists behind the Buddha Machine FM3′s concept of Buddha Boxing. Buddha Machine music is composed, performed and produced by Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian. The Buddha Machine name and design likeness are registered trademarks. Learn more about the buddha machine at the FM3 site.

And you should also check this out: in Rome, the FM3 folks have put together an art exhibit of buddha machines. You can listen to 1000 of these machines in “8-bit audio bliss.”

The post Buddha Machine Wall of Walls appeared first on Zendesk.

Based in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Monarch Teaching Technologies, Inc. creates technology-enhanced solutions that provide effective and cost-efficient support for children with special learning needs. We recently spoke with John Haprian, Vice President of Operations at Monarch, about how support works at their organization.

Describe how your customer support team works.

We have a single individual who provides technical support primarily via email for both our internal and external customers. Our entire workflow is centralized on Zendesk. We support approximately 1,000 paying and trial customers. Our hours are 8:30am – 5:30pm Mon – Fri. Our one person spends approximately 20% of her time on support-related issues. So far we’ve been able to comfortably handle the volume with current staffing through the efficiencies gained using tools like Zendesk.

What are typical support questions that the team handles?

For our core product mostly new account requests and installation issues.

What channels do you currently offer for support?

We emphasize email as the primary channel but also offer phone and IM.

What is your organization’s philosophy on support?

Excellent support is one of the most cost-effective ways to differentiate ourself from our competition. It’s a mission-critical fuction we take very seriously.

What other tools do you use besides Zendesk?

Jira for development and Basecamp for project management. Google Apps for email, calendaring, and IM.

Any big projects you are working on?

Externally, we are working to improve the breadth and depth of our knowledgebase. We are also experimenting with providing chat support during normal business hours. Internally we are working on tightening the integration between Zendesk and our bug tracking system (Jira).

How do you measure success of customer support at your organization?

Time to resolution of issue. We strive for 24-hour turnaround.

What is the best advice you have for a new customer support manager?

Respond to issues quickly and never solve the same problem more than once. If we encounter an issue often we try to create a knowledgebase article and then communicate the existence of that article to our customers via a variety of channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). If it’s a bug, we funnel the issue to our developers via Jira for a fix.

What has been the biggest surprise to you in your current role?

I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much impact on customer satisfaction a really good support experience can have. Even the best product will fail if customers don’t feel like they are being backed up by the company.

The post Support Team Spotlight: Monarch Teaching appeared first on Zendesk.

1. How representative were the vocal customers in the forums of the rest of our customer base?
2. Was the real issue the price/value perception, the grandfathering terms or something else?
3. How quickly and how targeted should we react?

As a followup to our previous post about the forums, we want to share how we addressed the above questions through an online survey; and how together – forums and survey – ultimately helped us move to our decision.

Asking Questions

We considered getting on the phones to reach out and talk to people we hadn’t heard from. Even with a set list of questions, however, the data was going to be hard to accumulate and smooth out to form a conclusion.  Also, it could take a lot of time to get in touch with enough people to get answers.  We felt we needed to form a response more quickly.

In the end, we opted for the speed with an online survey. Who and what should we ask?

Who was easy. The whole point was to hear from customers we hadn’t heard from. So we decided to email a few hundred customers who:

• were a representative cross section of our customer base
• hadn’t opened a ticket or made a forum comment about the pricing change
• had opened the original email communication announcing the price changes (the survey objective was to get data, not to educate people who hadn’t yet heard the news)

What to ask was more difficult. We anticipated that an online survey was going to end up publicly online by someone so we were mindful with what questions we chose to ask. In this way, even though it wasn’t a formal statement, the survey was a way to communicate where we were at (in this case: that we weren’t sure what to do, but were aware we needed to do something).

We decided on a set of questions which addressed not just the pricing changes, but also more general feelings about Zendesk.  (Here’s a pdf of the questions, if you are interested.)

The Results

Within 60 minutes we had 40+ responses and continued watching them come in until we had well over 100 responses.

The data showed that a majority of our non-vocal customers were pretty upset as well.  While nobody likes price increases, we were trying to assess whether the level of dissatisfaction we were hearing in our forums was shared across our user base. Since the price changes didn’t impact everybody in the same way, it was critical that we heard from a representative share of our customers.

Answers showed that we could implement changes to the previous announcement that would change customer opinion and perception substantially. But the announcement had had some big impacts on Net Promoter Score (whether people recommended us or not). Pre-announcement, 91% recommended Zendesk; post-announcement: 31%. (Yikes!)

In summary, we felt we would be able to make our customers feel better by changing the terms and specifics around the grandfathering and some features. But if we wanted to regain their trust, that wouldn’t suffice. The Net Promoter data was a big indication that we had done some damage to the relationship with our customers. It wasn’t going to be enough to just fix some broken parts, we were going to have to put some care into reconciling our relationship with customers. We had to start over.

After we made our announcement that we would roll back and customers could keep their current price indefinitely, I sent out a follow-up email to thank survey takers again for their valuable input. I was surprised to get back personal responses from many of them thanking me as well.

Lesson?

Don’t be afraid to ask your customers what’s wrong; just be prepared to listen.  It’s what you do in any successful relationship. While the community forums helped customers share their individual thoughts, the survey proved a good way to ask questions, to clarify, and to listen to the group more as a whole.  Together, they helped us through a difficult week for Zendesk; and we learned more (as we are always learning more) about customer engagement.

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