Tip of the Week: Analyzing Macro Use With Tags

In a previous Tip of the Week we discussed here how you can [intlink id="2171" type="post"]easily turn a ticket into a macro[/intlink] or a canned response. Here at Zendesk, we have turned many a ticket into macros (over 100 at last count). With all these macros now in place, we’ve realized that keeping that knowledge up to date has become … well… just as important as creating new macros. This week’s tip will discuss how tags (and if you are a Zendesk Plus+ customer, how leveraging the [intlink id="4793" type="post"]Zendesk GoodData integration[/intlink]) can help you manage your own Zendesk macros.

Tagging Your Macros

The first step is to create a unique tag for every macro. To access your macros go to manage > macros in your top menu bar.

Select “edit” for the macro in question and from within the “Perform these actions” section, you will select “Append tags” and add the tag of your choice in the text box to the right.

With this in place, a tag will automatically be appended to every ticket when we use the macro to answer an end user’s inquiry. (Please note that if you select “Set tags” instead of “Append tags”, the “set tag” action will entirely replace any other tags on the ticket.)

Analyze Your Macros

Now that we are tracking our macro use with tags, we want to be able to analyze how much each of our macros are being used. To do so, we can create a macro report using Zendesk’s integration with GoodData. GoodData is a business intelligence software platform-as-a-service (BI PaaS) [intlink id="5016" type="post"]recently made available[/intlink] at no cost to Zendesk Plus+ customers. (Note that Regular and Starter customers can also leverage Zendesk’s built-in reports, which were described in [intlink id="4119" type="post"]a previous Tip of the Week[/intlink].)

To analyze the frequency in which macros are used, simply create a tag report for the desired time range within your GoodData account. All you will need to do is select the tags associated with your macros and run the report. A list of your macro tags and the number of times each tag has been used will be generated.

Using your GoodData report, you can analyze which macros are used time and time again and/or which are maybe not used that much. From there you can make some informed business decisions — i.e. would a simple change in your user interface or website allow us to reduce the number of times you receive this frequently asked question? Or could your macro response be added to your FAQ’s forum? Or maybe you will observe that some macros are now longer as effective and can be retired from your list of responses.

However you analyze the data, tags are a great (and often under-utilized) way to monitor, review, and analyze many aspects of your Zendesk use.