6 Helpdesk Integrations to Boost Your Customer Support Efforts

In the customer support world, no two issues are the same.

Vast and varied, it takes real craftiness and problem-solving skills to troubleshoot every issue in an effective yet efficient manner.

Fortunately, Make is powerful and flexible enough to automate even the most nuanced of customer support cases.

In this article, we’ve highlighted six automation templates that offer both breadth and depth when it comes to solving customer support issues, and that you can implement immediately.

Read on to start slashing time from your support agents’ schedules, boosting their productivity, and, most importantly, enabling them to offer the best customer support that they can.

6 Make scenarios to take your customer support to the next level

1. Reporting customer support analytics

One of the best ways to improve your customer support team’s performance is to measure it.

Using Zendesk as a data source, Databox as a data visualization platform, and Make as the glue between the two solutions, you can create dashboards that automatically track and display your customer support team’s performance.

From ticket volumes to resolution times, here are three scenarios that you can build to get a clear insight into how well your team services your customers.

Add a ticket metric in Databox with the total number of Zendesk tickets created 

Ticket volume is a fundamental metric to track in customer support. It helps you determine how many hands you need on deck to provide excellent service.

In the scenario below, Make will count all of the tickets ever created in your Zendesk account. Then, it will add a metric in Databox that displays that count.

Update the ticket metric in Databox with the number of tickets created in Zendesk on the previous day 

This scenario will allow you to update what the aforementioned ticket metric tracks. Instead of tracking the total number of tickets ever created, it will track the number of tickets created on the previous day.

We recommend keeping this scenario active and running every day because it’ll let you keep a pulse on your team and product.

For instance, has your ticket volume been high the past couple of days? If so, then your team might be overwhelmed. Just as alarming, your product could also have a major bug that needs serious fixing.

Track the metrics “number of closed tickets” and “resolution time” for the dimensions “type of ticket” and “ticket priority” in Databox 

It’s time to dive into some more nuanced analytics. With this scenario, you can track the exact number of issues that your team troubleshot and how long it took them to do so for different types of tickets and different levels of ticket priority.

This dashboard not only gives you insight into your team’s productivity and efficiency but also their ability to prioritize your team’s most pressing issues and their ability to problem-solve.

Naturally, you may want to customize the metrics in this dashboard to gain an even more textured understanding of your team’s performance. But for beginner users or users who aren’t familiar with JSON structures, doing this can be quite a challenge, hence the data request below.

2. Backing up your customer support calls

Similar to recording and backing up your sales calls, doing the same with your customer service calls allows you to analyze what your team members did well, what they could work on, and how they can level up their customer service skills for their next call.

It also gives you the peace of mind of never losing a call recording just in case you need to access one for an unforeseen reason.

In the scenario below, Make will upload your RingCentral call recordings to the cloud storage platform Dropbox. Then, it will create a subfolder for each of your customers and add their call recordings to them with their date and time stamp.

This organizes all of your customer support calls in a neat, tidy manner, allowing your team to easily find exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Collecting customer feedback

Customer feedback is the breakfast of champions. Without it, you wouldn’t know the first thing about your customers' feelings and thoughts toward your product.

Since they’re the ones who keep your lights on, why not take their advice when building and iterating your product?

To help you automate the collection of customer feedback, we’ve built a scenario with the customer feedback management tool Canny and the customer support software Help Scout.

In this scenario, Make will automatically create a support conversation or a ticket in Help Scout anytime someone writes a post about a specific topic on your Canny profile. Or you can have Make automatically create a support conversation anytime someone writes a post about anything.

Another scenario that we’ve built to automate the collection of customer feedback taps into how much people love to vent about brands on social media.

In the scenario below, Make automatically scans any tweets that mention your brand, sends them to the AI-powered sentiment analysis tool MonkeyLearn, and creates a ticket in Zoho Desk for every tweet that MonkeyLearn deems as negative.

This scenario is just as useful or arguably even more useful than the scenario with Canny and Help Scout because Twitter will have a higher volume of “reviews” about your brand. They’ll also be way more unfettered so you never have to ask them how they really feel.

4. Flagging undelivered customer support emails

As a customer support rep, you know that time is always of the essence. Customers expect quick responses and service from you, prompting you to hustle all day to meet their demands.

That’s why there’s nothing worse than firing off an email to a customer in a timely fashion, only to get a message from them a day later about how you haven’t even responded to them. What gives? You can literally see the email in your sent folder.

When you connect your Gmail or Microsoft 365 Email inbox to Zendesk, you won’t get notified if one of your emails doesn’t deliver to a ticket requester. This can happen when a customer submits a ticket but makes a typo in their email address. 

Fortunately, Make can automatically check for these undelivered emails by scanning your inbox for automated replies from mailer-daemon or for “undelivered” notifications.

Then, Make will immediately notify the relevant support agents by tagging and/or commenting on the most recent Zendesk ticket that belongs to the requester that has the email address they were trying to reach.

Armed with these scenarios, your team doesn’t have to constantly switch back and forth between Zendesk and their mailbox just to see if their emails are actually being sent.

5. Creating recurring tickets

It’s likely that you need to create recurring tickets for maintenance, checkups, follow-ups, and customer-specific tasks.

But manually creating these recurring tickets is extremely time-consuming. It’s also possible to completely forget about creating them or creating them after they’re due. So why not rid yourselves of these burdens and automate the task?

Using the scenario below, all you have to do is input a few points of data into the following Airtable base to automatically create tickets in Zoho Desk that recur every day, week, or month.

6. Adding deadlines to Microsoft 365 Calendar

Deadlines are not only reminders to get your work done but they’re also one of the best motivators around.

That’s why we’ve built an integration that links Freshdesk to Microsoft 365 Calendar.

In the scenario below, Make will automatically create an event in an individual support agent’s calendar when a due date is added to one of their Freshdesk tickets.

Make will also update the event in Microsoft 365 Calendar when the due date changes in Freshdesk.

Automating the busy work out of customer support

Customer support is the lifeblood of your company for a reason.

The issues that you have to troubleshoot are vast, varied, and time-sensitive, requiring a certain level of craftiness and problem-solving that are hard to come by.

It’s one of the hardest gigs around.

We’re here to make your job easier. These scenarios offer actual solutions to take on the most complex customer support cases.

And hopefully, they can help your team provide the best support in your industry.

If you want to implement automation in other parts of your business, check out our article on 25 simple workplace automation ideas for operations and human resources, collaboration and project management, customer support, sales, and marketing.