Stafford Vaughan - Practical Zendesk Administration: Best practices for setting up your customer service platform

In 2011, a survey was conducted to find out what people really value about the companies and brands that they use. It may surprise you to hear that when considering the product, price or customer service, 55% of people said that they would recommend a company as a result of a outstanding customer service experience.

The example that I often give is this: imagine that your friend bought a pen. Now imagine you wanted to buy a pen for yourself, and you asked your friend whether they like the pen that they own. Statistically speaking, your friend is unlikely to say "its a good pen because it writes really well". They also wont say "I like this pen because I got it for a good price" or "I like it because it doesnt smudge." No, statistically speaking, your friend is most likely to say "I like this pen because, on the day that it stopped writing and I called the pen company, they made me feel really good about owning this pen".

That is the sort of relationship that Zendesk helps you achieve with your customers. For more details on this statistic, see the full infographic.

The best way to describe this book is the Zendesk Consultant in a Book . The advice, best practices and pitfalls included in this book are the result of working in the trenches, launching Zendesk customer implementations, delivering training sessions, and answering literally thousands of questions from training participants in countries all over the world. Every question from a Zendesk training participant gives me a fresh perspective on new ways to use the product, which Ive tried to capture and share in this book.

Zendesk is a popular customer service software tool, and the approach of the software has always been to deliver a powerful solution with beautifully simple design. In a blog post on the topic, Zack Urlocker (COO of Zendesk), describes a recent "renaissance in Enterprise software that embraces SaaS and beautifully simple design process to deliver an easy-to-use experience even in areas that have sophisticated functionality". Zendesks simple design philosophy should not lead you to believe that the product is not powerful. In fact, the entire purpose of this book is to bring the expansive set of Zendesk features to light, explain their purpose, demystify the best approach to use them, and to help you to get the most out of product.

In explaining the features of the Zendesk product, Ive focused on best practices instead of the step-by-step configuration tasks carried out by an administrator. If you are completely new to the Zendesk product and you find that youre having trouble understanding some of the concepts in this book, I do recommend that you take a look at the official Zendesk user guide before reading this book. This will ensure that you have a basic understanding of the features before getting the advice on best practices contained in this book. It may also help to build a solid foundation to the process of making important decisions about your Zendesk instance.

Its also worth noting that this book focuses specifically on best practices for the Zendesk product without going into depth on the broader techniques to provide outstanding customer service. Zendesk is a tool that can be wielded in any way that works best for your organization.

In his book High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service , author Micah Solomon describes the idea of "touching" customers as the starting point to developing a lasting relationship. Its impossible to physically touch customers over the internet, but its possible to use Zendesk as the tool to reach out to those customers and deliver that touch. This book will get you to the point of using the tool to its full potentialall thats left is for you to use it. As Micah Solomon says, "the goal in all this is to touch customers in a way that builds true customer loyalty."

I hope you enjoy reading this book, and I hope to have the pleasure of hearing your feedback in a future training session.