Hacking SaaS tools for better support — Episode 1: Zendesk Light Agent Sidebar App

Folks have been asking that I share the hacks that my support teams’ have used to deliver better customer experiences and operational efficiencies.

Sounds good to me. I’ll write a series of posts sharing solutions that have made a real difference.

A little context…

My teams use a variety of well-known SaaS tools such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Intercom, JIRA, Slack, PagerDuty, Status.io, and Google Apps. Inevitably, however, we find that even when we optimize the heck out of our configurations, there are things we want to do that just aren’t feasible without a little hacking.

I know that best practices dictate that we conform our process to the capabilities of our purchased software. They say that the value of our “innovative” processes is outweighed by the complexity and cost of customization. However, in startups, we’re frequently experimenting to find out exactly what we can and should be doing, how we can differentiate ourselves, how we can provide new and unique experiences, how we can be better than everyone else who is using the same basic toolset. Implementing targeted hacks can make all the difference.

Leveling up Zendesk Light Agents

Our support team used Zendesk to handle thousands of support requests per month. We had Zendesk Enterprise Plan licenses for all of our Tier 1 and Tier 2 agents. The rest of the company used Light Agent licenses that allowed them to review tickets and make private comments, but prohibited changes to most ticket fields.

The challenge here was that dozens of tickets a month would get escalated from Support to Engineering (our de facto Tier 3). Engineers, working as Light agents, would provide feedback via private comments. However, engineers frequently wanted to make small changes to key fields on the tickets, and they couldn’t. This would result in either extra back and forth (engineer tells agent to modify ticket in private comment) or important changes failing to get made.

We decided to provide a custom Zendesk App that would enable Light Agents to directly change specific fields within a ticket.

Engineers could use this sidebar app to modify important fields like subject, cc list, and whether or not the ticket was waiting on engineering action. Any changes in the sidebar would immediate modify the values in the ticket entry form. Clicking Update Ticket would make an API call, using a dedicated API/management account, that would persist the changes.

If you’re interested in checking out the app for yourself, you can find a demo version on Github.

We estimated that this sidebar saved at least several minutes per escalation, and more importantly, it dramatically improved escalation hygiene and documentation.

Next episode: Perfect Zendesk/Salesforce sync