How to organize an excellent tickets categorization in Zendesk

This story was initially published in Startup Central Medium Blog by Zendesk Startups.

Hi! 👋

More than one year ago I have posted my main contribution to Zendesk Community — the post about Using Customer Journey idea to set up or scale your Zendesk. Since that time I had implemented and optimized Zendesk many times. And in most cases, this approach has served as a great tool to make Zendesk efficient and manageable.

How do you benefit from tickets categorization

Today I would like to tell you more about the practical side of CJ idea implementation. And the starting point should be one of the main areas where CJ idea is applied in Zendesk — tickets categorization.

Why is it so important? Mostly because you can build out the whole Zendesk workflows on top of this one. Once you know what is your ticket about you can make many actions on it!

Namely, on top of the tickets categorization system you can:

• Triage tickets into different ticket views
• Route tickets to different groups and/or agents
• Assign priority levels to tickets (Urgent, High, Normal or Low)
• Assign SLA policies to tickets
• Change status of the ticket

This all makes a significant part of the everyday agents’ work. At the end of the post, I will tell you how you can automate this job of the tickets categorization (assigning categories to tickets) and win a lot of time for improving your customer service.

How to create a good categorization system

As one would expect you can create a good categorization system using Customer Journey idea. The general advantage of the СJ idea is that it mimics the real-world customer experience and by default is transparent for both customers and employees (it means it is easy to learn!).

Applied to tickets categorization this means that your system should be:

• Customer-centric in its vision. All categories and namings should be from the customer’s, not the company’s perspective (i.e. the company sends a refund, but the customer receives the refund). It allows you to deploy this categorization in your Help Center for the tickets submission as it is.
• Comprehensive in its coverage. Your categories should cover (more or less) all possible and important categories. The most secure and reliable way to get this result is just to follow step-by-step the real journeys (actions) on different СJ stages.
• Compact in its namings. I prefer to use compact namings (2–3 words) for categories and follow the pattern of “Verb + Noun” (i.e. Request refund, Approving refund, Receive refund). It looks good on all devices (especially mobile ones).
• Neutral in its terms. The categories should not be negative or positive but neutral. This allows you to apply them in any case — would it be a simple question or real problem. You can use the Ticket Type field to define the mode of the requester sentiment or create a custom ticket field for this reason.

Those principles might have some exceptions: like you can use simple nouns for a very general category without specifying any action via the verb there (Company > Newsletter / Partners / Stores etc). But it is always good to follow those principles consistently to avoid a chaotic categorization system in the future.

Let me explain those principles using an example of the delivery related tickets categorization from the Ecommerce domain.

As you can see some journey steps are optional, but they should be part of the complete Delivery journey. One ticket might be a simple question about the possible exceptions (due to COVID-19) and another one a complaint about delayed delivery (due to the same COVID-19). You mark both as Delivery > Starting delivery, and use Ticket Type = Question for the first case and Ticket Type = Problem for the second one.

How to implement categorization system in Zendesk

The answer here depends on what Zendesk plan and features (add-ons) you have, namely if you have Multiple ticket forms available (part of the Productivity Pack add-on).

• You have Multiple forms > Use ticket forms and custom ticket fields to create separate forms per category (Journey stage).

• You DON’T have Multiple forms > Use only custom ticket fields to create one field with categories using drop-down or multi-select field type to allow one or multiple categories per ticket.

Technically using any of those two options, you have the same results in terms of categorization. Multiple forms provide more control over the ticket submission process and more flexible reporting.

How to automate the categorization process in Zendesk

There are several ways to achieve the categories being automatically filled in when tickets are created in Zendesk.

• Via web form(s) / Web widget.
  You can add the categorization related field(s) to the Ticket form(s) and Web widget (additionally making them required upon ticket submission). Customers will do the job of categorization for you. This might work pretty well once your categorization system is customer-centric and transparent, and your customers engaged and ‘responsible’. This approach is limited since many companies use Email as the main support channel and customers are not always ‘correct’ with topics selection.

• Via Zendesk triggers.
  With Zendesk triggers you can create different rules to check ticket’s Subject text and/or Comment text for having some keywords or strings. This method is limited because of language complexity: customers might write about the same categories in a very different way and mentioning many keywords at the same time. But for typical request cases, it works pretty well too. More details about triggers here.

• Via AI services.
  Last but not least method is to use modern AI-based tools and/or services. Unlike in the previous method, they are not limited to the simple keywords based understanding of the text but use the whole tickets description to define the main or multiple categories. In Zendesk Marketplace you can find different apps for this case like MonkeyLearn. We at Pythia developed Tickets Classifier which provides automatic tickets categorization for the Ecommerce domain with 12 general categories and 56 advanced subcategories. You can test it live with your own requests here.

I hope you have enjoyed this post. Let me know with your upvotes and feedback comments.

Stay safe and happy support!