Why Zendesk Support is a Wrong Choice for Social Media
Zendesk Support is a great platform for businesses for handling customer support operations. It’s one of the most comprehensive customer support platforms out there and boasts of an envious clientele. However, their platform falls a little short when it comes to social media customer support.
It’s intuitive for businesses to aim for an omni-channel customer support platform. The reality though, is that social media has some very specific characteristics and the traditional ticketing system breaks down terribly when dealing with social media. Social media requires special effort and attention from platform providers and businesses alike. Let’s go through a few reasons why businesses should opt for support platforms focused on social media as compared to the social integration in Zendesk Support.
Real-time messaging experience
Zendesk Support is primarily focused on ticketing workflows. Incoming messages are converted into and treated exactly like other tickets. But messaging on social media is inherently meant to be real-time. Retrofitting that into a traditional ticketing system increases your response times and degrades the experience for both the agents and the customers. There’s a considerable lag in messages showing up in Zendesk; and the views dashboard is static — not updated as messages come in. We have a dedicated blog post on why that’s far from ideal.
Inconsistent threads
All new tweets and DMs from a single customer result in a new ticket. Ideally, there should be a unified view of a user whether they are messaging privately or publicly. This historical view of previous exchanges provides an additional level of context for the agent to work with. Not having this messes up the analytics, unnecessarily blows up the ticket count and you end up with awkward looking conversations like these:
Keyword tracking
Businesses need to be aware of, monitor and respond to any conversation about them on social media. That makes tracking hashtags or phrases critical when it comes to social media customer support. Zendesk no longer supports this and only allows you to monitor direct mentions.
Images and GIFs
It’s critical for the messaging experience to be personal and fun. Companies make heavy use of emojis and GIFs on social media to improve their brand perception and customer engagement. With Zendesk Support, agents lose the ability to enhance their responses with images or GIFs on social media.
Desktop notifications
When working with a support inbox application, desktop notifications for incoming messages is absolutely indispensable. It prevents agents from missing conversations if they’re browsing elsewhere and also improves response times. Zendesk currently does not support desktop notifications either.
Public-to-Private switch
It’s a common requirement for businesses to be able to switch conversations from public to private. Since Zendesk creates a new ticket for tweets and DMs, there’s no way for you to seamlessly switch conversations.
Lack of context
It’s crucial for agents to know details about the customer, their profile, location, influence, etc. There’s no access to this information in the Zendesk conversation view and it only gets worse with multiple participants since it’s not uncommon for social media threads to have more than one participant.
Platform specific features
Zendesk Support misses out on some cool platform specific features that businesses can leverage. For e.g., did you know Twitter lets you attach a DM invite to a public tweet making it super easy for your customers to reply privately? Social media focused platforms have all these features baked into their messaging experiences.
Chatbots
Twitter and Facebook allow businesses to perform some amazing automation with native support for chatbots, quick replies, welcomes messages, etc. These features are intimately tied to their platforms and only social media focused services can seamlessly and feasibly enable you to leverage these features.
All that said, Zendesk is powerful but its strengths lie in traditional forms such as email and ticketing. Although initially counter-intuitive, it is more efficient for companies to use dedicated support platforms which focus on social media.
Facebook and Twitter are constantly evolving with new support specific features. Leveraging platforms which can support these features and enable you to truly embrace the new idea of ‘social’ is needed in order to stay relevant in today’s times and not lag behind when it comes to customer experience. If you are a company using Zendesk along with its social offering, we highly recommended you to start a free trial of our social media focused platform Zelp, alongside Zendesk and experience the difference yourself.
