The Destination Reached: What to Do Next?

The Post-Migration Plan: Four Steps for Successful Zendesk® Start

The hardest part is done. You transferred the organization data to the new help desk platform. Nevertheless, your migration project hasn’t finished with the import to Zendesk®. Now you have to do a couple of things to ensure that everything is right and ready for work. The checklist consists of such tasks:

1. Verify if all data migrated correctly.
2. Announce the finish of Zendesk® data import.
3. Setup Zendesk® Guide if you have migrated the knowledge base.
4. Make settings for effective workflow.
5. Integrate apps used by the company before the data migration.

#1 Check the Migration Results

The data import can be done under keen eye monitoring, but the errors still happen. Usually, the network disturbances, database definition, and format mismatches cause them. The records in the destination help desk came from your old platform. If their value is poor, you rushed on the data audit or missed some steps in the pre-migration phase. It all boils down to check the migration result before starting to work in Zendesk®.

Addressing pain points on the spot is difficult. Let’s take a look at the following list of test cases to ease the “checking pain”:

• If you used Zendesk® bulk import, check if the number of records in the CSV files corresponds to the data in Zendesk®. For the API based migration, check the migrated record types in the source and destination help desk platforms.
• Check if the duplicates are removed in Zendesk®. Ensure that data hadn’t duplicated itself during the migration. There is no place for data redundancy.
• Ensure the data values and format are preserved on the new software.
• Check whether data modified, lost, or corrupted after the import process.
• Look whether the data preserved its format, type, and the like.
• Make sure that the agents can perform actions and use functionality offered by the restrictions they are given.

The thorough checking of the migration can’t be underestimated. Once the considerable time and budget investments were spent, both the CSV import and API based migration should be checked.

#2 Welcome Your Company to Zendesk®

The mission is completed: you have imported your organization data to Zendesk® and tested the results. Now bring the good news: “the migration project is successfully finished” to your boss, C-level management, stakeholders, support team, and customers.

Make Support Channel Go Live

One of the best data migration practices says it is better to redirect your support service channels (email, social media, and the like) from the old help desk during the import process. After the migration is complete, you should redirect these channels to Zendesk®.

Manage Tickets Created During the Migration

Let’s say you have imported tickets via Zendesk® API, and your old system kept on working and receive customer’s requests during the importing. In that case, you should gather those tickets and import them to Zendesk®.

The other scenario is when you bought a third-party service and got your data migrated within a definite time frame. You could plan the work on the old solution in two ways:

• Keep your old help desk platform downtime for a few hours until the migration is done.
• Continue to work and acknowledge your support agents about the transfer to avoid any changes or updates of records during that period.

In theory, such approaches could prevent new tickets from going to the old platform. In practice, it is better to check the number of tickets on the source and destination help desk apps to ensure that no data has leaked.

Showcase How the New Help Desk Works

In the migration project planning, you created documentation for smoothing the adoption of the new help desk. Perhaps, only the support service team looked carefully at the soon-to-be working environment. To increase the understanding of Zendesk® value for marketers, sales, or developers, arrange a demo and tune the two-way communication. Try to determine what outcomes the company will achieve using this help desk platform.

#3 Knowledge Base Setting Shortcuts

Zendesk® Help Center deals with managing your self-service branding, knowledge base, community, and portal. (The two last points are available only in Professional and Enterprise plans). If you have migrated your knowledge base using Google Docs Importer or via API, you figured out that the option isn’t available as default. There are three stages you have to take for making your knowledge base live:

1. Enable Help Center in a setup mode.
2. Get it ready for release.
3. Activate your self-service.

Stage 1.

Let’s put everything step by step. To enable your Help Center, you should have administrator rights. Then select Guide in Zendesk® Product, and click Build your knowledge base. In this mode, your content can’t be seen by customers. Only agents and administrators see it. What’s more, the knowledge base has a default theme, and you can’t customize it at this stage.

Stage 2.

Take advantage of planning the structure of your Help Center and its customization for business preferences. The default theme is Copenhagen, but Professional or Enterprise customers can change the theme by editing page templates, CSS, or JavaScript.

All Guide customers can show or hide objects on the panel and choose among five colors for getting another color for:

• brand;
• brand text;
• text;
• link;
• background.

When you finished customizing colors, make sure you save the changes. Similarly, you can update fonts for heading and texts.

The company logo is shown in the header. To change it, go to Customize design > Brand and click Replace (to browse and select image) under Logo. The image size varies from 200px to 50px, and the Copenhagen theme requires 37px.

The favicon is a square image that shown in the browser tab next to the URL. For changing it, the path is the same as for the logo, but you need to click Replace (to browse and select image) under Favicon. In case you want to have default images, click Revert.

The customization can be added to the images of the home page, community image, and the community banner in the default theme. Note that Lite customers can change only the home page image. To update images, go to Customize design > Images and click Replace under the image you want to change. Home and community images are supposed to have 1600x300px, and the community banner must have less than 300px. Don’t forget to click Save after you finished updating.

Take time to test your Help Center on different browsers to ensure it is displayed accurately. Also, it is important to set a default language before you add or import articles. If the languages mismatch, the content won’t be shown.

The next is to add your content. You can import your existing data or create a brand new one. Be ready to update links for the migrated articles because:

1. Google Docs Importer only adds content to Zendesk® Guide.
2. The API-based import tools don’t switch the links, just content.

If you create a new knowledge base, you can create categories and sections. Create community topics, and disable the community; enable the multiple languages - if it is required (for the customers of Professional or Enterprise Guide). Finally, make sure you add Guide Managers.

Stage 3.

Once all settings and customizations are done, you can activate your Help Desk and make it visible for your customers.

To enable it, you must have the rights of the Zendesk® Support administrator. If everything in place, go to Settings > Guide Settings and click the Activate button twice to confirm activation of your Help Center.

What’s more, you can click Enable spam filters to exclude the new and edited customers' posts and comments from appearing in the Help Center if they look like spam.

#4 Things That Make Life Easier

Among the reasons for a new help desk migration was the streamlining of the processes with improved ticket management, macros, and business rules: triggers and automations. These things are unique for a company workflow, and they don’t come as ready-to-use after the import. You should set them up manually.

Organize Ticket Lifecycles

In Zendesk®, you use Views to arrange the tickets at every stage in their workflow. This tool allows creating groups of tickets as support agents move them through the funnel to fix status. You can find predefined and editable views that Zendesk® states were developed on the best customer support practices.

There is a set of views available at the very beginning:

• your unsolved tickets;
• unassigned tickets;
• all unsolved tickets;
• recently updated tickets;
• new tickets in your groups;
• pending tickets;
• recently solved tickets;
• unsolved tickets in your groups;
• suspended tickets.

The ticket properties are used to allocate them into the views, so be ready to see the same ticket shown in different views. You can edit the existing views as well as create your own with selected conditions for tickets.

To create a new one, click View > More that will open the administration page. Then click Add View, enter a title, and select conditions to define how the ticket will show. You can set the formatting and access rights under Available for. To save it, click Create view. You can find the new view in the list of all predefined views.

Marcos: Automate Reply to Common Questions

Every support agent meets a set of recurring questions from customers about features that you currently don’t provide, pricing plans, and the like. Macros, which are predefined responses, can handle these requests. You can add it to a ticket.

Macros save time for replying to the same answer to different customers. You can write a new text for them or use the existing answer. Also, you can set the specific rules: accessible to all agents, personal, available to a specific group.

To add a new macro, go to Admin icon > choose Macros, and then select the Shared tab. There click Add macro and add a title.

Macros have actions for updating the ticket and creating a notification to a customer. To set them, click the Action drop-down list and select Ticket: Status and choose the conditions you need.

Then, write an email notification text by adding a new action (click the plus sign) and select Ticket: Comment/description. Add your text in a box that has appeared. The last step is to define access rules for this macro and click Create Macro.

Macros save a lot of time for your support agents. Besides, they are easily added to the ticket. All you need to do is to click the button Apply Macro at the bottom of a ticket window, select the suitable one, and click Submit to save updates and send a notification to a customer.

What Are Zendesk® Business Rules?

A set of actions that are applied to a ticket automatically if it corresponds to a list of predefined conditions. That is a short definition of a business rule. The primary function of these rules to streamline the workflow without overloading support agents.

In Zendesk® Support, you have two types of business rules: automations and triggers. Both of them have a set of conditions and actions, modify ticket data, and impact the ticket when a specific event takes place. However, the type of events is a crucial difference. Automations are set working due to an event in time (i.e., 2 hours from the last update), and triggers are enabled by creating and updating events (i.e., when a ticket was created). In case a ticket doesn’t correspond to any conditions, nothing will happen.

How to Create an Automation?

1. Go Admin and select Automations. Then click Add Automation and add a title.
2. Add a condition Ticket: Status and select Less than as the operator and then Solved.
3. To add one more action, click the plus button and select Ticket: Hours since created and then Is as the operator and 24 for the number of hours that have passed since the ticket was created.
4. Add one more condition - Tickets: Tags. The condition operator is Contains at least one of the following and the tag that you require. (The tag detects the ticket’s priority).
5. To set an email to the assigned agent, add an action: Notifications: Email user = (assignee). In the subject and the body, write the required instructions. Click Submit to save the automation.

How to Create a Trigger?

1. Go Admin and select Triggers. Then click Add Trigger and add a title.
2. After that, add Ticket: Status condition and then select Less than as the condition operator and then Solved. Use the plus button to add more conditions (if required).
3. To add the actions, in the action section, choose Ticket: Group. Then select a required condition.
4. The next step is to choose a ticket priority, add a new action, and select Ticket: Priority. Then select a required condition. Click Submit to save the trigger.

#5 Integrations and Zendesk® Marketplace

Zendesk® is known for a marketplace with various integrations and apps to facilitate the agents’ routine and advance the overall business performance. The apps are divided for Support and Chat separately. So you can find the required apps easily and integrate them with your Zendesk® account to continue the efficient work.

The Conclusion

The data migration project has a lot of preparations and actions to take. To make it successful, you should count all possible risks and develop a plan on how to conquer them. The pre-migration and migration parts are vital, and the post-migration part requires time and preparations to ensure that everything works as your company expected. Take your time to set up your Zendesk® and provide your customers' an outstanding experience.

Part 1. How to Get Prepared for Zendesk® Import

Part 2. Whats, Whys, and Hows of Importing Data to Zendesk®