Part of customer support is dealing with the unexpected, AKA incidents. Things will go wrong. It’s inevitable.
You can’t control incidents, but you can control how you respond to them.
Zendesk, while known as a customer support platform, can play a critical role in managing and responding to incidents. It offers native features that help support teams respond to and organize tickets. It connects with third-party incident management tools to bridge the gap between customer support, development, and DevOps teams.
Zendesk also includes out-of-the-box reports to measure customer impact and other key metrics.
In this blog post, we’ll explore ways to use Zendesk to manage and respond to incidents. Let’s get started!
What is incident management?
Incidents are unplanned events that disrupt service, and incident management is the process of responding to and resolving that disruption. The main goal of incident management is to restore the normal level of service as quickly as possible and to minimize the impact on the business and customers.
Poor incident management can deteriorate trust between customers and your brand. On the contrary, a good incident management process can actually improve customers' feelings about your brand.
A good part of incident management involves fielding customer questions and communicating internally with teams, and that’s where Zendesk comes in.
8 tips for managing incidents in Zendesk
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to incident management in Zendesk. Incident management looks different from company to company.
But Zendesk offers out-of-the-box features and integrations worth considering when designing your incident response playbook.
1. Use problem and incident tickets in Zendesk
Unfortunately, when incidents arise, your support team bears the brunt of the situation. Tickets start piling up, customers get frustrated, and the support team feels overwhelmed.
Depending on your company's size, this could mean hundreds or thousands of repeat tickets reporting an issue such as an outage or degraded performance. The good news is that Zendesk can easily manage duplicate reports of an incident using incident tickets.
Zendesk offers problem and incident tickets out of the box.
The basic idea is to treat each ticket as an incident report and link it to a single problem ticket. When you use these features, instead of responding to every single ticket separately, you can respond to the problem ticket and update each associated incident ticket.
This saves you time and gives your customers quick and consistent communication.
2. Use severity ratings
Severity ratings can be used to determine which teams are involved and how and when to update customers about the incident. You can create ticket workflows based on the severity rating using triggers and automation. Those workflows can kick off other tasks or notifications to executives.
An example severity rating scale might include:
Severity 0 - Large scale outage with extreme customer impact
Severity 1 - Product is completely unusable for multiple customers with no workaround
Severity 2 - Functionality is degraded and multiple customer are affected, but short-term workaround is available
Severity 3 - No known customer impact or only impacting single customer
Assigning a severity rating is also helpful when you want to pull reports after the incident is resolved. Furthermore, severity levels help you prioritize incidents and tickets if multiple incidents happen concurrently. This way, your team will know which tickets and incidents to focus their efforts on first.
3. Categorize incidents using tags or custom fields
The more data you tie to your tickets, the cleaner your reporting will be when you conduct a post-incident review.
For example, you should track which product or area of the product experienced an incident using tags or custom fields.
By categorizing incidents, you can pull reports after the fact. This data comes in handy as time passes and you want to see incident trends. For instance, you might want to pull an annual report of incidents. Relying on your memory to do so would be a bad strategy — but if you categorize every incident throughout the year, you can see which areas of the product need more work to stabilize the service and make it more reliable.
Categorizing incidents using tags or custom fields also allows you to build triggers and automations based on the categorization. And while manual categorization works, leveraging a tool like Swifteq’s Triggers+ChatGPT app to automate ticket categorization saves a lot of time and ensures consistent tags — both of which are critical when you’re dealing with a widespread incident.
4. Automate using triggers and automations
When you use triggers and automation, Zendesk can do a lot of thinking for you, saving your team precious time during high-stress moments. In Zendesk, riggers are action-based, and automations are time-based. Let’s take a closer look.
Configure triggers to notify internal teams or agents or to send notifications to customers based on specific ticket conditions. For example, you can set a trigger to automatically assign Sev 0 tickets to your incident response team.
Automations, on the other hand, can be used to notify your team or the customer based on a specific timeframe. For example, you can automatically update customers after 30 minutes when a Sev 0 incident ticket is still open to inform them you’re still working on a solution.
There are many ways to use triggers and automations in Zendesk. Jump in and experiment to see what works best for your team.
5. Integrate with other tools
Zendesk integrates with many other tools and platforms, including incident management and communication systems like PagerDuty, Statuspage, FireHydrant, Incident.io, and OpsGenie.
Using these integrations helps optimize your incident management process by connecting your support team with engineers and developers. If you work for a larger company, you might even have a dedicated team of incident responders. Those folks may or may not have access to Zendesk, but you can bridge that gap by connecting the tools they rely on with Zendesk.
Integrating these tools with Zendesk brings immediate benefits for support agents and customers.
For example, if you use Statuspage, a popular incident communication platform, you can see and share incident updates directly from within the Zendesk ticket view. This helps keep your support team and customers in the loop on the status of active incidents. More importantly, using a status page to communicate proactively can help deflect incoming tickets, saving your support team time and reducing stress.
6. Use SLAs
To hold your team accountable, define and enforce SLAs (service level agreements) in Zendesk. You can also report on SLAs to see how your team is performing.
If incidents often breach SLAs, it’s likely a signal that you need some training or additional product work to ensure timely customer responses and, ultimately, faster resolutions.
SLAs help measure your performance and keep customers happy. You might even be contractually obligated to certain SLAs. If so, consider setting up SLAs in Zendesk.
7. Use reports
After resolving an incident, use Zendesk’s reporting capabilities to measure ticket volume, response time, and more. Your incident response team will likely ask for this data, so the more you prepare ahead of time, the easier it will be to get them what they need.
Remember, the more data you tie to tickets, the cleaner your reports will be and the easier it will be to answer specific questions using them.
Zendesk’s flexible reporting machine even allows you to create a specific dashboard for incidents and share it with your team.
8. Practice, review, and optimize
Like firefighters who train regularly, the best incident management teams run mock incidents.
Conduct fire drills to practice your incident response workflows. Afterwards, conduct post-incident reviews after each incident to see what went well and what needs to be improved.
Dedicate someone from the support team to sit with the engineers on a post-incident review or postmortem. Treat every incident as an opportunity to learn and improve, and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a world-class incident response team.
Incidents happen — but you can be ready for them
Zendesk is a critical part of your support team’s tech stack, so it plays a pivotal role in incident management. It helps bridge the gap between customer support and engineers and plays a crucial role in keeping customers updated.
The greatest thing about Zendesk is that it’s incredibly flexible. You can configure it to be as simple or complex as you need. Its many integrations mean you can connect it with the tools you and your engineering team already use.
While incident management can be stressful, there’s a lot you can do proactively in Zendesk to set you and your team up for success when things go wrong. The most important thing is to have some sort of plan.
Don’t wait until the first incident to figure it out; start planning now, and your customers will thank you.