Is Your Support Team Ready for a Zombie Apocalypse?

#1 Put the right limb in the right bucket.

Despite zombies being clumsy, and stereotypical (and a bit dirty, with all that blood), unless you know exactly where the trouble is coming from, getting rid of them can be incredibly hard. Followers and hunters have identified more than two dozen kinds of zombies typified through extant literature. But in most cases, the first level of identifying the zombie (and how to get away from it) is knowing whether it is the infectious type, that spreads around from victim to victim, or the more subtle “eat brain and leave” kind.

Within each of these categories, you might have a dozen or more sub-categories. For example, the Viral Zombie, that spreads the virus around with its bite, and the Toxic Gas induced Zombie that releases some creepy cold smoke to turn its victims into zombies are infectious. The ones running around because of a radiation exposure gone wrong usually lack the ability (or charm) to convert their victims.

As a third level, you might want to add where the zombies came from. Toxic Gas Zombies, in most cases, rise from marshes and cemeteries, and if you have a Radiation Zombie you can be pretty sure that there is either a military research lab or a defunct weapons testing site nearby.

“In the heat of the night you can’t afford to waste precious hours trying to figure out what kind of zombie is troubling your customers. Dependent Fields in Freshdesk let you bucket every support ticket into the specific categories, sub-categories and items affected. That way you get to know exactly where the issue is coming from and get to hit the nail right on the zombie’s empty head.”

#2 Keep an eye on every customer and issue.

During the apocalypse, you are going to have more than a few dozen customers hitting your help desk for support. As you are answering their queries, it is really useful to know which customers are trying to flee the scene, which ones are in hiding, and which ones are brawling with five zombies and a baseball bat. If you plan to do this manually, pretty soon you are going to get overwhelmed, and not able to do your best to your customers in distress. Luckily you can mark the status of a customer’s issue, and quickly filter, come back or even automate some tasks based on the status.

Most help desk solutions offer out-of-the-box ticket statuses like “Open”, “Pending”, “Resolved” and “Closed”. While that works out pretty ok in most situations, to really be able to help your customers survive the night you might need to add your own customized ticket statuses. With Freshdesk you can even take it beyond that, and choose when your SLA timers must be running, and when they should be put “onhold”. That way, you don’t run an SLA violation when a customer is waiting for her brave boyfriend to return from the brawl!

Keep your support team in touch, even on-the-go

It’s going to be a long night, and some of your support staff may need to be off their desks and laptops. And it is even more critical for your on-the-field agents to be able to stay in touch with your support desk through the night. Configuring email notifications to alert your agents when a ticket is assigned to them can go a long way in keeping them productive on-the-go. With Freshdesk you can take it even a step further, and let your agents completely “talk” to your help desk without leaving their email. Email Commands let them reassign tickets, categorize them, change the priority or even set the status without having to login to your support desk.

#3 Figure out what’s important and what’s not.

It’s going to be a long night, and some of your support staff may need to be off their desks and laptops. And it is even more critical for your on-the-field agents to be able to stay in touch with your support desk through the night. Configuring email notifications to alert your agents when a ticket is assigned to them can go a long way in keeping them productive on-the-go. With Freshdesk you can take it even a step further, and let your agents completely “talk” to your help desk without leaving their email. Email Commands let them reassign tickets, categorize them, change the priority or even set the status without having to login to your support desk.

In Freshdesk, you can define the kind of service levels that your customers can expect from your support team, based on the priority of issues they raise. For example, you might want to guarantee that high priority issues would get responded to within an hour, and would get resolved in four hours, while a low priority issue might take upto three hours to get a response, and eight to get resolved. You get to decide which kinds of issues constitute a high priority situation, and can even automate the entire prioritization process.

A good way to prioritize incoming issues is by using an “Impact - Urgency” Matrix. In this case, you might define a situation as “high impact” if the customer is faced with 5 or more zombies. Similarly, if the customer is in hiding, and temporarily safe from attack, the urgency is lower than if the customer were currently in a brawl with them.

#4 Let robots fight zombies with intelligent automations.

With limited resources, every help desk agent on your team must be at their peak productivity to manage and support all the distress calls and queries. But a majority of your team’s efforts are spent in reading through every incoming ticket, categorizing, prioritizing and assigning it to the right agent in your support desk. In addition to that, you would have a lot of queries that need some following up with the customer. Your agents could make a mental note to remember each of these issues, go back and manually send your customers a reminder email to get their updates, but that’s going to rob you and your customers of a few precious minutes.

Freshdesk comes with a number of powerful zombie-fighting automations. For example, the Dispatch’r reads through all your incoming emails and performs a variety of actions based on it. Like setting categories, tags and priorities, shooting automated emails to the customer, or to specific agents, and even assigning it to the right person in your team. Or the Supervisor, for instance, lets you automatically send your customers a reminder email requesting their response every few hours, or make sure your support team doesn’t add to their agony by dragging conversations back-and-forth for too long.

A few quick tips to take advantage of the powerful automations in Freshdesk:

• Use the Dispatch’r to automatically categorize, prioritize and assign incoming tickets
• Set up rules to periodically remind customers, if you are waiting for their inputs
• Proactively mitigate customer frustrations when conversations keep going back and forth
• Reuse common and typical answers with Canned Responses
• Execute a series of tasks in one click, with Scenario Automations
• Save thinking time, by allowing Freshdesk to suggest the most probable solutions to a support issue, from your knowledge base.

When the zombies strike, get everyone to pitch in

Through the night, you are going to get a lot of panic-stricken calls from customers fleeing for their brains. To be able to scale up and match the inflow, you are going to need every person you possibly can to jump in and support customers. That’s why it makes sense to keep your entire organization, even the non-support staff, trained to be able to help out during an emergency. In most situations, it does not make sense for you to get an extra full-time agent licence (even if you use a super-affordable monthly-pay-as-you-go support solution like Freshdesk), just to be able to support customers for one night.

With Freshdesk, you can add as many occasional agents as your team needs, and give them all the help desk capabilities that the rest of your support agents enjoy, by getting them a Day Pass. As an occasional agent, pretty much anyone in your company gets to jump in and support customers, add knowledge base articles, and contribute in your forums for the whole day, for as low as a dollar.

#5 Open your support gates, no matter where customers are crying for help.

It’s the zombie apocalypse, remember? Let’s get a little realistic here - you don’t expect every frightened customer to come knocking at your support through email or your web portal, do you? No. Most of them would be live-tweeting their crisis or sharing their story on Facebook. As a proactive customer support team, you need to be able to be there, no matter where they are screaming for help. That’s why you need to have a multichannel help desk solution that lets you support customers when they contact you, through phone, email or your support portal, and even when they aren’t contacting you, but need your help on Facebook and Twitter.

With Freshdesk, you can take your customer support beyond just waiting for customers to complain and firefight issues. When customers aren’t talking to you but are talking about you on their favorite social networks, you can be there, answer their queries, and show the world that you are a company that cares!

#6 Give survivors and Zombie Hunters the platform to engage and learn from each other.

The last few humans need to be able to get together, organize their civilian armies and work on the advice of successful zombie hunters. With community forums, you can provide them with the right platform to engage with each other, ask questions, get tips and tricks, and report zombie sightings. “With the integrated community forums in Freshdesk your customers can talk to each other, suggest ideas, and vote on existing suggestions. That way, your customers get to share best-practices with each other, and fall even more deeply in love with your brand. Or, in the case of a zombie apocalypse, stay alive and coming back to you.” Community rock-stars will be able to share their experiences with other survivors, answer questions and discuss the best ways to get rid of the brain-eating undead. And you can participate in these discussions and get even closer to your customers.

Is your support team apocalypse proof? Here’s a handy checklist

• Get the team prepped up: Update your knowledge base with latest information Identify issue-priority matrix for your
  business Have occasional agent logins ready for non-support staff
• Keep the support portal ready: Customize ticket forms to get all relevant information the first time Create separate
  forums for discussions, tips, ideas and questions Monitor self-service portal activity and engagement through analytics.
• Go all out: Integrate social media into core support channels Automate ticket categorization and dispatch Bucket and
  drill-down issues with dependent fields
• Build on the heroes: Integrate social media into core support channels Automate ticket categorization and dispatch
  Bucket and drill-down issues with dependent fields

What do the reports say? A few numbers you need to worry about

Ready for non-zombie days too...

With a few simple things that you can make a part of your support culture, your help desk will be ready for pretty much anything. A zombie apocalypse may not be something that comes up every day (or night). But a few other common scenarios could turn apocalyptic real fast too. Perhaps the store announced a new sale, and customers are thronging at your doors, or one of your vendors ran a little glitch and customers now want their refunds. Or, perhaps, just the volume of innocent questions is smothering your team with more tickets than they can handle. If your support team is ready to handle calls during the final standoff between humans and zombies, they can handle anything!

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