Item: Zendesk Chat
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Zendesk Chat (formerly Zopim)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently, our Customer Support team is the only team using Zendesk Chat. The chat widget displays on our website, allowing customers and potential customers to contact us with any questions they have while exploring our site and/or during any part of our quote and purchase flow. The intent for enabling and offering this channel is to allow visitors to ask quick questions without picking up their phones. We recently expanded our Customer Support team from three to five agents. All of these agents have access to Zendesk Chat. Therefore, they have the capability to chat with customers while they are visiting our website both proactively and reactively. Although, we don't proactively reach out to visitors. Instead, we focus on servicing those customers and potential customers who reach out to us to ask questions while visiting our website.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Automatic ticket creation that contains the chat's transcript
Automatic replies when the wait time reaches certain limits
Ability to transfer the chat to another user

Cons

Linking with a telephone, so the agent is only working on 1 channel at a time
More simplified way to create and use templates
Link users who may have provided us a new/different email from what we have on file for them

Most Important Features

Ability to set status
Ability to understand chat and agent history
Ability to save transcript within user's profile

Return on Investment

Decrease in incoming emails
Increase in offline messages
Multiple tickets are created when a visitor reaches out multiple times with the same question (in a short period of time)
Does not simply re-open existing/prior chat for the same topic/person

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk Support Suite, Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM), Stella Connect, by Medallia, Quip and Slack

Key Insights

Do you think Zendesk Chat delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Zendesk Chat's feature set?

Did Zendesk Chat live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Zendesk Chat go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Zendesk Chat again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Zendesk Support Suite, Stella Connect, by Medallia, Quip

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited in the following scenarios - to create a Zendesk ticket that automatically saves a copy of the chat's transcript in the Zendesk ticket, to track timestamps associated with the chat, for agents to understand what page the customer is on when they initiate their chat, and for agents to proactively reach out to customers who have been visiting a certain webpage for an extended period of time. It is less appropriate in the following scenarios - to truly capture the chatters' identity, especially when the chatter enters a different email address than what we have on file for their existing Zendesk profile, and for agents to be available on both chat and phone, but in a way that they are not taking a new phone call while they are on a chat and vice versa. I'd also like the ability to pull a report that summarizes from which webpage chats are being initiated overall. This way we could understand where we may need to improve our messaging, etc.

Using Zendesk Chat (formerly Zopim)

Users and Roles

4 - Three of the users make up our Customer Support team and are part of our frontline staff. As members of our frontline staff, these agents work directly with any of our customers and/or prospective customers to answer questions about our products, coverage, questionnaire, opportunities to self-service, etc. The additional user manages the Customer Support team. While there may be times this user will also work directly to answer any incoming questions, they primarily use Zendesk Chat to oversee and understand staffing needs based on the number of incoming chats, scheduling, whether or not we have the capacity to handle incoming chats to meet service level expectations, QA, and chat statistics at both the team and agent level.

Support Headcount Required

3 - These are licensed insurance agents who are able to not only answer questions regarding our products and the coverage provided by our products but also sell Property and Casualty Insurance in all 50 states. They are skilled agents prepared to answer tough questions with thoughtful and often complex responses. Given how complicated and complex some of these topics can be they are trained to recognize when the chatter may benefit by speaking to us via another channel, oftentimes by offering to call out to the chatter.

Business Processes Supported

Ability to answer quick questions visitors ask on the fly
Ability to apply macros/templates to reduce wait time between replies
Getting the chatter to a live person who understands their complicated questions and is able to provide thoughtful responses

Innovative Uses

Ability to understand what page on our website the chat is initiated from

Future Planned Uses

Use AI to direct questions that come in outside of our regular business hours
Integrate chat with our FAQs so based on keywords found within their question we're able to quickly reply with a helpful article and offer the ability to proceed to speak with a live agent if the article does not answer their question
Would appreciate more insight into our chat history by having more reporting options available

Likelihood to Renew

Due to staffing issues, we have temporarily stopped offering chat as an available channel. We're also interested in the best ways to integrate chat with our FAQs and AI to provide quick responses, either during off-hours or prior to speaking with a live agent. I've also found that reporting is rather limited where some of the interesting and useful data made available and visible during the chat cannot be pulled post-chat; it would be great to pull a high-level report so we can analyze this data.

Evaluating Zendesk Chat (formerly Zopim) and Competitors

Products Replaced

Not Sure

Key Differentiators

Price
Product Features
Product Usability
Product Reputation

Ease of use and maintenance was one of the single most important factors in our decision. We wanted a nimble product that is easy to set up, maintain, and use. It was important that it worked well with our support ticketing system as well, which in this case is Zendesk Support, so this need was easily met.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I would ask for a deep dive into setting options and operationally how to set this feature up, as well as maintain it. Not being the person who initially set Zendesk Chat up for our team, I find more often than not when I'm trying to figure out how to change something I struggle to understand what each option is meant to do.

Comments

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Zendesk Chat Review

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