Your first week as an admin: what to set up

What a new Zendesk admin should set up first, and the three decisions that are painful to reverse once tickets start arriving.

What a new Zendesk admin should set up first, and the three decisions that are painful to reverse once tickets start arriving.

The short list for week one

• Your support email address. Nothing works until questions can reach you.
• Your agents, with the right roles. Including who is an admin, which is fewer people than you think.
• Groups. Even if you only need one to start with.
• The standard triggers. Read them rather than adding to them. Zendesk ships a set that already does the obvious work.
• Business hours. Everything about timing depends on these, and adding them later means your historical figures do not match your new ones.
• Evaluating a trial account before you commit

The three that are hard to undo

Your subdomain

It appears in URLs, in email headers and in every integration you build. Renaming it later is possible but touches everything.

One account or several

Running customer service and an internal HR desk from one Zendesk keeps costs down and mixes two audiences that often should not see each other. Separating them later means a migration.

Your tagging and field scheme

Fields and tags are what every report and business rule reads. A scheme invented ticket by ticket produces reports nobody trusts, and cleaning it up means touching historical tickets.

See also

• The order in which you set Zendesk up
• What not to do on day one
• One Zendesk instance or several: how to choose
• Evaluating a trial account before you commit