The Proactive Tickets app

Creating tickets for customers before they contact you. Good service when it is service, and spam when it is not.

Creating tickets for customers before they contact you. Good service when it is service, and spam when it is not.

Use it

1. Click the Proactive Tickets icon in the left navigation bar.
2. Search for the customers. The field at the top searches every user field, and there are separate filters for organisation and tags. Click Search.
3. Select the people from the results and click Create ticket. Only twenty show at a time until you raise the number of users per page, and that setting is what lets you go past twenty in one campaign.
4. Give it a name under Name your campaign. That name is applied to every ticket as a tag, which is how you report on it afterwards.
5. Fill in Create your proactive ticket: the subject, the message, the status, the assignee, and a macro to run on creation if you have one.
6. Create them, and make sure somebody is there for the replies.

Zendesk builds a view for the campaign, reachable from Go to ticket view, so the replies arrive somewhere you can watch rather than spread through the queue.

Two numbers to plan with: Zendesk advises no more than a thousand tickets in one campaign, and they are created at about two hundred a minute. And these are ordinary tickets, so your triggers fire on every one of them.

Where it earns its place

• An outage affecting known customers.
• A product issue you have identified before they have.
• A promised follow-up to a group of people.
• A change that will affect how they work.

Telling people first changes everything

A customer who hears about a problem from you feels looked after. The same customer discovering it themselves and then contacting you is already annoyed before the conversation starts.

That difference is worth a great deal, and it costs one message.

Staff the replies

Two hundred proactive tickets produce responses, and they arrive at once, roughly as fast as the tickets themselves go out. Sending on a Friday afternoon means a queue nobody works until Monday, which undoes the goodwill entirely.

Keep it to service

Not promotions. A support ticket is a channel customers associate with problems, and using it to sell teaches them to ignore it.

Say what you are doing about it

A proactive message with no action attached raises anxiety without resolving it. What happened, what you are doing, when they will hear more.

Test with a few

Ten customers first. The replies tell you whether the message reads as helpful or alarming, and that is hard to judge from the draft.

See also

• The Relay messaging app
• The Agent Notification app
• Which free apps Zendesk provides itself