Practical Zendesk Administration: A World-Class Customer Service Platform

Implementing the Zendesk customer service software as part of your company’s operations can be time-consuming, but with the best practices and advice in this hands-on guide, you can shorten the procedure considerably. You’ll learn the purpose, benefits, and pitfalls of each Zendesk feature, with examples of how to configure it to match your company’s needs and processes.

Written by written by two experienced Zendesk product trainers, this book is distilled from years of working in the trenches, launching customer implementations, and answering thousands of questions from participants throughout the world. With it, you’ll be able to determine the best way to put Zendesk’s vast potential to work for your company.

• Apply custom branding to your user-facing support portal
• Mitigate risk by implementing various Zendesk security features
• Manage profiles and permissions for users, agents, and administrators
• Create tickets from email, voice, chat, feedback tabs, and social media
• Capture and classify help requests through standard and custom fields
• Use techniques to build an efficient agent support process
• Automate your business rules in Zendesk to streamline your workflow
• Provide your customers with self-service support

Stafford Vaughan started computer programming at an early age. He grew up near Sydney, Australia, and found his first job at CustomWare, a software services company that specializes in the technology of fast growing software companies. In his time at CustomWare, Stafford has personally established the training departments of several companies, including Zendesk, Atlassian, and GoodData, and authored several of the official training programs for software products including Zendesk, JIRA, Confluence, GreenHopper, and GoodData.

As an educator, Stafford has delivered training sessions to more than a thousand organizations in 15 countries, including NASA, the Pentagon, the United Nations in Geneva, Harvard University, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Groupon, the US Department of Commerce, Sun Microsystems, and Wells Fargo Bank.

Stafford holds a Bachelor of Software Engineering degree from the University of Newcastle, he is a CompTIA Certified Technical Trainer (CTT+), a Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform (Standard Edition 5.0), a Microsoft Certified Application Specialist (PowerPoint 2007), and an Adobe Certified Expert (Photoshop CS5).

Stafford currently lives in San Francisco and works in Silicon Valley. In his spare time he is a keen hiker and serves as a volunteer mentor at the San Francisco SPCA.