Media training 101 for small businesses

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Great news: you just scored a big press interview to promote your business. The story will expose your brand to the perfect new audience and drive meaningful traffic to your website. So…don't blow it. Yes, just as quickly as the excitement for the opportunity arrived, the realization that you now have to do an interview sets in. I get it—press interviews can absolutely be intimidating. The resulting coverage represents a significant opportunity to acquire new customers, drive sales, or raise awareness, and you want to be sure to represent your brand well and really compel the audience to check out your company. On top of that, you have to contend with adrenaline and nerves in the moment. You may be thinking, "So many other business owners are so polished and articulate in their interviews. How am I going to pull that off?" Deep breath. A successful interview is usually the result of good media training: preparation and practice in advance of an interview. I've tr...
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5 ways to streamline your Zendesk tickets, automatically

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Customer service can make or break a brand. You remember the companies that went above and beyond, and you also remember the brands that treated you poorly.

Customer support isn't just about being nice. (Though it helps!) Along with soft skills and product knowledge, your customer service processes need to be airtight. You don't want to miss a customer's request just because they emailed the wrong person for help.

Zendesk is a customer service app that lets you customize your ticketing process to suit your business needs. If you already have a ticketing system in place but still have a few holes in your process, Zapier can help plug them up.

We're an automation tool that connects web apps to take care of tedious tasks. Through our automatic workflows, which we call Zaps—you can send information from another app into Zendesk, so you can take care of customer issues right away.

We've rounded up a few Zap templates—what we call those pre-made workflows—that can help you automatically create tickets from form requests, track tickets, and more. Just click on a template and we'll guide you through the set-up process. You can read more about setting up Zaps here.

You'll need a paid Zapier account to use the workflows in this piece. Zendesk is a premium app. If you don't have an account yet, it's free to get started.

Create tickets from a contact form

If a customer needs help with a product, the contact page on the company website is the first place they'll check. Even if you have a separate tab for support requests, some people still default to the first option they see. These Zaps will create Zendesk tickets from new form submissions, so you don't leave a customer hanging.

If you want to create Zendesk tickets according to certain criteria, add a filter step—available on our paid plans—to your workflow. Learn more about filters here.

Turn tickets into tasks

Ticketing isn't just a feature used in customer service. People in sales, HR, and other functions use ticketing to handle requests. And why not? It's easy to assign tickets to different people, so if an incoming request requires one colleague's expertise, you can route a ticket to the right place.

If you organize your workday in a task management app, it's not ideal to check in two places in order to plan your work. These automatic workflows will create a task in your favorite project management whenever you receive a new ticket.

Get notifications for new tickets

While in-app and email notifications are fine, it's not realistic to stay glued to your customer support app all day—even if that's part of your job. Sometimes you're working on something else while you're waiting for a customer to respond. These automatic workflows will send a message in your favorite chat app whenever there's a new ticket in a view.

Need to route specific notifications to different channels? Use Paths—available on our paid plans—to run different actions based on various situations. Learn more about our Paths feature.

Track ticket trends

You can spot trends in tickets over time. For example, if you launched a new product and receive a surge of tickets, perhaps the new product is a little buggy. Or if you're receiving the same questions constantly, maybe you need to develop some educational content to guide customers along.

Creating a spreadsheet of tickets is a great first step for this kind of data analysis. On certain Zendesk plans, you can export tickets to a JSON, CSV, or XML file. But let's say you only want to extract a specific category of tickets. You'll have a pretty big file to sift through. You can save yourself the headache with these Zaps, which will automatically create a new row when you receive a new ticket in Zendesk.

Note: Zaps will not retroactively trigger on new tickets that were received before you turned on your workflow.

Turn emails into tickets

It's inevitable that a customer might reach out for help in the wrong channel. For example, you work in sales, but the client you recently spoke to reaches out to you for help instead of a customer support rep. (That's what you get for being so good at your job!)

Instead of asking your client to send in a support ticket, you can use a Zap to automatically turn that email into a Zendesk ticket. You can avoid giving your client the runaround, and the customer will receive the help they need.

Take your customer support to the next level

This is just the start of all that you can do with Zendesk and Zapier. Zapier supports thousands of apps, so you automate almost any task at work. Start building your Zap now and see what you can create.

New to Zapier? It's a tool that helps anyone connect apps and automate workflows—without any code. Sign up for free to use Zendesk with Zapier.

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