3 Zendesk tricks to help your support team hit their SLAs every time

Delivering a great support experience–whether it’s a recommendation on what size a customer should get, or talking them through a frustrating experience — is key not only to securing a customer’s first purchase, but ensuring their long-term loyalty with your brand. 

That means the pressure is on for customer support teams to provide service that’s not only accurate and up-to-date, but speedy as well — which can be somewhat of a challenge when the typical contact center faces hundreds, if not thousands, of support tickets a day. 

But if you’re managing a support team on Zendesk, we’ve got some good news for you. With Rippling’s no-code, custom workflow builder, Workflow Automator, you’ll be able to trigger tasks, emails, and even Slack messages to help keep you and your team on track, and ensure you’re hitting your SLAs every time. 

Want to learn more? We’ve got five workflows to get you and your team going. 

2. Be alerted to unresolved Zendesk tickets in your out-of-office agents’ queue

While it’s obviously important that your Urgent support tickets are handled promptly, that doesn’t mean it’s fine to let your non-Urgent tickets languish in an absent agent’s queue.  

With this out-of-the-box workflow, you can easily stay on top of any unresolved tickets your agents might have left in their queue before going out on PTO. 

When Rippling detects that an agent is on leave, you’ll automatically get a list of any Open tickets still in their queue, so you can assess if any need to be reassigned, or if they can wait until your agent is back at work.       

3. Don’t lose track of your On-hold tickets

The On-hold status in Zendesk is helpful for both agents and managers, allowing them to easily distinguish between tickets that an agent hasn’t responded to yet versus tickets that need input from third-parties to be resolved. 

But the risk of putting a ticket On-hold is that they may be forgotten in the rush of fresh tickets assigned to agents every day — leading to the unwanted situation of a missed SLA. 

Well, not anymore with this out-of-the-box workflow that provides a timely alert if a ticket has been On-hold for more than a week. That way you can follow up on the ticket before a customer is forced to follow up with you. 

Automate your support workflows with Rippling

Managing a high-performing support team means staying on top of hundreds of tickets without letting any slip through the cracks. Rippling IT's workflow automation connects directly to Zendesk, pulling in ticket data, agent status, and queue information to trigger the right alerts at the right time.

What makes these workflows powerful is how Rippling IT accesses employee data. When you use Rippling IT as part of Rippling's all-in-one workforce management platform, it automatically knows when agents are out of office, which teams they're on, and who should be alerted, because HR data and IT systems share a single source of truth. 

This seamless integration enables intelligent automation, like detecting PTO status to alert managers about unresolved tickets in an absent agent's queue.

If you use Rippling IT as a standalone product you can still access this same workflow automation by connecting it to your existing HR system, whether that's Workday, BambooHR, ADP, or 70+ other HRIS partners. Rippling IT syncs employee data in real time, so your Zendesk workflows stay smart and responsive regardless of your setup.

With over 600 pre-built integrations, Rippling’s system connects Zendesk to the rest of your business systems — from Slack notifications to email alerts — so your support team can focus on customers, not on managing their queue.