What this post is about
- We will introduce you to the sidebar menu items and what you can do with them
- With this introduction you will be best prepared to get started with your helpdesk
- Learn how Zammad enables multitasking
Welcome dear agent, to your smart helpdesk! Here we present the most important menu items that will guide you through your workday in support – with these you should familiarize yourself at the beginning. Take a look around! Then you can get the most out of Zammad.
Or you can let us explain the most important elements and workflows to you and your team in a personal workshop (with lots of tips and tricks that will get you started right away). Just take a look at our services.
Dashboard: This is where the Zammad operation starts
When launched, the ticketing system always greets you with key metrics that help keeping track of the status of tickets assigned to you and your team. These include the:
- First steps in using Zammad to quickly get up to speed
- Time customers had to wait for a response on average
- Mood and number of tickets with high escalation levels
- Channel distribution based on all sources of incoming tickets
- Amount of tickets assigned to you compared to the company as a whole
- Amount of tickets that were handled or reopened by you in the last 24 hours
- Activity of other agents on your team
So, with the help of the dashboard, you can see at a glance how your productivity is doing and where you rank in the company average. This is especially useful to identify workload peaks early on and redistribute inside the team.
Read more in the documentation
Overview: Your ticket overview as the centerpiece
The most important menu item for the support is the overview. This is where you can find all the messages and requests that have been assigned to you and that are waiting to be processed by you. This, by the way, is the cross-channel power of Zammad! Nothing gets lost anymore.
Filter what's important to do in the overview (for example, using priorities or status) and dive deeper into attached notes that won't lose details from previous conversations (no matter who led them).
Read more in the documentation
Knowledge Base: Your knowledge base to fill up
When setting up Zammad, the administrator can decide to enable the useful feature of a knowledge base. This can grow over time to include all the process descriptions, guidance, templates, and insights that you and your team need to access again and again.
We recommend maintaining the knowledge base as a self-help tool with a public area for customers and an internal area for your organization. With this you offer timeless assistance that already has answers in 80% of all cases. And if a new case is added, simply adopt it in your KB.
Read more in the documentation
Customer Chat: Real-time communication with customers
Did you know that not only e-mails, forms, social networks, and even phone calls (see the "Phone" chapter) can converge in Zammad, but also live chats? If you integrate such a tool into your website and set yourself to present, the system will inform you with a sound that a new message has arrived right now.
No matter where you are – for example answering another ticket – with the navigation bar you always keep an overview of ongoing chats and with one click you can get back to them (because the expectation of real-time support is to reach someone from the team immediately). And if you are not at your desk, chat messages appear like normal messages in the overview.
By the way, your previously edited ticket is not lost while chatting, but simply moves down one position in the table bar with open tickets (see chapter "Table bar"). This makes it a breeze to switch between different tickets while waiting for replies.
Read more in the documentation
Phone: Your call log
This menu item of Zammad's operation is also optional and can be added by your admin. If you have a digital phone system (read all about it here), your call log with all incoming and outgoing phone calls will appear in the menu item "Phone". Including a hint who is currently calling!
If the phone number of the person you are calling is known to the system, you can read his name directly in the sidebar. With one click you can open the existing customer profile, add new notes and view older conversations. This means that no step in the support journey is lost.
Read more in the documentation
Table Bar: All your recently opened tasks
Whether open tickets, user and company profiles, or search entries - in your tablebar you can see all of them as direct links, between which you can jump back and forth with one click.
With displayed color codes like yellow (for new / open), black (for postponed) or red (needs urgent attention) you can immediately see the status of assigned tickets. If you mark a ticket as "closed", it will also automatically disappear from your sidebar.
Read more in the documentation
And that was not all!
At the very bottom you'll find navigation elements to switch to your profile, open reportings or the admin area or to create a new ticket yourself.
On top of that, there are lots of other cool features that make Zammad even more efficient and productive in your day-to-day support. Here in the blog we have already collected and presented our favorite power features.
But we would like to add a small but nice highlight to the navigation bar. Pay attention when the color dots of tickets start pulsating. This is a sign that there has been a new action since you were last active in the tab.
Summary
You see: Zammad continuously keeps track of all incoming and outgoing messages, helping you stay on top of things in any situation. A central role is played by the sidebar, which provides you quick access to the most important work areas of the helpdesk.