Recipe for the customer-centric company: Collect customer insights and act on them


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Support

Team, Professional, or Enterprise






You can optimize how you support your customers based on what you know about them. These
recipes outline how you can set up custom fields for two different types of companies to
provide better, more personalized support. Featured ingredients: custom user fields and custom
organization fields.
Also, see our other recipe for the customer-centric company, Gather customer info for every support request.
This article contains the following sections:


A recipe for the retail (consumer)
business


A recipe for businesses providing software
support




A recipe for the retail (consumer) business

As a retailer, you face a variety of customer types—from a one-time shopper to a lifetime
loyalist. How do you target the customers who would benefit from some extra attention? Using
custom user fields, you can segment your customer base by capturing relevant data and
creating unique workflows based on these data points.
This recipe walks through how you can configure your user fields and business rules to
optimize how you support your customers based on what you know about them.
Skill level: Beginner
Time required: 30 minutes



Ingredient list




2 date user fields


2 drop-down user fields


1 trigger






Instructions

Step 1
Start by gathering customer data in user fields in your Zendesk
account. As a retail business, you may want to capture the following types of information
about your customer. Knowing their spending habits, billing cycle, and social influence can
help determine which customers you need to prioritize.










Name of field
Field type
Field options




Date of last purchase
Date
Manual entry, via the API, or via bulk import


Subscription renewal date
Date
Manual entry, via the API, or via bulk import


Average annual spend
Numeric
Manual entry, via the API, or via bulk import


Service level
Drop-down
"Platinum", "Gold", "Silver", "Bronze"


Social influence
Drop-down
"High", "Medium", "Low"





Step 2
After you create your custom user fields, you can now set any user field as a condition in
a Zendesk Support business rule, such as a custom trigger.
For example, if a high-spending, influential customer submits a support request, you might
want to alert the appropriate team members. This example trigger escalates any ticket from a
customer on a platinum service level or one that spends over $1000/year with your business,
or has high social influence.



A recipe for businesses providing software support

Its common practice for a software company to track customer type and service level plan.
For a B2B company, you most likely want to capture customer information for a group of
customers—an organization.
This recipe outlines how to configure custom organization fields and workflows to support
your customers at different times of a sales cycle.
Skill level: Beginner
Time required: 30 minutes



Ingredient list




3 drop-down organization fields


1 numeric organization field


1 checkbox organization field


1 trigger






Instructions

Step 1
Start by gathering customer data in organization fields in Zendesk Support. For each
organization, you can capture the organization's account type, monthly spend, contract
agreement, service level, as well as if they have agreed to be a referenced customer.









Name of field
Field type
Field options




Account type
Drop-down
"Active customer", "Prospective customer", "Churned customer",
"Partner"


Monthly spend
Numeric
Manual entry, via the API, or via bulk import


Customer reference
Checkbox
Mark checkbox if true


Contract agreement
Drop-down
"Monthly", "Quarterly", "1-year", "2-year"


Service level
Drop-down
"Platinum", "Gold", "Silver", "Bronze"




Step 2
After your organization fields are in place, you can create a trigger based on the
organization field data to set up a dedicated workflow based on customer type.
For example, when your business prospects submit a ticket, you can create a trigger to
automatically set the priority of their tickets to high and loop in relevant sales teams,
who can be agents or light agents in your Zendesk account.
The next recipe in our Customer-centric Cookbook is Create meaningful views of your customers.

