After going through a special kind of misery sorting out a medical claim discrepancy—complete with tinny elevator hold music and templated email responses with placeholders mistakenly left in—I’ve had plenty of time to consider all the ways support teams can use their support software’s built-in tools to improve their workflows.
Zendesk has clearly thought this through, which is why it consistently makes Zapier’s list of the best help desk software and live chat apps for customer support. It offers everything support teams need to respond to requests faster, smarter, and without accidentally calling someone {{FirstName}}.
We asked professionals across various industries to share the Zendesk features they use to transform their customer support workflows. Here’s what they had to say.
6 Zendesk features to improve your customer support workflows
Here are the six Zendesk features teams use to optimize everything from ticket triage to self-serve resources.
1. Macros
Ever since I discovered the secret Rainbow Road shortcut in Mario Kart 64, I’ve been obsessed with finding time-saving hacks everywhere else in life. Macros in Zendesk are the customer support shortcut: they’re canned responses or actions that you can apply to any Zendesk ticket.
Jane Ingram, director of operations and marketing at Forwardly, uses them to add pre-written messages to support tickets. “I have a macro that prompts customers to submit a new ticket if they have follow-up questions and another that wishes clients a good weekend if I plan to follow up with them the next week.”
Director of Exceed Plumbing and Air Con, Caleb John, on the other hand, uses location-tag macros to automatically allocate jobs: “Every urgent ticket tagged with ‘gas,’ ‘leak,’ or ‘urgent’ and a postcode gets routed directly to the technician on-call for that zone.” Caleb then set up filtered views for each technician so that they would see only calls within their radius sorted by priority.
“We used to spend around 45 minutes per shift just reallocating jobs that landed at the wrong desk,” Caleb shares. “This new system dropped callback delays by 70% and doubled our same-day resolution.”
Before you go macro-creation happy, don’t. Jane suggests this approach: “Start small and build your library—don’t try to write macros for everything all at once. I tell my team that if they say the same thing to different clients more than twice, create a macro.”
2. Automated workflows
Macros aren’t the only way to kick off automations in Zendesk. You can also set up automated workflows to do things like notifying agents about unresolved tickets or closing resolved tickets.
“Automated workflows allow us to quickly categorize, prioritize, and route tickets based on their content, customer segment, or urgency level,” says Roman Surikov, founder of Ronas IT. “For example, we created automated workflows specifically for urgent issues like billing or technical problems, which instantly alerted the right support agent or escalation team.”
The results: “This drastically reduced our response time and greatly improved customer satisfaction by ensuring that critical requests received immediate attention.”
Zendesk also offers thousands of native app integrations so you can automate workflows across the rest of your tech stack. If that’s not enough, use Zapier’s Zendesk integration to connect with thousands more so you can automatically do things like add tickets to your project management tool or create tickets from form submissions. Learn more about how to automate Zendesk, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.
Zapier is the most connected AI orchestration platform—integrating with thousands of apps from partners like Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Use interfaces, data tables, and logic to build secure, automated, AI-powered systems for your business-critical workflows across your organization’s technology stack. Learn more.
3. WhatsApp integration
Different types of customers prefer to reach out in different ways—live chat, social media, phone, and email. If WhatsApp is one of the support channels you offer, use Zendesk’s native WhatsApp integration to centralize your communications and speed up your responses.
That’s what Aleksandrs Tuls, co-founder of Rozie, does. “We use the WhatsApp integration in Zendesk to share ready-made templates to answer common customer issues. Since most people prefer messaging apps these days, communicating on WhatsApp makes the whole process more convenient for them, and it boosts our conversions.”
4. Custom ticket fields
Zendesk comes pre-loaded with your standard ticket fields—for example, requester, subject, and priority—which is great, unless they don’t actually reflect how your team works. That was the case for Kiara DeWitt, founder and CEO of Injectco, so she created custom ticket fields to mirror her clinic’s language instead of using Zendesk’s defaults.
“Instead of generic status tags like ‘pending’ or ‘open,’ we use real-world status markers like ‘Waiting for callback,’ or ‘Needs refill approval,'” explains Kiara. “These categories mirror the language we use in clinic, which means agents don’t waste time translating internal lingo into platform lingo—they just click the thing that makes sense. It’s like having a dashboard that speaks our language.”
Kiara continues: “When we export data, it actually tells a story—for example, I can see if most callbacks are about semaglutide refills or booking confusion. From there, we can tweak our workflows before our call volume spikes.”
Another benefit of mimicking clinic language in Zendesk: “New hires onboard in half the time,” says Kiara. “Instead of asking, ‘What does this tag mean?’ they already know because it sounds like what they hear in the clinic. That kind of alignment makes operations feel smooth, not forced.”
5. Side conversations
If you’ve ever played email ping-pong with a vendor, you know how it goes: you email your request, they forward it to someone else who might know the answer, but then another person gets cc’d, and somehow the subject line now reads “RE: Fwd: Re: URGENT.”
Zendesk side conversations put an end to that chaos.
Instead of jumping between inboxes and hoping for the best, agents can loop in external partners—like shippers, software vendors, or Dave in accounting, who’s the only one with the answer—without ever leaving the ticket.
Glen Wasserstein, managing partner at Immigration Law Group, shares an example of what that looks like in practice: “Our biggest win came from switching every vendor email chain into a Zendesk side conversation instead of forwarding mail from Outlook. The agent clicks the tiny speech bubble, pulls in the shipping partner or software vendor, and keeps the whole chat glued to the ticket. No more lost history or blind-copy drama. We even built a macro that fires the side conversation with a ready greeting and an auto-filled ticket summary. Two clicks and the request is gone.”
For Glen, the numbers tell the story. “First-contact resolution jumped from 58% to 71% in six weeks because agents were no longer chasing vendor replies buried in personal inboxes. And we cut our audit time in half since the compliance team could see every outside reply in the ticket timeline.”
6. Request tracking
Sure, solving tickets feels like progress. But if you’re not looking at what’s causing them, you’re just playing a never-ending game of support Whac-A-Mole. Ashley DeFilippo, director of customer operations at Animoto, explains how she uses Zendesk’s request tracking to improve their overall customer experience.
“Gaining visibility into the most common reasons why users reach out has enabled our team to proactively build self-service resources, particularly for one-touch tickets. Based on these insights, we’ve enhanced our automated chatbot with additional content, updated existing Help Center articles and published new ones, and optimized search keywords to better connect users with the right resources when they need them.”
The results speak for themselves. “These efforts have significantly reduced ticket volume, contributing to a 35% year-over-year reduction in tickets submitted per active user. More importantly, they’ve empowered users to resolve issues independently, improving their overall experience by helping them get unblocked in the moment. By allowing users to self-serve on the more common tickets, we’ve also freed up agent time to focus on more complex inquiries.”
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