Creating a Multi-Tiered, Multi-Timezone, Multi-Language Support Desk

Here at Brandwatch we not only work in three official languages, but we also span halfway across the world.

This means that we need to support our clients in all languages and in all timezones, ensuring a smooth transition as each office comes online.

Having reached 99% customer satisfaction in the month of October, our implementation has proven to be successful.

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Choosing the right help desk

When shopping around for a help desk, cutting corners just won’t do it.

We did a ton of research and went with Danish born, American raised Zendesk. As the leaders in the industry, Zendesk provides all the key elements that have allowed us to create a multi-tiered, multi-timezone, and multi-language support process.

 

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Working with tiers and SLAs

Once you have worked out your SLAs, you’ll need to properly implement them. Using Zendesk’s Organization Fields, we were able to sync up our database and tag all of our clients with their relevant service levels. Through the Views pane, we are able to view each ticket’s service level, allowing us to prioritize issues as they come in.

We have triggers right before an SLA is due to alert the team to pay immediate attention to a particular ticket. The ticket’s priority is also escalated, putting it at the top of the queue.

We then have another set of triggers for when an SLA is violated, setting off a series of triggers that let the team and managers know, subsequently allowing us to create a report through GoodData to keep track of our monthly progress. 

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The tricky timezone issue

As the sun rises in San Francisco, the sun is already setting in Brighton… and somewhere inbetween, New York is sipping a mid-morning coffee. At this point, we’ve handed over support responsibility at least twice.

While we can’t completely give away how we set this up (for legal reasons, and well…we like to keep some cards up our sleeve), we can tell you that we used Targets.

Using a script built in-house by our brilliant Engineering team, as a new office comes online, the Target reassigns tickets to a new group.

This results in a smooth rotation between our different locations – a change virtually invisible to our clients. We also have this same rotation set up with our phone lines, so that if someone calls our UK offices out of hours, any of our US offices will be able to take the call.

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Creating multi-language content

The secret sauce to it all: Dynamic Content.

In my opinion, this is probably Zendesk’s most powerful tool, which allows us to create content in multiple languages. All of our macros and triggers go out based on the user’s language preference – all written by our native speakers.

Making sure each response has a personalized touch ensures that our clients don’t feel like they’re just receiving an automated message, but that we really do care.

You can read all about that and other key strategies that allow us to maintain our Customer Satisfaction consistently at 97% here. Do you work on a support desk? What tools do you use? Comment below!

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