When defining a good customer care strategy there's 3 main elements that are core items that need to be part of your strategy. Customers need be able to self serve, agent need context and as an admin you need insights.

Self service not only allows customers to solve issues more quickly by offering solutions up front without waiting for an agent, it also removes workload from your team so that they can focus on the complex issues while the easy questions are handled by bots and guide articles.

Similarly, when agents have context they know who the customer is and what they want to accomplish. It reduces duplicate work and makes sure information is available instead of customers needing to repeatedly provide their name, email or intent.

And finally you need good reporting that categorises your inquires and flags repeated scenarios and blockers so you can optimise these flows so you can improve self service and context.

This article will focus on giving agents context based on user actions.

Giving context

Imagine a customer who visits your webshop and looks at a product. They spend some time on the product page and then reach for the Contact Us button. Their question will probably be about that product.

So when an agent sees an incoming conversation it would be pretty convenient if they can see what the customer was looking at right before they send a message so they can open up the product page themselves, check if the customer bought or orders the item, pull up the knowledge articles on the product, ... The customer will be assisted faster, and the agent doesn't need to ask that context from the customer.

Similarly let's say that same customer started the conversation and the Zendesk Bot proposed a few articles. They read the articles, maybe mark a few of them as "did not help", and then reach out to an agent. The worst experience we can offer the customer is having the agent send them those same articles again. So if we can make the list of read/shown articles visible to the agent they won't waste time sending the same information again, but can immediately dive into more complex support questions and solutions.

Both of these scenario's are examples on how Zendesk and the Agent Workspace can give agents insight in user intents to better assist them while working more efficient.

How does it work?

So, how does it work? Let's dive into three concrete examples

1. Show browser history next to tickets
2. Show prior interactions and actions in external tools next to tickets
3. Show FAQ activity next to tickets.